Next Year's Words

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

A couple of years ago, I posted this as my status on Facebook: "I love the new year--it's like waking up to a fresh blanket of snow that no one has disturbed. Yes, it will get messy when you start to move around in it, but there's also the chance to make snow angels and snow men, watch dogs and little kids play, and look forward to the life that will sprout once the snow is gone."

In the last few years, I've realized that, as much as I love Christmas, the New Year is my favorite. Not New Year's Eve, so much--I'm not really one to go to big NYE celebrations, although there have been a couple of memorable ones over the years. 

When I was in high school, my friend Lisa and I, along with our younger sisters, went to an all-night skating party. We skated for a while, but then we left (and left our sisters) to go to another party at the house of some boys we knew. We got caught, and Lisa's parents took us home--and we spent the rest of New Year's Eve in her basement listening to Casey Kasem count down the biggest hits of 1982.

And then in college, I was in Amsterdam over New Year's, and a couple of friends and I went dancing at a club called Zorba the Greek and drank champagne at midnight.

That was 25 years ago, and since that one, the only other actual New Year's Eve I remember specifically was when it turned 2000. My son was 5, and he had asked us to wake him up a little before midnight so he could see the fireworks. We got him up at around 11:45, and he stood on our dining room table so he could see the fireworks--and in the morning, he didn't remember it and was upset that we hadn't gotten him up like we promised.

So that's three memorable New Year's Eves out of 47. The others have been very nice, I'm sure--but mostly they run together. But the New Year--that's something different entirely. That's clean slate, throw your arms open wide and march into the unknown kind of celebration. Not an event so much as a feeling. Hoping there are more snow angels than slushy mess.

Then, of course, my son was born right at the beginning of the year in 1994. I tease him about the fact that he was so late--he was due before Christmas--and made me wait, but the truth is, I love that each year starts with his birthday, and by the time the year is over, he's completed (almost) another year of his life. It's one more reason to love the beginning of the year.

But ten years ago, my year started out with my world being turned upside down. Not a beautiful snowfall, but a destructive storm. My marriage ended--no, that is putting it so mildly that it's almost comical. What it actually did was explode with such a fiery vengeance that debris and wreckage were falling for miles around. And one of the large chunks of debris that fell down and knocked me flat was that I also lost my job.

It was such an awful year that I was just in survival mode for most of the time. I had moved in with my parents (temporarily, which turned into nearly three years), which alleviated a lot of the financial pressure, but I had a fourth-grader who still needed to get his homework done and go to his friends' birthday parties and go trick-or-treating and be reassured that the world wasn't ending because his parents weren't together anymore.

Somehow I got it in my head that if I could survive to the end of the year, everything would be OK. It was like a finish line that I struggled towards, dragging my battered and bruised self towards it as if my life depended on crossing it.

And I did it. I got to 2005, and although everything didn't magically get better as soon as the old year was over, there was definitely something about closing the door on that awful year that felt really, really good. It was like in the movies, where someone is running away from a monster or an axe murderer, and they manage to get through a door and lock it behind them, and they lean against it with an enormous sigh of relief that they managed to escape.

Of course, I always want to scream at them to get a little farther from the door because, hello! An axe can chop through a door, and you're only safe for now! Keep moving! Get through the next door and close it behind you too!  I very much felt that sense of temporary safety too, and I kept moving.

It was only symbolic, I know--but everything after the New Year that year felt like progress. I was that much farther from the Worst Year Ever. And the next couple of New Years after that were really celebrations of that survival and being even farther away. The scars were healing--fading, even.

At some point I reached a tipping point where the New Year once again became a looking forward more than a celebration of surviving another year. Getting married again had a lot to do with that, of course. Now life is a lot more about enjoying the present and looking forward to the future than about trying to distance myself from the past.

But this year, since it's 10 years since the big explosion, I'm finding myself very reflective about my journey over these 10 years. When I look at the good things in my life, I know I wouldn't have them without having survived that terrible year. Of course, there's no way to know that when you're just putting one foot in front of the other.

Even if someone had had a crystal ball and could have told me that I would end up happy, I don't know that I would have been able to believe it--or, if I'm totally honest, I don't know if I would have wanted to know. The truth is I had to go through the hard years to get to this place, and I love this place so much that it was worth all of that to be here.


A friend introduced me to a poem recently that so exactly expressed how that year felt that it seems fitting to close with it.

Hurricane

by Mary Oliver

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
which is what I dream of for me.