Same Shit, Different Year

The year started off badly and that hurt my feelings.

Reader! Forgive my absence! I have been on a whirlwind tour of these United States that included such glamorous moments as making my potty-trained son pee into a unfastened diaper wee-wee pad-style during takeoff because he couldn’t wait til the fasten seatbelt sign turned off. (I didn’t make him, my husband did. I would have just put the diaper on him once it got to that point but I was in a different row, trying to pry a seatbelt doused in the DNA of millions out of my other child’s mouth.) Yes, there was a stranger sitting next to my son during this deconstructed diaper experience. But honestly, I ain’t sorry (even though, again, this was my husband’s call, not mine). The more I take my feral children into public spaces, the more resentful I feel about the urge to apologize for doing so. Isn’t this world is for all of us? I promise I will try to keep my children from kicking the back of your seat, because I know it’s really fucking annoying. But also, this ain’t a picnic for me, either, k? What’s that? My shit isn’t your problem? Your shit isn’t MY problem! So go the irrational arguments I have in my head despite the fact that no one was unpleasant to me or my children on the 17-day, four-flight exercise in masochism otherwise known as holiday travel. But I digress…

.Like most people, come the end of this past year, I was all, fuck 2023! As my husband pointed out, it started out sad, with the death of our cat, Ned, in January, and ended much sadder with the death of my sister, Gillian, in November. The months in between felt like an endless string of possibilities for my life in Los Angeles to take off that never materialized. It was a hard year, coming off the back of a few more hard years. And if social media can be trusted to take the temperature of the general public re: 2023, I think a lot of you felt the same way. But like many, I’m sure, on January 1st, I gave myself the hopeful pep talk. I was gonna OWN 2024! I was gonna make all kinds of new friends! I was gonna get in the sickest shape of my life! I was gonna make $$$$$! Surely the universe had been keeping a running tally of its debt to me, and it was time for this bitch to collect. Then, on January 2nd, my mom called to let me know my dad was in the ICU. And in addition to all the feelings one feels when a person one loves deeply is very sick, I felt wronged. I felt stupid. Was some part of this the universe taunting me for my hubris? Needless to say, it hurt my feelings.

What exactly is luck? Trying to pin it down is an exercise in futility best suited for college students with a big ole bag of weed to get through. It’s gotta be random, right, or we’d call it something else? And yet, the privileged and/or naive among us (ie me) believe there must be some sort of 1:1 ratio of the good kind to the bad kind, that if we’ve had too much of one, we’ve got the other coming. I suppose this kind of thinking betrays the very caprice built into luck’s nature, but we tell ourselves what we need to hear to get out of bed and make our children peanut butter toast in the morning. My husband’s family jokes that he is preternaturally unlucky, because life’s minor (and sometimes not-so-minor) inconveniences seem to constantly befall him. The first Christmas we were dating, his suitcase — full of 90% of his clothing and all the presents he’d bought for his family — was stolen as he dozed beside it on the DC Metro. When he called to tell me, I was horrified, but he sounded resigned, used to it, even. I was merely witnessing the first sprinkle of a raincloud he’d lived under his entire life. I tell myself (and him, OFTEN) that the many indignities he’s endured over the years have been necessary to offset the motherload of all good fortunes, MARRYING ME. I, conversely, have been on the receiving end of obscene amounts of luck, personally and professionally, for decades. Not only have my bags never been stolen, I once got upgraded to first class on a flight from New York to Paris, just cuz! This recent luck dry spell I’ve been having was inevitable, right, after so many years of The Easy Life? Of course, there is the possibility that by (quite literally) marrying my fate to my husband’s, I’ve totally fucked myself and squandered a charmed future that could have been mine, all for a handsome face and an ass that won’t quit. Only time will tell, in that random things will continue to happen and I will continue to assign meaning to them.

But while I am extremely oblivious, I am at least not totally oblivious to my own obliviousness. There is actual bad luck in this world that never self-corrects. Walking past a guy who has no place to sleep but the street, listening to a podcast about a father in Gaza who can’t keep his family safe, happening upon a commercial for St. Jude’s while I’m watching Bravo, these are all reminders. The rational explanation for all this misery would be that the universe is indifferent, and the consequences of its indifference are cruel. But part of me wonders, is the unrelenting pain that some endure meant to balance the scales against the overabundance of good fortune others of us lucked into? Basically, how can I still believe in fairness, and also make this about me? In any case, it feels gauche, nay GREEDY, to pound on 2024’s door yelling, “It’s my turn! Give me good things!” But feeling shame about wanting good things doesn’t stop me from wanting them, no matter how many times I remind myself of the point I’m trying to make in my own head: that I already have healthy children, a roof over my head, a body strong enough to carry my comically large two-year-old. That I know I already have good luck doesn’t stop me from wanting MORE. Instead, it makes want to call it something else.

I tell myself that in 2024, I will work harder. I will be disciplined, resilient, confident, dogged. I will earn good things instead of dipping into the universe’s reserve of luck to get them. The problem is, thinking you can have everything you want if you just try really really really hard is its own form of American insanity. 2023 didn’t suck because I didn’t try hard enough. It sucked because things and people die. It sucked because the greed of a few shut down my industry and left thousands out of work. It sucked because war and because climate change and because illness. And again, a lot of it didn’t suck. My kids saw snow for the first time. My husband made a really good roast duck on Christmas Eve. My sister’s boyfriend told me funny stories I’d never heard about their twenty years together that comforted me when her death felt so pointless. Hardheadedly, I keep trying to secure my own happy future, when deep down, I know better. I know that happy isn’t a word that applies to the future, like trying to measure your weight in inches. There aren’t good years and bad years. There are just years, made up of good and bad days, which are really just days, made up of good and bad hours, filled with good and bad minutes and good and bad seconds that don’t ever even out but always offer the chance to begin again.

Which brings me back to New Year’s, the most widely acknowledged chance to begin again on an infinite timeline of chances. I’ve decided to think of 2024, not as happening to me, but as something that I am some small part of. I get to choose what I bring to it. And whatever I bring, and however much of it, no one can extract or undo. And if I bring kindness, if I bring patience, if I bring a weekly newsletter so goddamn hilarious and poignant that you’re completely soaked in your own tears and urine every time to read it, these gestures won’t make it a happy year. But it will be a year with happiness in it, and I’ll know because I put it there.