Five days I’ve been sick, and nothing comes out right, and I’m tired and cranky and frustrated that even after all this time my eyes still burn and my throat still feels like it’s holding shards of glass and my nose is the heaviest appendage on my face, except for my ears when I try to lie down and sleep.
All these hours I’ve been trying to pull myself from bed, because it’s the last week of winter break for the two boys in school, and I never get to spend quality time with them, but all I really want to do is stay in bed, alone, and rest until I can hold up my head without the whole world spinning.
They’ve been watching movie after movie, because it’s too cold and wet outside, and the whole house is falling apart, since I just can’t bring myself to care, and guilt rides my heels, because I’m not being a mama to my boys, I’m just laying on a couch hoping the movie will keep them fully entertained until lunchtime and I can summon the effort to climb from these piles of blankets and fix them something healthy that I won’t want to eat because I can’t taste anything anyway right now.
This is not how I wanted to ring in a new year.
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Weeks ago we made our plans to sit out in our cul-de-sac to watch the neighbors set off their fireworks, and we intended to catch up on their holiday news and their hopes for the new year, like we always do.
We were going to let boys stay up later than usual, because fireworks are exciting and beautiful, and the noise of them would keep them all up anyway.
And before all that, we were going to sit and talk about our goals for the new year, as a family, and then we were going to solidify all the others, as a couple, but I can’t seem to stop sniffling and sneezing and hacking up whatever is hanging out in my chest.
I guess I just really didn’t expect to start a new year with a filthy house and an early date with the bed and a miserable cold or flu virus that will probably, in the next few days, work its way right along to the other three in my family who haven’t had it yet.
It’s disappointing to end an old year with sickness and ring a new one in with that same sickness.
We have all these expectations for what the days or weeks or the whole new year is going to look like, and then there are all these setbacks and unknown variables that come sweeping in, even in the first few hours, and it’s hard to know what to do with them all when we are clinging so tightly to the way we wanted things to be.
Maybe it’s not so much the sickness that feels disappointing in this first day of a new year. Maybe it’s just the expectations.
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Somewhere along my life journey, I began to connect the way we rang in a new year with the way a whole new year would go.
So if we rang a new year in jobless, that’s how the whole next year would go. If we rang it in tired or frustrated or disappointed in the way the last year had gone, that’s how the whole next year would go, too.
If we rang it in sick, we could expect sickness in the next year.
Over the years, I have let that belief put a whole lot of pressure on me, so I always tried to start a new year with a perfectly clean and tidy house (because who wants to spend the whole next year in a dirty, out-of-control house?), and I always tried to patch up relationships with bosses (because who wants bad communication in the job for the whole next year?), and I tried to shake off the anxiety, for at least the one day that turned into a new year (because who wants anxiety hanging around for a whole new year?).
And this year beat them all, because there was a job ending and anger aimed at the people who had chosen to end it two weeks before a new baby will be born, and there was anxiety about the future and a big black hole of unknown sitting on top of all those new months of a year.
And then sickness on top of it all.
What kind of year would 2015 be, with all of these dark spots already showing up?
What chance did it have, in the shadow of all this?
These were the questions walking me right into the new year.
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There was another year when sickness rang in a new year.
It was a plague, four years ago, a stomach virus that just wouldn’t leave us be.
Forty days we fought it, forty days of scrubbing toilets and washing blankets and soaping up hands until they were chapped and raw, and then came the day when no one puked or dirtied their pants, and I started finally, tentatively, hoping that, for God’s sake, it was over.
We were creeping up on a new year, and I wanted to be virus-free when that clock said 2010 had turned into 2011.
Two days down, and I thought for sure we were in the clear.
Three days with no vomit or diarrhea and I braved going to church for the first time in more than a month, and then as soon as we walked in, my 20-month-old, holding to the side of his five-month-old brother’s stroller, bent over and heaved all over the floor.
I would be marking a new year with a washer full of blankets and soiled clothes, just like I’d spent the last 40 days.
I cried in those shocked moments, partly because I was mortified but mostly because I just couldn’t do it anymore, and then I walked them all back out the door, the oldest, 4 years old at the time, screaming that he wanted to stay at church with Daddy because we hadn’t been able to leave the house in too many days.
It would never be over, that’s what I thought. It would ruin the whole of 2011, that’s what I thought.
We would never recover from this beginning-of-the-year setback.
And we almost didn’t.
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I don’t want to be this person anymore.
It’s a silly way to live.
Just because something is plaguing us when the old year turns to new doesn’t mean it has the power to define the whole next year.
That’s a lie that keeps us afraid and timid and ineffective.
One day does not mean a whole year down the drain. Two days don’t mean a whole year down the drain. Two hundred days don’t mean a whole year down the drain.
Half the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.
So much of what we do and accomplish in life, so much of our success or our failure, hangs completely on our attitude toward it all.
We can meet those setbacks with defeat already on our minds and clenching our hearts, and they will be our defeat.
Or we can meet those setbacks with grace, and they can turn into a year of learning all there is to know about resilience and positivity and choosing gratitude in the hardest of places, and they can be our victory.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget, in the middle of trying times, when we’re laid up in bed too sick to talk and someone forgot to pay the water bill and the checkbook hasn’t been balanced in 30 days, maybe more, that it’s not what a year can do to us so much as it is what we can do to a year.
We are stronger than we know. We are braver than we know. We are more resourceful than we know.
Life is not something that happens to us. It is something we can mold and steer and change.
Even if the way my new year started, with lingering sickness and question marks surrounding the employment piece and hours of playing games and doing puzzles and watching movies with the older ones while the younger ones sleep, is the way the whole next year goes, what’s so bad about that?
What’s so bad about spending a whole year learning how to rest and trusting our future to God’s hands and practicing staying present with the little ones we love, who won’t be little forever?
What better way to live a year than fully present in the moment, like this day has demanded of us?
So, instead of feeling defeated at the disappointing, not-according-to-plan start to a new year, we claim victory and let that new year word frame all the days to come: Presence.
And then we commit to living into it.
