Happy New Year, and I Mean It
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. I’m eating ALL the hummus. It’s a problem.
Happy New Year, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart
The day I turned thirty-one, I woke up to a telephone call from my father, telling me that my grandmother had died. A week later, my husband had a heart attack, and had to have a quintuple bypass. In that brief afternoon between the catheterization and the open-heart surgery, the doctor told me to be sure Lee’s affairs were in order, just in case. We had two small children; the youngest was still breastfeeding. I was completely overwhelmed.
Two months later, after Lee was home and mostly recovered, we discovered that our eldest had a hernia that needed to be repaired.
[Pop quiz: which is worse—when your soulmate has legitimately life-threatening major surgery, or the baby who made you a mama has somewhat less major surgery? Answer: it’s a trick question. They’re both worse. You will survive them both, but you will never again be the person you were before.]
The rest of that year was a blur of grief and fear and confusion. I hadn’t signed up for any of those really hard things. There were days (many days) when I just wanted our old life back—the life where I was young and naive and didn’t have to worry about my precious people actually dying. I was angry and sad and overprotective and numb. I had all the feelings. Except when they were too much, and I turned them off completely.
About six months after Toby’s hernia surgery, our youngest had to have some (truly minor) dental surgery. I was kind of done with medical stuff at that point, and I knew it. I asked my dad to come sit with us, just so we’d have an extra adult on deck. At some point, when Lee was taking a turn calming our screaming, bleeding toddler, I commented that being thirty-one had totally sucked, and I was pretty ready to be thirty-two.
My dad gave me a stern look, and said, “Don’t wish your life away.”
Lots of writers have referred to 2020 as a global annus horribilis. They may be right, but the year I was thirty-one was mine. It was a year of growing up, of learning hard lessons, and learning them in a hurry. In a nutshell, it was the year I learned what mattered—life now. I’m only going to get one opportunity, and I don’t want to miss it. This became the governing principle of our little family: life is short, and you only get one chance.
2020 has reminded me of a lot of those lessons. I have struggled a bit, trying to balance the necessary Covid shutdowns with my habit, cultivated in that awful year when I was thirty-one, of trying to get the most out of every day. We only get one life, right? And you want me to spend it sheltering from a virus, isolated from my friends and family? I am distracted and anxious and oh-so-ready for the vaccine, and the adventures that add sparkle to my days.
And then I think of my dad’s words—don’t wish your life away—and I remember. This is my one shot. My one good life. It may be our Covid year—I may be spending it isolated from most of the humans I love—but it’s still my one and only opportunity to live this year. I’ll never get it back, so I might as well make it count. Do I want to spend it fretting and being miserable, just marking time? Or do I want to look back and know that I got as much meaning and pleasure as I could from my fifty-fourth year?
I know 2020 was weird and scary and awful, and for way too many people, it was shot through with grief and loss. But if you’re still kicking—if you’re reading this—make 2021 count. Figure out ways to appreciate it, whatever it looks like in your corner of the world. We only get to do it once.
Be well, my friends. Here’s wishing us all a happy, healthy 2021.
Take care,
Lisa
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