It’s been a full year and I can hardly believe it’s almost over. Nothing that happened this year feels incredibly momentous but I also don’t want to forget the seemingly small things. Every year is unique and contains memories that will never be repeated, not exactly. It’s a time in our lives we can never get back, and I don’t say that to lament. It is part of life. I think remembering is important, and sometimes seeing things all together is a good reminder of the things that filled our life this year.
A quick scroll through social media helps me remember and the more I think back, the more I see themes emerge. I begin to see what our priorities are, what was important to us this year.
An overview. In reverse.
December: Our son turned 9. Maybe that’s not a milestone, but every year older he gets is just evidence of how our family is enduring and thriving.
November: Phil and I ran a 5k on Thanksgiving morning. We revamped our living room and bought a furniture set for the first time in our married life. Also a new TV. We don’t have to squint to see words on the screen anymore. We redefined family for our Thanksgiving meal, and it was so memorable and lovely. A tree came down in our yard.
October: Phil ran a 5k in Philadelphia. I completed a Whole30 eating plan. I published my first co-writing project with a client. And started playing guitar in church.
September: We spent a day in Washington D.C. that we hoped would include a baseball game, but it rained the whole day. Still, we visited two museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, which was my personal highlight of the day. We hosted a Labor Day gathering at our house.
August: We saw the Cubs play in Pittsburgh. Our daughter went to a sewing camp and discovered she loved it.
July: We spent the Fourth of July in Harper’s Ferry. The kids and I traveled to Illinois to visit family. We gathered a group of friends to watch fireworks. We hosted a Kenya team reunion. The kids rocked their swimming lessons.
June: We took an epic road trip to our vacation in Florida with my family, a wonderful week of unforgettable memories, including a visit to Kennedy Space Center where we saw a space shuttle up close and personal. We took the long way home visiting friends in North Carolina and driving a portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway. I drove to the Philly suburbs to gather with other Chicken Soup for the Soul writers and to meet the publisher.
May: I turned 40. We bought a car and traded in our van. Phil threw me a small birthday party gathering. I ran with my daughter in the Girls on the Run 5k, during which it poured the whole time.
April: Phil and our daughter ran a 5K at Cowan’s Gap State Park. It was the first time we’d been back there since a visit on our fifth wedding anniversary. I got four long braids of hair cut off.
March: Our daughter turned 10. We went to our first hockey game.
February: I started running again, training for the 5k in May. I met one of my favorite authors at a local event. We watched the Olympics.
January: I started working part-time at a school.
If I was going to pick a theme for our year, it would be “improvement.” Or maybe “rebirth.” This was the first year in maybe our entire married/family life that I felt like we got to make positive choices for our family and didn’t have to settle for doing things the way they’d always been done or making choices that weren’t necessarily bad but also not necessarily good. For so many years, the choices and decisions for our family were based on survival and/or meeting our basic needs. This year, we had more freedom to choose based on what would help our family be healthy in all the ways.
From job decisions to physical achievements to conscious choices about food to vacation and travel, I felt like we had more control over our life. That’s groundbreaking when all I can sometimes remember is feeling like I’ve been carried along by circumstances and the consequences of those.
It was a year of plenty for us, a major shift for a family that has known only “enough” and often “lack.” Where previously we were surviving, this year, I sense what it means to thrive: as an individual, as a couple, as a family.
This does not, of course, discount anything else about 2018 that wasn’t good or great. There has been a lot of sadness and turmoil and the world is still a place with so much hurt. A year can be both wonderful personally and terrible globally. This is a hard dichotomy to reconcile. I think maybe I haven’t allowed myself enough engagement in others’ pain this year. More opportunity to do better in 2019.
How did your year measure up? What defines a year for you?
