The Everyday Resolution

The week before our lives changed forever, we received the elusive blessing of a snow day. On the night of January 17, 2023, Clinton texted one of the last texts he would send that didn’t involve the business, the busyness of marriage, and having three active kids. 

Mama gets what she wants for her birthday, he said in a group text to our children and me: all of her kids home for the day!

He was right, it really was all I had grown to want in the years leading up to his death. The life of sports and work consumed us. I needed it to slow down; I needed us to slow down, and we were picking up speed at an exponential rate. I felt that our family needed to pause and give time to what was quietly sustaining us. 

My family thrived on the sensory feedback of an active, busy, and noisy world. Many times over the course of our marriage, Clinton would ask me, in response to my desire for a slower pace, "Well, what do YOU want?"

And typically, I would think about it for a long moment, trying to find the right words for what I wanted–it was an unreachable desire, not realistic for any of us. The life we were living in was the world we knew, and it was also the same life everyone around us was living. Our life is what we know, and what we know becomes our life.

How could I explain that all I wanted was for us to sit on the couch and watch a movie together? I wanted us to laugh and connect. I wanted us to be bored. No one wants to repeat the scary and uncertain thorns that COVID pricked into the preoccupied regularity of our lives. However, I loved COVID for what it gave to our family: bonfires, storytelling, cooking together, and reading. The kids were bored–something they had never felt. But then, they built things and adventured; they created and played games around the table. We connected outside of work, school, and sports, and that part was nice for me. 

So, when I unexpectedly became a widow at 46, I sent one child to college, and I now have two more with their feet out the door. My desire to be together as a family is still a large portion of what I want in life, but at what point do we really stop and ask ourselves what do I want, and who am I?

This is not just the pressing question of widowhood, although becoming a single parent through loss has forced this question–and the possibilities an answer would embrace–to sit brightly on the surface of a murky pond. This is bigger than resolutions or buying a gym membership each year when January rolls around. It's not about publishing that novel, doing well on a test, or tackling that backyard project. The answer isn't in money or moving through people who stand in the way. It's not in being selfish either– so many of us are told to start being a little bit more selfish and to say “no” more when life is being lived less for you. The answer isn’t found in excuses, either: I can’t leave my current situation because of this or that. Or, I can’t just up and fulfill the calling of my heart’s desire because that would require a lot of money. There are insurmountable situations that place us exactly where we are without the options to act. So what do we do?

I have thought a lot over the last three years about the answer to the question of what I want. Other than the basics of what we all desire: world peace, health, happiness, a meaningful life for ourselves and those we love, there is the yearning found in too many of my favorite songs to pick just one. There is that sacrosanct, hard-to-access part of myself that oftentimes finds it easier to stop trying. It takes little effort to let that part of me stay precisely where it is, so that I can go about the business and the busyness of life.

There is only one answer that holds after denouncing the notion of resolutions each time a new year rises. There is only one person who knows me better than I know myself and who asks me to lean in and listen when stillness and togetherness are the only desires I can name. Growing closer to Him is a daily resolution where access works both ways. It is a commitment to create stillness and to listen every day – to stop trying to find the answer on my own, and to change the question from 'me' to 'Him'. What does He want, and what does He want for me? Those of us who are left behind after loss, the ending of a relationship, or children leaving home, can often forget that we are not alone as we try to forge ahead into territory that is unknown.