Resting On My Post-Holiday Laurels

Resolving to make no resolutions in January.

It is the New Year and I am resting on my laurels. Okay, to be clear, I’m getting over yet another illness. But I’m resting a tiny bit while doing so, or at least as much as is allotted to a mother of tiny demanding people. And I’m not making any plans for self-improvement. At least not yet.

As I drafted this post I had to google “resting on my laurels” to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. Turns out it does: it means being content with your past achievements and not feeling any burning ambition to do more at the moment (it comes from the Greek and Roman practice of conferring laurel wreaths on athletes and statesmen and Who’s Whos down in the antiquity version of Whoville). And that’s how I feel about January resolutions. I just MADE IT through an entire YEAR including the HOLIDAYS. Everybody chill for five seconds and stop asking me for things, including snacks and “new year goals.”

By “everybody” I mean my four-year-old and one-year-old sons, but I suppose it can apply to anyone reading this, too.

I’m not against resolutions or goal-setting. In fact, as a general rule, I make more resolutions than I finish. (Funny how that works.) It’s rare that a week goes by in which I don’t come up with some idea for creativity or self-improvement or an organizational hack that will absolutely change the way we live around here, FOR SURE this time. I’m a knitter and a sewist and a newbie crocheter: my work table in our basement is overflowing with odds and ends of fabric and spills of yarn and piled-up patterns and papers. As a writer, I am constantly scribbling down or pecking out ideas for new essays and stories and tweets—sorry, bleets. My drafts folder is an infinite scroll. I am no stranger to the next big idea.

But in January, I am making myself pause.

One of the things people say all the time to parents of little kids is “enjoy every moment! They’ll only be tiny for a short time!” In the happy moments, amid the kisses and snuggles and whispered “I love you, mama”s and first tastes of ice cream and first times in the ocean, this advice feels poignant and precious. But when I’m already overwhelmed, remembering to “cherish every moment!” feels like yet another unchecked square on my to-do list.

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Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 classic Pollyanna has been much maligned, though that is another topic for another day. The titular heroine is now synonymous with relentless optimism, a stereotype of cheesy toxic positivity that rings more annoying than inspiring. But if you actually read the book, you’ll find Pollyanna Whittier is a bright and funny child making the best of the difficult hand she was dealt. And this is immediately on display in chapter six, when her stern new guardian Aunt Polly lays out a schedule for her eleven-year-old niece’s education.

She paused in thought for a minute, then went on slowly: “At nine o’clock every morning you will read aloud one half-hour to me. Before that you will use the time to put this room in order. Wednesday and Saturday forenoons, after half-past nine, you will spend with Nancy in the kitchen, learning to cook. Other mornings you will sew with me. That will leave the afternoons for your music. I shall, of course, procure a teacher at once for you,” she finished decisively, as she arose from her chair.

Pollyanna cried out in dismay.

“Oh, but Aunt Polly, Aunt Polly, you haven’t left me any time at all just to—to live.”

“To live, child! What do you mean? As if you weren’t living all the time!”

“Oh, of course I’d be BREATHING all the time I was doing those things, Aunt Polly, but I wouldn’t be living. You breathe all the time you’re asleep, but you aren’t living. I mean living—doing the things you want to do: playing outdoors, reading (to myself, of course), climbing hills, talking to Mr. Tom in the garden, and Nancy, and finding out all about the houses and the people and everything everywhere all through the perfectly lovely streets I came through yesterday. That’s what I call living, Aunt Polly. Just breathing isn’t living!”

As an aside, Pollyanna’s schedule seems hardly arduous to a mother of little children (whether working outside the home or staying at home with the kids) but that’s not the point. Everyone needs time to “just live.” Everyone needs time to just do the things they want to do: not to organize, or to study, or to learn and plan and improve themselves, but to just live.

Unfortunately, I have no tips for carving out time in a busy schedule to “just live.” Besides being the at-home parent to a preschooler and toddler, I am also a part-time college student, a very-part-time childcare worker (for other people’s children), an active church volunteer, and of course a writer. The “just living” part gets packed into small moments: walking in nature with a sleeping toddler in the stroller. Reading in bed before I crash for the night. Writing in those tiny pockets of stolen time. Getting coffee with a friend and punctuating our staccato dialogue with injunctions to get down and stop climbing on that and say please and thank you and don’t push your brother and stop licking that toy and do you have to go potty okay then stop doing that dance, use gentle hands, stop whining, be kind, just live.

I say “stop” all day long while I rush from one thing to the next. Maybe I need to teach by doing.

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My birthday is in March, and it is at that almost-spring date that I make my annual resolutions. It makes perfect sense to me: the year is new for me, I’m setting goals for me, and I’ve had three months to watch my friends make resolutions and succeed or fail at keeping them while I secretly take notes.

December is chaos. January is for rest. February is for stretching, and getting myself together in just twenty-eight days, and thinking about what the new year will be like, and finally March is for jumping in with both feet.

And really, March isn’t that far away. If I’m willing to stop, and pause, and reflect on the year that has brought me to this new calendar and all that lies before it, and let myself take a few deep breaths— with nothing new on the to-do list, no skills to master or workout regimens to stick to or diets to embark upon— January will fly by like a nap cut short all too soon. Just living.

Of course, I’m not always willing to take my own advice or to practice what I preach. And the siren call of the Next Big Idea is, often, irresistible.

So when my friend Lucy said “hey, let’s start a parenting Substack with a bunch of friends in January,” I thought about all my principles regarding rest and energy renewal and giving myself a break and letting the work of the last twelve months be enough, and I wrapped them up tenderly in Christmas paper and put them away for next year, and said, “I’m in.”