“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” -Antonio Gramsci
Never have I stumbled upon a quote that speaks more to my
heart in this darkest time of the darkest year of life.
This time of year is always one of introspection for me,
this last bit of the year that holds my turning a new age just as the world turns
a page onto a new time, a new perspective- I have realized in the past few
years how very lucky I am to be born on Christmas day, which just naturally is
a time of year lent to figuring out how much you’ve grown in the past year and to
look forward to the new year with all of its empty planner pages ready for new
hopes and dreams.
But of course, this year everything has a completely different
shine to it. Life at the end of 2020 is not about looking back over my favorite
things that I’ve stored up to recommend, not about looking back to where I have
traveled and how I have grown as a person- life at the end of 2020 is about
survival, and joy found in pockets of the tiniest glimmers of hope, and grief
unlike I’ve ever known on such a wide scale.
My own personal grief story, cataloged so thoroughly in this
blog, feels to me like it has been lived out in front of my eyes by nearly
everyone I know as they grapple with this year. The world turning upside down through no fault of your own isn’t
much comfort when you still have to deal with the consequences of decisions
taken from your hands. Life keeps plodding along even as all of the tentpole
moments have been stripped so bare it is hard to recognize them.
I keep being reminded of the first year that the girls and I
decorated for Christmas as just the three of us- I kept saying, “Just think,
next year this won’t seem so strange because we will have lived through it
before.” And now, every single year as we get the decorations out, I say it and
we laugh over how silly with grief those three girls were, so sad to be
dragging heavy boxes out and trying to figure out what decorations could be
safely put out without dredging up too many memories of their father. If it
helps at all to know, this year we put all of the old decorations out, even those
“Johnson Family” decorations that we so carefully stowed away that first year, because
it doesn’t make us sad to remember anymore.
Which leads me to what this year that I chose the word “release”
means to me now. 2020 has been a year of release unlike anything that I have
ever known. Some of it (most of it) has been the same for me as for everyone-
an understanding of how many seemingly small joys I take for granted in life,
of coming to grips with how frightening it is to understand truly what tender
hooks my life is balanced on.
But it has also been a year of me releasing, finally, the
idea that I am going to just control life from here on out. I could have told
you, 5 years ago, that I knew that my obsession with my hair and my weight and
my routine was a symptom of my feeling at loose ends, staring at the end of my
marriage. I understood it in my head. But I honestly didn’t care. If
straightening my hair gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning and not
see that girl whose husband had abandoned her, then straighten my hair I would.
I’ve released bits and pieces of all of that leading up to
this year. But this year was the year that I finally got it through my head
that it doesn’t matter exactly how my marriage ended. The story that I began living
at 21 years of age had this painful ending, yes, but that was all a part of the
making of me.
I envy people that I know whose love stories have continued
on, true, but I also have a deep desire to own this story that I am living. I
lived out a story that had an ending. I’m never sure what exactly I’m brushing
up against when I bristle against that- if it’s that good Christian girls don’t
get divorced, or if it’s that Type A girls don’t give up on anything- but this
year of release has been about me accepting that as a fact and letting it live.
I’m not trying to tie it up in a bow and make it all neat and tidy. That grief
hurt. But it’s gone now.
The word that is pressing on my heart for 2021 is “quiet.”
That’s a scary word for me to embrace. I’ve spent such years working my way out
of my shell, getting to a point where I talk (much too much) instead of being
overcome with fright. But quiet is what I’m feeling entering 2021. I want to
wrap my arms around my girls and enjoy these last few years of Betsy being at
home, I want to wrap myself inside of my books and music and movies and just
marinate in the enjoyment that life brings. I want my words to be uplifting and
hopeful, words untangling themselves from fear and worry.
I want to be the girl who lived.
