Ugh. Its January 1st and the air is filled with hopefulness, people are teeming with new possibilities and gyms are packed. Nothing makes me roll my eyes and sigh more than New Years Resolutions. Maybe I’ve lucked out the last few years….2014 rolled around and I had a newborn who never slept. 2013, we had just moved. 2012, I was overwhelmed and hugely pregnant with our first baby. So really, for three years I’ve made no New Years Resolutions. People would ask and I jokingly say something like, “survival!” or “peeing by myself!”
But really this year, it’s intentional. I am making no New Years Resolutions. In a chaotic life filled with littles who can manage to pee everywhere but in the toilet and a never ending cycle of teething, I just don’t have time for one more disappointment. Because one thing I do know: come mid-February, I will have forgotten everything I resolved to do. In the midst of play dates, sick kids, babies who don’t sleep, groceries, budgets, laundry, cleaning, shopping, story telling, game playing, snuggling, cuddling and book reading, I know that my New Years Resolutions won’t last.
And, I know they won’t make me happy.
Want to know why? Because I finally stopped nursing last year and lost the 15 pounds I’d been obsessing about for eleven months. And guess what? It didn’t make me happy.
I got off Facebook for a month, and it didn’t make me happy.
I organized our house to perfection, and it didn’t make me happy.
But you know what actually made me more happy? Putting down my phone, placing limits on social media, cutting out the people in my life who dragged me down, saying no and just being me. Not me in 15 pounds, or in nicer clothes, or in the friend group I’d always wanted or driving the dream car. Just me, my husband and my kids. We just stopped. We stopped going to activities that drained us, spending time with people who discouraged us and scheduling every second of our lives.
The margin we managed to create allows us to make space for what really matters: faith, family, friends and activities we genuinely love.
So this year instead of making a grandiose list of resolutions, take a step back and see what really matters to you, your spouse and your kids. Go from there. Make changes. Cut things. Make hard choices. I don’t claim to know much of anything (other than the correct name of every construction vehicle ever made), but one thing I do know: an investment in our marriages and our kids will never return void.
