2011, you certainly left us wiser.
It's funny looking back at my new year's post from 2010, wishing that 2011 would be a good year. I was thinking "good" merely in terms of fewer hassles. But here I am posting a year later with a photo of my baby. How can that be? How can I have a baby? And yet...here he is, growing more adorable with each passing day and making us wonder how there could ever be a time when he wasn't here. "Good" indeed! My favorite memories of 2011 were the surprise of discovering we were having a baby, my mostly-wonderful pregnancy, and meeting Caleb and discovering what it's like to be parents. I'd love to be eloquent and poignant here, but what really sums this up for me is "holy shit!"
That's actually a good summing up of this whole year. Aside from having a baby, which is quite enough to rock our worlds, we both had surgery (Dave on his nose, me a c-section), we both have new jobs and not by choice (Dave's school closed and my department restructured), and we found ourselves enmeshed in a lengthy and very costly court case about Dave's mother's estate that is still unresolved. Related to that, we had multiple estate emergencies to deal with (burst pipe, dropped home insurance, finding new insurance, threatened foreclosure). We got a new fence put up in our yard. The summer government shut down almost cost Dave his new job. I went to New Orleans. We both went to Boston. Dave had to move to our house everything of his from his mother's house (a considerable amount of stuff), and do so right in the middle of our reconfiguring our own house to accomodate a nursery. Oh, yeah, and I got another Master's Degree. I can't stop looking back on all this like one might stare at a multi-car pile up. 2011, you were ridiculous! Seriously, what the hell?
And the craziness of our lives is nothing compared to what others' are going through right now. So many people had life-changing developments in 2011. And even looking at the Year-End magainzes, the level of change in the world is absurd.
But while 2011 really did beat us senseless, it's hard to rail against the injustices of the world when simultaneously creating and caring for a beautiful new life. 2011 is the marking point for us of "before" and "after." And for that, 2011, you will always be the most beautiful of years even though on the outside you appeared quite ugly.
You left us wiser. You left us stronger. You blew our minds. I salute you one final time. Now I'm off to hold my baby boy and feel some peace amid the chaos.
