It was one of my most satisfying years. This is why:
•We raised 12 chickens from day old hatchlings to egg-laying hens. It hasn't been entirely easy or pretty, but there is a certain satisfaction of watching them from my bathroom window pecking around, doing chicken things. There is an even more certain satisfaction in collecting and consuming their eggs. The variety in eggshell color is superb. Lovely shades of brown mostly, but Chonko-Boppo lays beautiful green eggs! They are very cool.
•Cocoa became a part of our family in January. Our year of owning a dog has been one full of opportunities for learning and growth. She has been absolutely faithful, obedient, ready to have fun, calm, mature, quiet. We are slowly learning how to be the same. In more ways than we originally expected, our first family dog has been a blessing.
•And we added another cat. That was probably an irrational blunder on my part, but our boys are very attached, so Rocket is a permanent addition. (I guess.)
•We spent a few July days on the banks of the Atlantic. Is the ocean a similar experience for all people? It changes my entire being. I feel more alive and able to breathe deeply. Visiting the ocean makes my body feel healthy, jubilant, younger even. Aside from an infestation of sand fleas, my boys also had a wonderful time
•In the same vacation, we also visited dear friends, which meant so much to us. We felt so fortunate to be able to travel just part of a day to spend a few days in their company. They are some of our most treasured friends. Sometimes, living in the country, I feel extremely lonely for good friends. This short visit really, really filled a need.
•This was the first full year of owning and living in our first house. I love our little old house. When we return home from somewhere and enter between the fence lining our drive, my heart swells a little to look up at our house and think of being welcomed in. Have I mentioned before that we live in the country? I can't explain how I love it here. Today I ran a couple miles down our road with Cocoa and I thought for the millionth time how I love this place. It is beautiful and quiet and peaceful. I feel similarly here to the way I feel at the ocean. A bit more alive. Quicker to smile. Like my heart is completely full and over-flowing. I still marvel at it and I hope to for as long as we're here.
•We bought a van at a good price from my grandma and found ourselves a two-vehicle family. What a relief it has been to me to have freedom to come and go! Even when I don't leave our house for days at a time, it is liberating just knowing I could.
•Probably most significantly was the expectation and arrival of our third child and first daughter. She has carried with her an added measure of joy into our family. I feel more comfortable, adept, and relaxed as a mother. I think I've been better prepared to just enjoy. The entire experience of growing, birthing, and nurturing this new little one has been deeply soul satisfying. I'm relatively young. Most people I went to high school with are only beginning to think about marriage and an even smaller portion are beginning to have children. I'm not only an anomaly for a person my age, but also for a parent in NY. Most are only having one child, maybe two. I stroll into any public place toting my three children and I'm sure to elicit at least one well-intended comment about how incredible it is that I have so many kids or how overwhelmed I must be or how absolutely adorable my children are (accompanied by a look of bewilderment as they make an obvious head-count).
We purchased our very own piano and later in the year were given a second. So now we're a two-car-two-piano family. I'm even more pleased about the pianos than I am about the car.
•My last thought about this year is a reflection on something I learned.
I learned that I am a daughter of God. Silly, because it's something I was taught for my whole life and even something that I truly believed, but it finally really means everything to me. It says everything about who I am.
I think I had an identity crisis after I became Nolan's mom and then Gerret's mom. Maybe it started when I became Patrick's wife. Maybe it was there even before that. I had grown up preparing to be a wife and a mother. That's really what I wanted most to be. It was all I wanted to be, actually. That was how I identified myself even before I got married at the ripe old age of twenty. Over the course of being a wife and a mother for seven and five years respectively, I felt somewhat lost or missing something about myself. This year, I finally understood why. I finally understood that I am not a wife and a mother. Well, I mean I am and I love to fulfill these roles, but they don't define who I am. You're probably thinking, "Duh!" and that's actually what I thought once I understood, but it very truly was an epiphany. I finally feel at peace with who I am.
I am a daughter of a loving heavenly father and that means everything to me. It says something about what I already am, it says something about what I can become, and it gives me direction, hope, and a measure of peace that I hadn't been able to grasp before this was in my heart --the reality and meaning of my identity. It is my foundation, who and what I am at my very core. Everything else that I am is in addition to this. If I wasn't anything else, if I hadn't met my husband, if I wasn't able to bear children, if I worked in a career that I was ill-suited for, or even if I had a career that absolutely satisfied me, if I was orphaned at a young age, or even homeless, I would still be a daughter of God and my purpose to become like him (at a painstaking pace) would still be my sole purpose. And that understanding has really shaped my year.
Coincidentally, the most recent lesson for my young woman in church was this very idea. Though it wasn't even my day to teach, I had to speak up and even broke down in tears because my desire for this girl to understand it was so great. I almost wanted to shake her shoulders and shout, "This is not a trite phrase! It is not something sweet to say! It means EVERYTHING!" Or at least it can mean everything, if you let it and I am letting it.
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