Well wishes for a new year

and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

A few weeks ago my 80-something year old grandma suffered a fall. She was alone on the ground in her home for nearly 24 hours before my cousin found her. It breaks my heart to think about.

She has since been moved into a rehab facility/assisted living. She has her own room, but I’m mourning the loss of her independence.

She is and has always been radically independent.

We all have.

She has always been the only grandmother I’ve had in my life. My mom’s mom. We spent nearly all holidays with her. We always went back to school shopping with her. Celebrated birthdays with her. Had sleep overs at her house. I can hear and feel the sound of walking on her floor. I can smell her house when I think about it.

We like the same food. We like the same movies. We all like mystery and intrigue /spy novels. In so many ways we are so alike. It became clearer to me after I became a mother and we were taking a trip across the country and we stopped and stayed with her. There’s something about seeing someone as a whole person and not your mother or grandmother. I saw her as she is, and I couldn’t help but laugh at how similar we were/are.

A simple example is our love of sour bitter things. We love unsweetened cranberries, pomegranates, grapefruits/citrus peel, dark chocolate, olives, bitter greens, etc. Magnolia is the same. To the point the other day she said to me, “Mom, we’re bitter girls!” I thought she was saying that we were emotionally bitter, but she was talking about our tastes. We had a good laugh about it. Your five year old telling you you’re both bitter 😂

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We come from a deeply independent family full of historic loners. One of my great great great great + grandfathers founded towns all over Utah, and as soon as people started showing up he’d pack his family up and leave.

If you’ve ever been to Capitol Reef National Park, and seen the Behunin cabin out in the absolute middle of nowhere… that’s my family’s.

Further back my family hails from a tiny Danish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea, Bornholm. When I visited there years ago, I mentioned to a woman that all the towns were so close together, and how quickly they could get around the island and she said something to the effect, “we have no need to visit other towns, we have what we need where we are”.

I get it. Like on a cellular level I get it.

All of the towns I’ve visited that my family had some part in founding are remote, to say the least. They deeply valued their independence and PRIVACY. Which, if you know anything about the history of the Mormon Pioneers, was a quality they were looking for up until a certain point when they were then meant to take their place and start contributing within a community. Whoops!

Further back my ancestral family were essentially vikings and highlanders. Tough odd ball misfit loners. There were also trailblazers never profiting off of their work or inventions because they just had to keep going. I also get that on a very deep level.

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I am someone, who too, imbues that loner independence. But I’ve also been hurt by it, and hurt others because of it.

It, like anything else, is a story. A story that has been told and relived in my family for hundreds of year. We don’t need other people, and we’ll do it ourselves.

I’ve got a bad case of the Little Red Hen syndrome.

But I think what it really is, when I search my feelings, it’s not that I don’t need other people, I truly do. Especially now as mom juggling too many plates. It’s a lack of belief that people need me. That they need my ideas or perspective. That those ideas or inventions are important enough to last or stick around or make an impact. So I throw it away and move on. Or my Great++++++ grandfather founds a town and doesn’t believe that the people came because of him, or need him anymore, and he leaves.

To be completely fair though, there is also a personality factor to all this, and I see that shining through all the women in my family… fortunately/unfortunately.

There’s also still the reality of wanting to be alone. Valuing solitude and privacy. Not quite fitting or wanting to mix toooo much, but there’s definitely a worthiness factor.

I also see being able to be done/to put the work down/to not found another town… as a way of being able to acknowledge that at some point it’s enough. That you’re worthy of rest.

This has been a huge discovery for me. I have always stayed up too late. Some of it is just night owl stuff… but over the past few months I’ve actually been too tired to work at night, but I haven’t been able to go to bed. So I’ve started to unravel this, and I realized that I felt guilty for not getting more done, and that guilt, was keeping me up at night.

For Christmas I got a WHOOP band. It’s a health tracker, and it has been tracking my sleep for the past week and it’s been illuminating to see the effect these nonsense ideas have been having on my health.

It’s not good, y’all.

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My hope for the new year is to build on the changes I’ve started making in 2024.

I wasn’t perfect, but SO MUCH BETTER, at being realistic with myself. At mostly stopping when the work was done. I still have too much on my plate, but I think that’s mostly about being alive today without much of a village…

except! Magnolia’s school is very much like a village, and our neighborhood church congregation is feeling better and that’s not nothing.

I’ve had a good think about these words that I’ve written, and my thoughts on my families behavioral patterns… it feels like when things got too tough or too uncomfortable, or just not what they had in mind, they moved on. They ceded their land. Again and again until there wasn’t anything for anyone really. I have done this my entire adult life. Seriously. It’s absolutely an extreme, but I know for me growing up in a home with an abusive father, I would just rather cut all ties and move on. I’ve done it too much. It also doesn’t help being a Gemini who will cut you out so fast and literally never think of you again (if you’re reading this, it’s not you, so don’t worry).

I’m working on actually knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em instead of always folding ‘em. I’m going to stop ceding my land (ideas, efforts, work, relationships etc) because it doesn’t go the way I think or feel it should right away. I can be more comfortable sitting in the discomfort.

I’m working on putting my health in order. I don’t know if you know this (you probably know this), but all the things I’ve stated above are actually extremely detrimental to your health. It’s too easy for me to put everyone and everything in front of my own needs. I have to put myself at the front of the line. It’s kind of like saving… you save at the beginning of the month, not at the end with what you have left… because there’s never anything left. I’m going to start taking 1-2 whole hours everyday after I drop Magnolia off to work on my health before I start working. That’s why I got a fitness tracker, so I can be cognizant of some material data and do something about it.

I’m going to start keeping a personal journal again. I just think it’s one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself, and I’ve experienced the richness of that in years past.

I’m making time for new work. There are so many projects I want to do, and things I want to make/investigate, and it’s just time.

I’m going to have more hope in a bright future. Because frankly, my hope isn’t in this world or any politician or government. My hope is bigger and rests firmly in God, and that’s very bright, indeed.

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What will this year be for you? Do you pick a word to encapsulate it? I’d love to hear from you, and I wish you the happiest of New Years.

xoxolizzy