I begin each year thinking to myself, “This is the year that I will really write, a lot.”
2026 is no different.
I have my new calendar, my stack of colored pens, and hope.
I ended 2025, mostly, in a better place than I began it. I felt more organized than I have in a long time–possibly ever.
I loved my Christmas decorations. They held both old treasures and new things.
Ryan and I made salt dough ornaments and painted them all gold. They looked beautiful and were such fun to do…to actually DO them, rather than just thinking about making them and never quite getting around to it.
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My family is, quite frankly, nowhere close to what I’d like. My counselor is walking me through letting go of Norman Rockwell images–images that I do NOT have 100% control over–and encouraging me to accept what is.
For years I did a huge share of the holiday work, but it was always my parents who were the magnet, drawing people in. With them gone, the attraction is gone as well.
A few weeks before Christmas I suggested to my hubby that rather than sitting around staring at each other and making a huge meal for three people, we leave Christmas morning and go to Tennessee.
He immediately agreed.
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I had to work the lunch shift; Carl and Ryan served as greeters at our old church. We did Christmas Eve Dinner at Texas De Brazil–a Brazilian steakhouse that is scrumptious and expensive. It is a delightfully festive atmosphere for the holiday.
We woke up, let Ryan open a few presents, had breakfast, packed a picnic lunch, and drove away in our rented car.
I had booked us into (what looked like) a beautiful hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Driving all the way to Chattanooga is do-able. But grueling.
We stumbled across a beautiful college in Mississippi where we stopped to eat our lunch.
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We moved from California to Texas 8 1/2 years ago for a fresh start we never got.
In those 8 1/2 years have been the biggest losses, worst seasons in my marriage, and hardest parenting times we’ve ever had.
It’s certainly NOT the state’s fault, but that fresh start I longed for still hasn’t come and I am itching for it.
Tennessee may be the place we go to find it.
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In those areas of my life where the relationships gap, I find myself in an awkward chasm, flanked on one side be the reality that things are not what I want them to be, and on the other side by the anticipation that (at least) they will no longer be what they were.
When one is sitting in a space they genuinely don’t want to be in, getting up and moving is the only way to change the environment. Change almost always has some measure of grief with it, but it is also the largest vessel of hope: The hope that I can do/be better than have I have done/have been in the past is real.
Not because I am a martyr, bellowing, “Poor me.”
Because I understand that while I may have done the best I could then, I have worked to make my best better now. It is both an agony and a gift.
Grieving the agony was the only door I could find to give me access to the gift.
And so I am gearing up and getting ready.
Ready to do today better than I did yesterday.
Ready to be better prepared tomorrow for the day after.
Ready for what God has in store and ready to see what God will restore…
Grateful.