New Year, Same You

When the calendar flips, you have another chance to be better. It is 2013. You can be better than ever in this year, you learn, in terms of losing weight, exercising more, publishing your novel, landing your dream job, raising your children, being a good spouse, keeping an organized household, mending your own clothes, tending your free range chickens, changing the car's oil in a timely fashion (and mess-free in the driveway, using a funnel made from upcycled dried coffee filters reinforced with papier mache, accented with cruelty-free raffia, as seen on Pinterest), walking three times a day, doing sun salutations between laundry loads, brushing your hair more regularly, creating activities appropriate to your child's developmental level in order to maximize his/her learning potential, boiling down a homemade version of sidewalk de-icing salt that's less corrosive to city cement and better for environmental runoff, handmaking peanut butter birdseed bells for the cardinals and the woodpeckers, and the squirrels, because they also are hungry, albeit obnoxious, and you've already mentioned squirrels a few times in this venue and are beginning to look a little nutty. A-corny. C'mon. Let's try, here. Let's at least put in an effort. Put up appearances. New Year, New You.

The calendar flips with or without you. There you are, on your way to library story time with the kids, and Dunkin' Donuts is not on the way but does have a drive-thru, and it might not the best idea to feed a two-year-old half a glazed donut before story time, but what the hey, he does fine, he likes it, and how about a Boston cream for you? And another cup of coffee? Yes. That third cup of coffee puts you in the zone. Turns you from mediocre to SUPER IDEA PERSON. Clearly caffeine is a drug, and you are going to get all you can before it is outlawed. You went to the gym the other day and burned off last week's pastries along with the intermittent anxiety over cobbling together multiple part-time jobs, returning to work after baby, taking baby to daycare for first time (avoid that thought), of job applications labored over and spinning aimlessly into black holes, the sorting of modern life, the emails that disappear into dusty e-folders, overstuffed and never to be seen again, the sorting and storage of toys with one million parts moved daily in and out of bins, parts that you trip over each day.

You did sun salutations for the first week of the new year, until you forgot or your wrists started aching, or both, wrists that flare with carpal tunnel and the usage of the technology of modern life, that ache from the lifting and nursing and buttoning and caring for two small people dependent largely on you for their survival. The older one turns off the computer with five browser tabs on the screen and three documents-in-progress, an unsubtle opposition to the end of the tractor video on YouTube. (That weirdly passionate song about excavators: rock on, 1988, with your badass synthesizers. This song will be in your head all day.) Everyone says, "Time goes so fast. Cherish this age!" And you do. Or you try. Because you have learned that the months and years go fast. It is the days that are slow. You wonder how it possibly could be just 12:30 p.m. when it feels like you've done enough work for three weeks.

This complaining! Do you think you work in a sweatshop? (No.) Do you think you are paid cruel wages? (Well. Adjunct pay minus the cost of daycare equals No Benefits in most senses of the phrase. It equals anchors aweigh on the S.S. Explore Your Options). Sorting emails, toys, employment, wah wah wah. Complain less in the new year by writing in a handcrafted-by-you gratitude journal, with deckle-edged paper and French flaps. Iron on a tree decal to the 100-percent cloth cover, as a reminder that trees give, just as in the children's book, and you are a tree, sturdy of trunk and long of limb, and your reach extends over many. Do not think about the fact that the tree winds up being a stump, and is all like, I've given, and you've taken and taken, and I would love it if you just sat on me some more!

(You are missing the point of the story. The point is selflessness. But that book has always made you sad in the wrong way. Or maybe the right one.)

Forget where you put the gratitude journal. Pledge to make a new one.

Or not. While the kids nap, dig out a cruddy notebook

last used for a class you taught. Rip out the old pages, the notes you chalked on a board, ideas that students may or may not have copied into their own notebooks. Sit down with your favorite pen, the Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, black ink. Stretch a little, do a sun salutation or two if you can stand it, knowing that your wrists will hurt only until they get stronger again. Think about your two-year-old's enthusiasm for just about everything: "I love this!" he exclaims daily, about Christmas ornaments and toy trucks. About measuring cups and pine cones and the occasional donut. The four-and-a-half-month-old grins and grins, sighing comically at the end of a sneeze. Write about that, write about anything. Get it published or don't. The caffeine and sugar and pen and notebook and clumsy yoga: these make you you. So many changes, yet this remains. Run a hand through tangled hair. Grin a little. New Year, Same You.