It's really 2012?

I'm back at work today after having a week off. It was an almost impossible feat to get out of my warm bed this morning. Especially with it being so dark, so cold, and knowing there were still traces of snow on the ground. Thankfully my car is actually in the garage this winter so I don't have to clean snow off of it. It's a small luxury that I already love.

Our Christmas was good. Lilly got *almost* everything she asked for. The Barbie Dreamhouse was the only thing she asked for that she didn't get. She would have got it had I been a little quicker to respond to a Craigslist ad, but oh well. I'm going to keep my eyes open at flea markets and garage sales this year and see if I can find one to put up for her birthday.

It ended on a up-note, but truthfully 2011 wasn't the greatest of years. I learned a lot about love and loss, pain and joy. A lot of things I went through this year are lessons I don't ever want to learn again, but likely will. At least I know now that I can get through them.

I've decided that 2012 is going to be about more of my actions and words coming from a place of love. I want more reality in my life, less disingenuous feelings and less appeasement of others. So in that line of thinking I want to reflect on what last year meant to me.

At the beginning of 2011 my marriage almost self-destructed. I'm not saying this to gain sympathy, I'm saying it because I'm kind of fed up with the idea that people can't openly talk about hard, scary shit. My husband and I were not getting along, at all. We were screaming at each other a lot. We had completely forgotten how to talk to each other and were in a pretty ugly cycle of who could hurt who first, or worst. We seriously talked about divorce. We decided early in the year that something had to change. We started counseling and things got better, slowly, but they improved.

Then in June Jim's step-dad passed away. Watching my husband loose the man that had been his father figure for 16 years, the same number of years he had his biological father, was devastating. Chuck had been sick for so long, but his death still felt so sudden.

Learning to deal with grief, in all its forms, was the hardest thing I had to deal with last year.

I want more joy in 2012 and less pain. Though pain is something mostly beyond my control, and is usually a direct result of caring about someone or something, I'm going to work hard to create joy where I can and hopefully buffer some of that inevitable pain.