Looking Back, and Looking Forward

So, here we are, the tail end of another year. I got older, my kids got older, and bigger, and stranger. My big boy uses deodorant now (I’m not embarrassing him by saying this, he was excited to hear that he’d reached this milestone.)

Growing up…

Meanwhile my little boy (oops — I promised him I wouldn’t say little anymore, even though truth be told my 8-year-old is really the size of an average 6-year-old) has decided to grow his hair. Curiously, this makes my boy look even more like I did at that same age, with his pointy chin, jutting shoulder blades, and now a 70s-like pixie hairdo.

…but staying my baby.

I usually have to be dragged kicking and screaming into making “resolutions” or even “plans” for the new year. I am better at looking back than forward. In fact, I’m excellent at looking back, probably too much so. But this year has left me with little other choice than to be more forward thinking. It’s been a strange year. They’re all strange years, sure, but this year I have been feeling that it gets weirder and more worrisome all the time, the older I get, because the older I get the more fragile I feel.

I’m not proud of this feeling — of being more inclined to remain curled and focused inwards, a hermit inside my own head, wearing my sackcloth and peering jealously outside my own window. If I ever have a resolution, it’s this: to throw the sackcloth off and turn my gaze up and out.

I had a lot to think about this year. Financially, we had a rough one (which makes it sound like the Rough Year ends tonight at midnight, and then 2013 starts out with a check from Publisher’s Clearinghouse. Would that it did, but we have more slogging to do; I’d like to slog with a more open view, though). But a few things happened that eased the rough edges. I got a couple of unexpected kindnesses. A fellow traveler in the strange world of freelance writing, understanding the ups and downs and the anguish, sent me a gift, a pay-it-forward box of four, cheerily-hued Fiesta plates. Four plates that make me happy whenever I take them out of the cabinet (I get the lime-green one!). My parents and my in-laws, who never, ever fail to be generous with their time and energy with us, bought us a new TV, one of those things we sorta kinda wanted (I won’t say “needed,” because, you know, it’s just a TV) but wouldn’t have gotten around to getting for ourselves for a good long while, because we’re responsible like that, preferring to pay for heating oil and other less entertaining things.

I know, I know: stuff. but that’s not it. It was the nature of the gifts that has helped to reset my thinking.

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My husband is by nature an optimist; I am not. I don’t call myself pessimistic; I call myself realistic (also Sicilian; I was raised with an ethos that says you should be both grateful for what you get, and suspicious that you’ll ever get anything again. It’s  obviously not a helpful way to live, but there you go).

Every year, my husband says something like, “I really think this is going to be our year.” Around Thanksgiving time, awash in fear and frustration, I told him not to say “this is going to be our year” again because it was sounding sort of pathetic rather than hopeful.

But then those small things happened, the gifts, the kindnesses, and the kind of hope that worms into even a hard-skulled character like me, with my carapace of pessimism. There are always cracks, I guess.

And then Newtown happened. It’s not like I needed to think of the terrible picture of tiny coffins and how one little boy loved singing at the top of his lungs; there are reminders all the time how life can break in two in an instant. It wasn’t too long before the tragedy in Connecticut that we lost someone special, a husband and father who would be alive today but for a rain-slick road and an SUV going just a hair too fast in the dark.

I’m not mulling these things to boost gratitude. I know it sounds nuts to say, but I hold my pessimism (realism!) and my gratitude right in the same heart, always have.

I just don’t want the negativity to win as often as it has in the past. I want a box of bright plates to be able to make me smile. I want to think of those children with love, and to bear the frustrations of raising my own children with more grace and a lot more humor.

So maybe it’s not a looking forward thing or a looking back thing. Maybe it’s a living-in thing.

A few days before Christmas, I sat down to write a few words in a card to my husband, and that pesky “this is our year!” trope rang in my head. I thought, with a familiar weariness, how I’ve lost faith in it. And I swear to you, I had an epiphany right then and there:

Every year is our year, since we have each other, two healthy, sturdy young boys growing up in our house, and family that loves us.

I wrote it in the card, and I cried, and I meant every word.

Happy new year to all of you.