Goodbye Old Year

I hate New Years resolutions. And not because I never stick to them. Okay it’s a little bit of that…maybe a lot. I mean what difference does it really make besides changing the calendar?

We are constantly changing anyway. Our cells are constantly reproducing and dying, more and more so until the system eventually fails and we die (pause for deep breaths as I have a panic attack about my own mortality).

Everything changes and everything ends eventually. 2019 has gone by with a few blinks of the eye as I realise I am now the same age my parents were when they said that the years go by faster and faster as you get older. And I didn’t believe them!

For me New Years is a bit of a mini midlife crisis. Much like Christmas and Birthdays and every time I wake up in the morning. The New Year strikes me in the pit of my stomach with the question ‘what did you actually achieve this year?’ And this year the equally perplexing ‘What the fuck just happened?’

This year I had far too many days where I was ‘just getting through the day’ and rather than trying to make meaning from it or learn some kind of lesson I’d rather not look at it too hard like my sleep deprived face in the mirror sometimes.

Sometimes the most positive thing you can take out of a year is that you survived it and that’s ok. Maybe it wasn’t your turn to shine. But I showed up for every day of 2019. Playing with my kids, playing with other people’s kids, listening to the sometimes endless stories. I stopped my kids from killing each other. I fed them. I put them to sleep…sometimes for hours.

Yep, I failed. A lot. Sometimes my kids ate breakfast in the car. Sometimes on the weekend my kids ate packet stuff from the cupboard for breakfast while I napped on the lounge. I made mistakes at work, I put the wrong formula in the wrong bottle and there was no extra formula so someone had to drive to the shops. I got stressed at home. I yelled.

Sometimes I just wanted to shout ‘I’m doing my best okay?’ Sometimes to my own little family I actually did. You see sometimes when you have anxiety and depression or maybe even if you don’t I wouldn’t know, your best is a bit shit. And you know it, but you keep going anyway hoping no one notices, which I am sure they do.

So 2020 I will try harder, I will try to get into some kind of organisation so that I can find my kids birth certificates and not have to reorder them AGAIN. But I will not be perfect, I don’t believe in perfect. But you better play nice too.