Maybes for 2026

Idk guys, we're just surviving over here.

It's nearly 8:30 P.M. and we've just passed the exit to Richmond. My husband is driving, our two-year-old is snoozing in his car seat, and our five-year-old is drowsily listening to a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook on the car stereo while I type this on my phone. (Jody Jones is pretending to be sick so he won't have to go to school and Mrs. P-W is about to prescribe a Tonic to straighten him out. I guess truancy laws weren't a thing in the 1950s?)

We are driving through the night to visit my husband's grandmother in rural North Carolina, and I am going to wait to publish this little new-year reflection until tomorrow morning, when we are safe at the hotel, so that no one need worry that Rob fell asleep at the wheel and we all died. (EDIT: it is now three days later and everything was fine.)

I think I sort of have death, and sudden death, on my mind a lot lately. 2025 was a real jerk about that. My grandfather's death wasn't really unexpected, of course, but still-- the part of me that is still forever a little girl has always thought my grandparents would live forever. They don't. In the summer a dear friend with whom I worked at my church died very unexpectedly, and then on October 18th my father died, twenty-three hours after a devastating stroke. For twenty-two of those hours his five children were with him, in cycles and shifts and all at once, until the very end when it was just him and my mom and he chose that moment to let go. They had been together for forty-two years.

I am not ready to write about my dad yet. Maybe I never will be. But it seemed odd to kind of slide back into writing here without acknowledging the gaping, raw crevasse that is the death of a parent. I think about my dad in some way every single day, even sometimes when the thought is just "oh my gosh, my dad is gone and for a little while I had forgotten. Why did I forget?"

I don't know what the answer to that is, but I know I'll be talking about it in therapy. I don't mean that in a flippant way. I mean that I really am going back to counseling later this month because I have a lot to process and my brain and nervous system are struggling to keep up. Writing is a soothing and necessary release but I do need to, you know, actually confront some of my emotions in a healthy way.

I don't mean to imply 2025 was all bad. Looking back, there were a great many bright spots. Friendships deepened and my once-baby brother got married and a beautiful, fat, imperious little niece was born (to my sister, not my brother). We got a cat (pictured at top) and she now rules the household, or at least thinks she does. I started a new part-time job, returned to school full-time, won a couple of scholarships, and finished the fall semester with three hard-won As and an A-, of which I am extremely proud. Going back to school at age thirty is challenging in a lot of unexpected ways but one really lovely aspect of it is the way you appreciate the opportunity so much more than you ever could have at eighteen. It also makes you much, much less tolerant of the shenanigans of incoming freshpeople who do not fully appreciate their opportunities and are not recognizing their dewy-eyed, childless potential. No you may NOT copy my notes after failing to show up for half the classes this semester and scrolling Instagram for the other half, Mykynleigh!

I am now just three semesters away from finishing my English degree, and am now in the delightful position of taking courses that are almost completely focused on my major. Which means a lot of my reading is focused on those courses. Which means you can expect to see posts here that are directly linked to those assigned readings, and not simply whatever fiction I take it into my head to read this year. (Okay, you'll probably see a bit of that too. My list of library holds is currently maxed out.)

I mentioned before that writing is a soothing and necessary release (even when done with two thumbs in a notes app, ahem) and I'm planning to squeeze in whatever I can this year. I don't know what that's going to look like. If I can publish here once a month I'll consider that a win. Topics I want to cover this year include Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Beverly Cleary's middle grade books, Schindler's List, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the new BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister, and what sort of qualities the excessively picky reader, like me, might be looking for in historical fiction.

Maybe this will finally be the year I write a draft of a novel. Maybe I'll just keep my head above water with work and school and the everlasting exhausting antics of my wondrous children. Maybe I'll read a book I haven't even heard yet and it will change my life. Maybe the dumpster fire of U.S. politics will... you know... expire. Maybe I'll grow my bangs out! The year lies open.

If 2025 was brutal for you, too, I'm here for you. Maybe 2026 will be better. And if it's not, I'm grateful we have good books to escape into. Thanks for escaping with me.