A Toast for the New Year

Here is to slipping the new calendar onto the lonely, gray nail. Here is to forgiving ourselves when, after all these years, we are still stupid and surprised to find the same familiar vices eating away at our paper-thin resolves. And when we’ve finished weighing ourselves down with the lead of unbearable burdens–here is to untying those anchors from our necks. Here is to letting them drop to the seafloor with the bottom feeders. Here is to carrying only the flush of air in our lungs and the plodding pulse in our veins.

Here is to remembering our worthiness when there is nothing to boast–no beatific selfies, no trendy jeans, no measurable accomplishment to ease the fear that sits in our bellies like a squatter. Here is to drinking down all the love we’ve bottled up for the someday-people we may never become; here is to no longer shelving it in the cellar like some exorbitant cabernet. 

Here is to letting our own voracity run ahead, to taking our fill and calling it good, to eating and eating and still being hungry. Here is to looking in the mirror and making peace with our own reflection. Here is to pushing the cart with the one squeaking wheel past the rainbow of dewy serums. Here is to the babies who place their chubby, angel hands on our tired faces, who nestle into our soft bodies in the glow of the corner streetlamp. Here is to our children knowing that we are loved and we are real, like that beloved velvet bunny from their storybook. 

And if it so happens that we find ourselves looking back, measuring out our words, sprinkling resentment over our choices, a bitter taste in our mouths of all that is left undone, here is to holding ourselves tenderly. Here is to ministering to our own rest, like how we say “enough, now” to our children before pulling the quilt over their shoulders–how we sweep the matted hair from their foreheads, and when they ask us, “When will it be tomorrow?” how we assure them that the morning always comes. 

Here is to that.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Cheers!".

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash