Happiness Is a New Calendar

New Year’s resolutions, in stream of consciousness order, written over three days:

1. Treat my body with respect. That means give it the nourishment and exercise it needs to live a healthy life and take care of my family. During that last fateful book discussion at Jesus Moms’ Club, one of the mothers marveled that as a mom to 2 under 2, she lives a very physical life as opposed to pre-kids when she worked in academia and used mostly her brain all day long. She spoke about using her body to lift and care for her children with wonder, as if she had just discovered the strength of her limbs, the endurance of her wakefulness, the amount of food it takes to fuel such daily activity. I’ve been thinking about her comments ever since. There is a mom in my blog network who is very sick with lupus, and twitters the day long about her naps and how sick and guilty she feels because she cannot run and play with her little son. It makes me grateful for the relative health of my body, and it makes me feel guilty that I feed it such crap. It has been telling me to stop it. Parts of it cry out in pain far too frequently, robbing me of comfort, concentration, and sleep. Those things are not free anymore. I’m 37. I need to get to work to restore my body to a more worthy state.

2. Give less energy to relationships that hurt me. There are friendships that I’ve been carrying around on my heart for years that are not what they used to be. Periodically I will try to revive them, as I remember long gone shared events that tell me it couldn’t possibly be over. But things change, and it’s over. I need to accept that and move on. I also need to devote less worry and time to relationships that are not yet cultivated but plague me with uncertainty. Does she like me? Is she using me? Should I call her or does she think I’m a syncophant? You think these things are behind you when you find your mate and dating torture is over? Relationships among women can be much worse. I’m wary writing about this in such a public place, but doing so is always cathartic, and people usually have wise responses. So, there you have it. I’m not sure how to go about carrying out this resolution. Maybe just being mindful of it will help. I’ve already dropped those people off the Christmas card list, which is truly The List. When I say someone is “off The List,” they have some ‘splaining to do to get back on it.*

3. Enjoy my children. I have been unnecessarily snippy and harsh with them over the past year. They try, as little boys do, my patience, thin as it already was. Some mothers gain more patience from motherhood, like my friend Holly, about whom I always think “Motherhood becomes her.” She was a well-paid, fancily-dressed New York City lawyer who got to a place in her life at which she was able to handle most everything with ease, and that grace has served her well as she had first a little girl and then not two years later, she will have twin girls on Monday via scheduled C-section. Although her pregnancy has been uncomfortable, she does not complain, nor does she try to convince anyone that everything’s okay. It all is what it is. I, on the other hand, tend towards hyperbole, convinced every time I yell at Kyle that I am a terrible mother, that every time I fight with Stewart I am the only one on my team. In the light of happy times, those feelings seem insignificant and easily handled, but in the dark of certain moods they are overpowering and threaten to make everyone miserable, and often succeed. Over Thanksgiving weekend everyone in the house was felled by illness, forcing us to lay around like drunks suffering a mass hangover. I enjoyed it, despite the fire in my gut. For the first time in a long time, I felt no pressure, no urgency, no responsibility, just the pleasant proximity of my family and the gratitude that we would all survive this. I want to feel that way more often. Another goal that mindfulness will help.

4. Organize. This is the funny and not funny resolution. Funny because I make that resolution at new year, at midyear, at 3/4 year, pretty much daily. My very existence comes with a humming undercurrent of wanting to be productive, to declutter, to fold, sort, pile, recycle, drop off, return, shovel, sweep, clean (but not mop, oh no, I hate mopping), purge, file, and check off the list.  Perhaps I should accept now that a) I will never get it done and b) that’s just the way I am. “Stuff” and I, we need to agree to disagree. However. The not funny part of this resolution is that there are some things that I seriously need to get done. Two specific ones that I will concentrate on this year (because it’s taken me that long to even get them on the list, I realize they may take that long to accomplish) are financial planning and legal planning. Financials are difficult because the choices are overwhelming and the economy is so depressing, but my money savvy friends Elizabeth and Suze will help me, and I will turn to my dad for advice as well, as I have my entire life. Legal planning is hard because I cannot get very far without crying. Stewart and I met with a lawyer in November who gave us a lot of information before we realized that his price was way out of our range, even with a $1000 discount. One of the first things he told us was that his wife died recently, suddenly, leaving him to care for his tween girls alone. Cry, I did, right away. I’ve turned to more self-helpy ways of doing this, including Legal Zoom, Quicken Lawyer, and Alexis Martin Neely’s book Wear Clean Underwear, which is not appropriate lunchtime reading, by the way. I was, again, crying in my pizza today as I contemplated dropping dead on a treadmill, unidentified, at the gym, a victim of a brain aneurysm, my children taken in by the state because my spouse (who is, make believe, in France) and I had failed to draft a document authorizing the daycare lady to keep the children until an appointed person could come to care for them. (Watch out, friends and family, for this year you may be asked to be included on the “people who are authorized to take care of my children in the event of my demise” list.) See how awful this is? But it must be done, otherwise Kyle and Brady will end up on drugs, shadows of the people I intended them to be.

5. Focus on the right priorities, including the above. Try not to get distracted by the things and people that take up too much of my time for too little payback. Like laundry for instance. And telemarketers. And those guys who come to the door selling “fertilizer.” I kid you not. In my neighborhood, men come to the door to sell me shit. People are always telling me that I have too much on my plate, and I’ve been pondering this idea for a few months. How to get any of those things off of my plate? All of the things on my plate are important to me. It’s just that I have to find some time to put the plate away and ignore it so I can regroup and recharge. I resolve to keep non-essential things off the plate.

6. Deal with my cell phone situation. This task is requiring special attention because it falls under number 5: non-essential things that are threatening to crowd something important off my plate! I have a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile, that syncs to outlook. I absolutely hate it. It is my FOURTH Palm Treo. The first one I bought was secondhand and I found it on Ebay. That one lasted a year, and I loved it because it had Palm OS software, which I was using on my Palm Pilot, and it was a seamless transition. When that one crapped out, I had to bite the bullet and buy one from AT&T. The only way I could afford it was to buy a refurbished one with Windows Mobile and convert from my beloved Palm OS to Outlook which I have always found clunky and user-unfriendly. Two phones in a row malfunctioned, and the one I have now refuses to ring audibly, so the only way I can tell if someone is calling me is if I am staring at my phone and I see the call come up on the screen. Not useful. That is why, if you call me and I don’t answer, you should not be offended. I just can’t hear my phone. I’ve been complaining about it for months now, and I have to deal with it and move on. In fact, I’m so against this phone that I’ve gotten really bad at putting dates in the calendar and names in the phone book, so I’m considering switch back to a regular phone and a (gasp!) paper planner. I use Google Calendar so much more than Outlook now anyway. Now that I am large-purse lady, I certainly have room for a small planner, and non-smart phones have lots of room for essential phone numbers.

And so, as I switch my regular paper calendars at my desk, in the kitchen, and in Kyle’s room, I contemplate the year ahead with hope, apprehension, and a simple prayer. “Please, keep us safe.”

*If you did not receive a Christmas card from me this year, that does not necessarily mean you are off The List. It could be that I just didn’t get around to it, or that I forgot. It’s been kind of a tough year.