Life in January

The month of January is sort of cursed I think. Every year we look forward to the start of a new year with excitement and dread. This is a new beginning, a fresh start. And yet somehow it has also become synonymous with failure. What resolution, grudgingly made, is not also an invitation to failure when made on January 1st? We joke about it, we quip about the cheesecake that just arrived on the table before us or the gym membership that has gone unused. Still there are greater challenges we have presented to ourselves in private. And we do all of this knowing full well that this is the least motivating time of the year. January is the month when humans do and ought to resemble bears in their behavior. We naturally sleep more, eat more, and care less. Our energy is down, our interest in starting something, anything, new has left on the same train as daylight. Why do we do it to ourselves?

Well January mostly sucked for me this year. (Can't you tell from the intro?) For starters, my marriage was the pits. I pretty much would have given my man to a travelling circus or a group of hairy Ishmaelites. I was just about to change the locks on the house when I had a moment of realization in the final week of hell month. I love that guy! He makes me madder than I have ever been, but I love him more deeply than I have ever loved. AND I feel more loved by him than I have by any other person in my life. He accepts me for who I am and that is no easy job. So I was presented one of my greatest new year's challenges. Try to decide where the limit of love is in a marriage. How much are you willing to endure to stay with the one you love, the one who loves you back? When is the struggle too much to outweigh the joy that that love brings into your life?

Then something else happened. Just as I was beginning to crack, the pressure began to ease. My DH took several steps to meet me in the middle. Not long after, we had a moment of spontaneous, raucous laughter, which spilled into talking to each other like human beings, which flowed into hope for change and a richer understanding of each other's experience. A new beginning was born. But as any mother knows, birth is work and the kind of work that doesn't end once the baby is out either. So here's to the sacred work of matrimony, that it might yield sweet fruit. Fingers crossed.

I also was not granted the estrogen treatment that I was longing for. This made me a little snarky and certainly frustrated by the nonsense of the medical community. I have--no lie--been offered an abdominal hysterectomy, and vaginal hysterectomy, an endometrial ablation, and hormones that I know full well will cause me to be significantly depressed. But no one will give me the bl*&%ing bioidentical estriol that I have researched out the wazoo and have requested. What the h*&%? I am taking your thoughts here. Can anyone give me something more absurd than that to chew on?

And of course, I was not the optimal parent to my kids either. But I suppose that's no big surprise considering...

The one shining star in this otherwise dismal month was that Steve and I decided to learn how to cook Chinese and Vietnamese food. This has been incredibly fun. We poured over cookbooks and recipes found on the internet. We sought out new ingredients at local asian markets and enjoyed almost all the fruits of our labors--all the fruits but jackfruit, that is. Our friend Alex introduced us to a super yummy noodle dish from Korea called Japchae and she loaned us her cookbook on kimchee. Now we want to eat asian cuisine everyday of the week. We're not sure if we are going to try Thai or Indian next. Hopefully there will be a lot of firsts in this department throughout the year. And if you come to visit we'll treat you to some of our tasty new discoveries.

I guess that's all I have to say for now. Hope your new year is off to good start. If not, you could just try again at the pagan new year, March 21st. That was my plan B.