And a Happy New Year
I’m not sure that anything will be different in 2021.
We’ve been heralding the coming of the new year with such anticipation and hope after the thunderstorm dumpster fire that was 2020. As a collective, we can use a new start, a fresh breath, a release.
And for people like me, who like to use transition days to mark important moments in my life, the turning of the year is a perfect time for welcoming in change.
It’s also the calendar turning from Thursday to Friday of an ordinary week in an ordinary moment in time.
For the past several years our group of friends have been working to create a meaningful friend ritual for the new year. We gather at one house, cook an elaborate meal, share in it together, and then disperse a little before midnight to accommodate the bedtimes of the kids.
It has never quite worked out. There was the cabin in Wisconsin in which our car died, and my mom had to come to pick us up and drive us to the Twin Cities to buy a new one. There was the time when one of the twins projectile vomited at the dinner table, making the partaking of the seafood boil spread out on newspaper a little less… appetizing. There was the snowstorm that almost had us stranded in Michigan.
We’ve come to anticipate that the celebrations to bring in the new year may not live up to expectation.
Except last year. Last year we had gotten wise. We got childcare for the kids, we got gift cards to our favorite local restaurant, we ordered the chef’s tasting menu and the restaurant kept the food and the blood orange gimlets flowing. We made so much noise that our high table of ten in the middle of the restaurant was surely the cause of some of the other patron’s not-so-great New Year’s celebrations.
And we cheered for the year to come, certainly the best yet. With 20/20 vision.
I’m glad we didn’t know. I’m glad we had that night. The night we finally figured out how to have a good new year as parents of small children.
Knowing might have moved us out of the joy and the community. And we were going to need that to get through the year ahead.
We control so very little. I suppose that is the most uncomfortable truth I’ve had to wrestle with this year. We control so very little.
I don’t control the diagnoses that can change the future in an instant. I don’t control the ventilators keeping the breath in the lungs of the parents of my friends. I don’t control the opening and closing of the local schools. I don’t control the speed at which we can develop and distribute a vaccine.
We control so very little.
But we have these moments.
Those dinners with friends, warm from wine and food and laughter.
The phone calls, when comfort must be done at a distance. The phone calls when we hold one another in our silence as we listen to the sobs through the speaker. The phone calls when we laugh until we can’t breathe.
We have the warm snuggles from our children as we unexpectedly run our own homeschool, reading them books out loud and sneaking in one more chapter even though it’s already past bedtime.
We control so very little.
And maybe it’s good that we don’t know what 2021 will bring. Maybe that unknowing invites us into the beauty of what is right here in front of us. This. This is what we have.
This year I had big plans to set out the Christmas tree and decorate it with abandon. I wanted one beautiful and perfect thing. I wanted one damn thing I could control.
I nagged my husband to get the tree out of storage and helped carry up box after box of decorations. We finally got all the tree pieces assembled and plugged in the lights. Only one small section of our eight foot tree lit up. After playing around with it for an hour or so, we had enough energy to put up a half dozen ornaments, all of which were quickly removed by my two year so that he could throw them down the stairs into the basement.
I kept meaning to finish setting it all up. But life got busy and one thing led to another, and washing dishes and picking up the blocks and books and Lego has become a full time job.
We celebrated Christmas with four sad ornaments and one string of lights.
And it was still good.
We still laughed. We still ate way too much cheese and chocolate. We still played games. It wasn’t perfect. But it was enough.
It was also a relief to put the tree away on December 26th.
This year will bring the beautiful and it will bring the painful. It will bring the perfect nights of laughter with friends and the shitty Christmas trees with only one strand of lights. It will bring plenty and it will bring need.
There’s so much we don’t control.
And maybe that’s ok.
We have this transition. The calendar page from Thursday to Friday.
We have this.
I wish you a Happy New Year.
