Here’s my hello, 2024. Yes, I’m a little late, but I feel I have a fair reason. You see, these last 5 years have been so chaotic, so unplannable, so sideways, that it has had me unsure of how to say hello. For 2020, 2021, and 2022, my husband and I made these beautiful and fun collages alongside charcuterie and cocktails. (This was never my husband’s favorite activity, but he indulged me.) We chose and arranged images that stood out to us, chatted about our collages, and watched UGA football. It was easy to dream, hope, and visioncast those years. Maybe it is growing older, maybe it is having three kids, maybe it is moving across the state twice in the last 3 years, maybe its some of the trying times life offers, but dreaming into you, 2024, isn’t so easy this year.
I greeted 2023 with a different approach. I journaled around a word and then multi-media collaged, layering color, texture, and magazine clippings to explore the word that found me for the year. It turns out that the word nurture was the exact right word for the year. I did in fact have to nurture myself to navigate all that 2023 had in store.
I recently read Matrescence by Lucy Jones, and now I am wondering if it is not this season of matrescence that has me floundering. We talk so much about adolescence as a developmental stage of life that humans undergo. We can often accept the mood swings, identity shifts, and relationship negotiations as a reality of this developmental period. It wasn’t until I was a counselor specializing in maternal mental health that I began grasping to understand my own reality alongside my clients’ realities. The language of matrescence as a developmental stage helps me to name that there is a change in our bodies and emotional realities when we have a child. For each birth we experience this dramatic shifting of identity and personhood. Jones describes this metamorphosis in such poetic and resonating language. It was a book to savor. All this to say, perhaps I am still too in-the-middle of matrescence to hope, dream, and visioncast.
2024, I guess I am trying to say that I am sorry we are meeting this way. I feel run down and exhausted. Yet, you’ve played a part in this already. You’ve come in so strong with a (minor) surgery, 124345 colds between the 5 of us, and ridiculously cold weather. I want to welcome you and to feel excited that you are here, but I struggle to be disingenuine.
So how about this? Instead of forcing hope, dreams, and vision, can we just agree to take this one step at a time? Let’s take some more time to settle into one another before we plan out the year. Besides, I really think it is too cold, too dark, and just too much to hold all the hope and dreams right now. I’m more up for snuggling, reading, drinking americanos, and hibernating. The growth, flowering, and fruit will come later. Winter has more stories to tell before Spring, Summer, and Fall can take hold.
This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Hello".
“The growth, flowering, and fruit will come”
Isn’t that the truth! Love this!
I think there's so much pressure to force the new year resolutions and words. I love the slow ease into the New Year that you are encompassing!