You think about your 'loved ones'.....you think about their lives and how their circumstances will affect them this coming year....more importantly, you think about how it will affect you.
When you are the matriarch of a family....doesn't that sound presumptuous and glorious, all at the same time? .....anyways, in simpler terms, when you are the mother of a large family, it really doesn't matter how old your children become, or....how active you are in each of their lives.....you find yourself still intertwined in their lives....some, whether you desire to be or not.
Of course, the positive things, the joyous things.....you don't mind being intertwined at all.....the other, ....the negative, stressful things ....you'd rather not be, you'd rather hide out somewhere....you even start to wish that your trailer at your summer camp ground was winterized...then you could go and hide....not to be found until the latest crisis was averted and you could return to the calm. That is not life though, is it?
Life consists of the highs and lows, ( and I'm not talking about drug effects) ...I'm just musing about the good and the bad of life in general.
As you look at this long strip in front of you, you are trying to imagine the year before you, you try to prepare yourself for what is to come......some are already defined.....a new grand baby due to be born this month, an occasion that you've been looking forward to, have been praying about, for the last nine months!.......this is a birth with all the positivities, in your mind that should surround the birth of a child.....also a surprise birthday party for a good friend, a bridal shower next month, a stag and doe in the third month...I've never been to a stag and doe....I think it should be quite interesting to see what I've been missing all these years....that takes us to April...where at least two birthdays will be celebrated....in March there are three.....also, in April is Easter...the most holy of celebrations in the Christian calendar but to some, it's just a repeat of Christmas with gifts, new clothes and copious amounts of cheap ( not the cost but the quality) chocolate and candy....
But...to me...and obviously not in the official sense, but only to me, April is the beginning of spring! To me, the first three months of the year are the ugliest months, the first quarter of the year is to be endured, in my mind. I detest them!
May...a month to watch your outside world coming to life...things turning green, flowers starting to bloom and in this year a family wedding...the culmination of much planning , the reason for the bridal shower and stag/doe in the doldrum months, all comes to a head, so to speak with a wonderful celebration of two people who have chosen to publicly commit their lives to each other.....definitely an occasion in looking down the strip of the year to look forward to! Plus...more birthdays......
June brings with it a huge surprise.....something that my husband has been planning for well over a year......the details can not be revealed at this time....to protect the innocent....but it is grand! Don takes great delight in planning these things......I believe it's one of the ways that he shows our family the caring and commitment he has towards me, his wife and thus showing it to his family. You see, if he wasn't willing or cared to show it to me, then he doesn't care about the family as a whole, does he....he's showing our children just how important our relationship is to our family as a whole because without that commitment , I feel our family would flounder. Even , when Don and I are no longer here, our children will still remember the commitment that their mother and father had for each other, the joy that they feel in each other, and it will give them comfort that they did, and even though they may all go their separate ways...emotionally or physically.....they still have that solid base in their lives.
Onto the summer months,.....in our youth, they were the carefree months....the months to laze about, go to the beach, have picnics..( although I'm not a picnic person) ...leave the rat race behind, so to speak......but they were the months to re-energize your body, mind and soul....now a days, people seemed to be just as busy...they are truly missing out!
All to soon, September appears....if you have school aged children in your lives, it's a month of new beginnings, getting back into routines....routine isn't all bad...it's like putting all the Christmas decor up at the beginning of the season, very happy to do so, but then when Christmas is done , you're all ready to pack it all away...why?.....routine....we really crave it...we like getting things back to normal...that's why some like September when things get back into the routine...school starts, lessons and activities get underway...new programs are tried out.....it creates a routine in our lives.....it also contains more birthdays, as did July and August.....
October, .... October is starting the wind down of the year.....foliage after it displays it's beautiful colours, withers and dies......( can you tell that I'm not a 'fall' person......to some the autumn season is their time.....I've never experienced those feelings...yes, for us Canadians, it does hold Thanksgiving...a reason for families to gather together to give thanks....giving thanks for what, varies with the individual.....it could be a very shallow appreciation or it could be fairly deep....I think it's truly affected by what your life circumstance is at that moment.....perhaps what has transpired in the last three quarters of the year...yes, we have entered into the final quarter....we can be thankful for the superficial but the older we get, we really do allow our minds to really dig deeper, not just to appreciate the everyday, although those should not be minimized.
November is one of the huge birthday months in our family....not sure but I think it must have to do a lot with the depressing, cold month of March! We also start our Christmas preparations in earnest, what should we buy, what is our budget, what would so and so like.....will there be the Christmas drama of the previous years...already our mind starts rolling in angst but we carefully keep shoving it back, trying to concentrate on the positive and putting on 'the game face'.....let's face it...Christmas is not the holly jolly Christmas that Burl Ives sings about.....( I detest that song, by the way)..... But we 'soldier' on ....
As Christmas becomes closer in the month of December, we try to concentrate on the positive, the pure.....we rack our brains with trying to keep everyone happy and content.....which is a fallacy because how many people do you know that are actually happy and content , all the time...it's impossible because...surprise! we are human.....but you persevere, knocking yourself out and in the meantime usually miss , not the 'true' meaning of Christmas, which everyone is striving for but taking the time to really figure out what it means for us and what we can do to achieve that that epiphany in our lives...not just on Christmas Day but on each and every day of this year and the years to follow.
And now, once again, we find ourselves staring down that long strip, in our minds....visualize a long strip of photography negatives....ah...now you see it , don't you.......look ahead on this long strip of the coming year and ask yourself.....what will I do with this year.....yes, it will hold special occasions just as this year of 2015 does.....but they haven't happened yet.....we have these plans with our finite minds, but sometimes plans change....will we be ready for them....or will we just 'wing' it....take it as they come.....I am a planner by nature , an organizer....not overtly OCD but I do like things planned out.....but...life isn't like that.....at the beginning of last year, we said good bye to a good man...a father, a grandfather but most of all a husband to my only sister. Would we have planned this out, ...of course not, but it came none the less.....our daughter , who lived on the streets became pregnant....would we have planned it , obviously not....she did but we did not....would we have planned, 29 weeks later to have to ask people to help us bury this wee grand daughter......absolutely not! But we did.....we had never been in charge of doing something like that before......
Another daughter started out the year in a psychotic break.....would we have planned that...for her or for us.....absolutely not!
There were good things that we were apart of, some we personally didn't plan but enjoyed......a thirteenth birthday celebration for our very first grandchild .....a surprise trip to Bermuda, a relaxing respite in Florida.....a quiet spring, summer, fall and winter with our daughter being mentally/emotionally stable......what a gift that was! ....and we pray every night that she continues to be so......
.......Friday's Off.....the greatest thing since sliced bread! Don and I able to plan day outings....little things to give us some alone time, just the two of us.....great and glorious times......I pray his company never stops Friday Offs! A body and mind need, no it craves, something to look forward to......what a blessing.
So, we look ahead to this year and once again we claim the word Hope as our word ....I mentioned to Don that we should be thinking of a new word for the year......my very wise husband, looked at me and said.....'why?....I don't think we're finished with Hope yet'.....and as I thought about it, I realized he was right.....and I don't think that it's finished with us yet either......
HOPE.
~ Marie
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