New Year, More Me

HI GUYS! Happy 2019! I didn’t post on here for eight months. I knew it would be challenging to find the time once I went back to work as a mom of two, but honestly that hiatus was pretty much unplanned. I focused on other writing projects (my book!) when I had a free 20 minutes. But I missed the blog format which is where I can run free. And I missed you!

How are you doing! We are great. I have so many thoughts flowing as always with any New Year. The last half of the year was so packed with nonstop work deadlines, many baby milestones, celebrations, travel. Our national sales meeting, which for 100 years has been the first week of January, was moved to the middle of December. At the time, it was nuts. I brought the whole gang (both kids and our au pair) to Florida. In retrospect, though, now that it went beautifully and is behind us, it was a brilliant idea. I rounded the corner at the end of 2018 feeling… spacious. Nowhere to fly, no massive deadlines on the near horizon. I finished the first draft of my book (a self-help-y memoir) on December 31 and I’m ready to blog again.

With holiday downtime, I’ve moved my child care hours around so that I have 9am-noon covered for the last two Saturdays. I run on the treadmill at the gym listening to podcasts (today it was The Daily from Jan 2, highly recommend). Then I head over to my fave café where I write with earbuds in. Today, just before arriving at L!ve, I noticed that Eva Jo had posted a link to a free playlist: “1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist,” which is now streaming into my earbuds. When I run and write, I am the best version of myself.

It’s clear and sunny today, with a high of 50 degrees. It’s January 5. My baby girl turned one on December 11. Just as all humans are, she is incredible, a little flame of eagerness and warmth and desire and learning, with an edge of fiery frustration. She hugs you by leaning her head against your head. She has a lot to say, most of which hasn’t taken the form of words. She has a unique giggle reserved for her big brother. Her ice blue eyes came out of nowhere. Her emerging curls were predictable. She’s walking with more confidence every day, and crawling is almost over (sniff).

Big brother is tall. He’s strong and sensitive and visibly working at managing big emotions which I can see as his eyes change from sad to frustrated to OK again to mad in the space of 10 seconds. He’s moved on from fire trucks into a solidly dinosaur and superhero era. He’s very into science. He’s starting to notice the difference between boys and girls. He said yesterday, “I’m not super into girls, but I am super into Kiera.” He wanted a pet for Christmas and we ended up getting a pet betta fish named “Yellow.” The three of us gather around the tank at dinnertime to give Yellow three pellets of food. It’s exciting and he’s brought a lot of joy (ask me again once we’ve attempted our maintenance of the tank later today). We have a calendar on which we put big X’s whenever we’ve fed the fish, plus a sticker if morning and bedtime routines go smoothly (right now we’ve remembered the fish every day but the stickers are two out of three).

I started this with “New Year, More Me” because the “New Year, New You” concept has increasingly bugged me over the last few years and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. With kids, many of us work to separate the behavior from the person, i.e. we say, “Thanks for putting your dirty undies in the hamper!” instead of, “Good boy!” When someone thinks their self-worth depends on certain achievements, they feel like a deep failure when those achievements don’t or can’t happen.

So- why should this be any different with grown-ups? We all have desires and goals and yearnings to pursue happiness and fulfillment and accomplishments. But our struggles are not ourselves. We are all perfect and beautiful as we are now. And there is beauty in the struggle too; it simply doesn’t have to define us. Believe me, I am ALL ABOUT goal-setting and aiming high. Yet I never want to confuse my successes and failures in that department with my nonstop awesomeness as a human being. I share this as a way to reassure you of the same- YES: set New Year’s resolutions and dream big! And do not beat yourself up or feel like a dolt if it doesn’t go the way you planned, or if the house is still cluttered or if you went ahead and ordered the cheesecake or if you write every day for 10 days and then miss one. You can always reset. Or you can enjoy things as they are and skip the resolutions. The essence of you, there from your conception, is still here! That’s comforting to me. You can change behaviors, which can be brutally hard and ultimately super fulfilling. You can’t change who you are. We do not want a New You.

We want More You!

These were the thoughts in my mind as I sat down to scribble out a few ideas with 10 available minutes on the afternoon of December 31. How can I be the me-est me? Be truest to myself and my own individual strengths, wishes, dreams? Get in the flow, follow my path, insert all the metaphors here.

My friends have so many different (inspiring) approaches to this, from an annual slogan to an annual word to a set of well-considered goals. I love the resolution of one of my friend J: to memorize a new song in a different language once a month. My friend Wig said she just wasn’t in the mood this year. All approaches valid and approved.

My goals are a work in progress. As my kids are now 4 and 1, there’s a teensy bit more space for me, in which I begin, with baby steps, to emerge from the family cocoon to exercise, write, spend time with friends, consider the future. There are big ideas brewing. A lot depends on running and writing. I feel fortunate to be here.

One solid intention for the New Year, obvious and organic in its formation, was to pick up my blog again. In the interest of setting myself up for success, I won’t put a specific time increment on this… so let me just say: see you again soon! xoxo