Thursday, December 31, 2009

The Year of Resilience

We have christmased. We spent the last few days hanging out, cooking some of our favorite meals, celebrating Max's ninth birthday and playing way too much Super Mario Bros on the Wii. I slept past six several days in a row for the first time since summer.

Max had his first guitar lesson and is practicing his chords. The familiar A, D and E minor are layered with crunch from his amp. This will take some getting used to.

And 2009 draws to a close. It has been a good year in so many ways for me and my little family but it was also a year that didn't pull any punches.

We worried through a time of sadness and frustration with Max. We faced down some playground bullying and eventually came to understand (a slow puzzling together) that it was the disintegration of his best friendship that was making him so sad and angry. We weathered the storm and before Spring Max had new friends, a new, dear, best friend and was his happy self once again.

I participated in Jen Lee's Portfolio Project and created a huge amount of raw writing material – pages I am still pulling words and ideas from. I made my first vision boards and spent a couple of months with a therapist getting back on my emotional feet. I started running. (This may be the best thing that happened to me this year.)

We began our tradition of Saturday night playlists.

We survived the great housing crisis of 2009 and actually came out of it in a much better place. We dropped everything in the middle of unpacking and went to a baseball game.

We gardened. I made it rain.

I played my way through Keri Smith's Wreck this Journal and Martha Beck's The Joy Diet with Jamie Ridler's The Next Chapter online book group. I took the Mondo Beyondo course and did some big dreaming. I had a dream come true and went skating.

Max through sheer determination triumphed over the dread standardized tests that have kept him out of the gifted program at school. He also gave me a wonderful memory from my own childhood and inspired us to attend our first hockey game. He completed NaBloPoMo and so did I.

We were dealt another blow in December and the aftershocks are ongoing but we are filled with hope for the new year.

There were things I couldn't blog about and things I chose not to. One being a drink with an old friend who gave me the priceless gift of reflection, mirroring my real true self, the things I sometimes forget tangled here in the trappings of daily life.

Looking back, I so clearly see this was a year of resilience for all of us. There were lots of things that knocked us about but we kept getting back up, stronger for having faced the crisis. We were resilient this year and that's something I am incredibly proud of.

I am also going to own that I did some damn fine blogging this year. Despite the drop off at the end of the year, I am proud of the stories I told here.

I'm looking forward to anything and everything that 2010 might have to offer us, and I'm looking forward to telling the new year's stories.

4 comments:

  1. You three are pretty great, you know that? Laura, I love that you found some super-cool projects to work on. Your writing has always been great, but it's more... honed now. Deeper and sharper.

    happy year of the tiger, mama.

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  2. Wishing you a year you'll look back on happily.
    xo

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  3. You are such a beautiful woman. May 2010 bring everything you desire.

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  4. great info on the diet industry's dirty little secrets!

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