Mother Courage

For Christmas this year, among other lovely things, my daughter gave me a journal. On the inside cover was this inscription:

Her heart and brain do not weigh her down, but are set aflame;

they singe her skin, they make her radiant.

She is your mother. 

She is you, years from now.

Let your definition of beauty

begin with her.

They are lines from a poem called Mother Courage. She wrote it for me, for my 50th birthday, and performed it as a spoken word piece in front of an auditorium full of people to spectacular applause. It was stunning. It took my breath away and it made me cry. Proud and touched, I posted it on my Facebook page, where it was shared over and over and viewed nearly 2,000 times. 

It remains the best gift I have ever been given.

But if I'm honest, I'm not living up to her words. My heart and brain have been weighing me down. I am not radiant. I do not feel beautiful. I feel tired and worn, dull and heavy - in every way.

Yesterday, while celebrating a late Christmas with family, I found this photo in one of my brother's albums... 

It's me at nineteen years old. It was taken by someone I was dating, on a lazy Sunday meander along the Skyline Drive in August. And though the picture, like my memory, is fuzzy, it reflects a happy girl; a radiant girl; a girl who, on that day, anyway, felt beautiful. 

I miss that girl. 

I want some of that radiance back. 

And I'm starting on a quest to find it. 

I generally scoff at New Year, New Me resolutions and proclamations. But this year I'm not scoffing. This year feels... different. And even if I'm just imagining it, I have the ability to make it different. I know I will never again be the girl in that photo. Too much Life has happened to her over the past 35 years and it has changed her. But I'd like to at least resemble her a bit.

So I've started the process of clearing the clutter and the cobwebs - from my head, my heart, and my space. I'm disconnecting (quite literally) from what isn't serving me well, in order to reconnect with things that feed my soul. In place of social media and Netflix, I've got stacks of books to read, ideas to write about, lists of things to get done - not obligations or chores, but things I want to do. I've got goals to meet.

And one of those goals is to once again be the woman my daughter described in Mother Courage. To be an example of radiance, beauty, and a mind and heart aflame. 

So, here's to endings and new beginnings and all the stuff in the middle that makes us who we are. Here's to becoming the people we want to be and to loving the people we end up as, regardless. Here's to doing the best we can while we're in it and to having quite enough of it (thank you very much). Here's to hitting rock bottom, to praying it doesn't have a basement, and to the flicker of candlelight that keeps us from being completely in the dark. Here's to believing that things will be better, even if you're faking it until you make it. 

Here's to the New Year. Come on, 2020! Let's be great, shall we?

XO,