What are your New Year’s Resolutions?

Or if you only have one, that’s cool. This year, I resolve to love my family. I’ve spent many long years breaking out of the self-misogyny that I learned from everyone I knew, basically, until high school (when I discovered Our Bodies, Ourselves but didn’t ever read it). I’ve gotten to the point where I like getting my period: it makes me feel powerful, holy, and part of the Great Cycle (of birth, death, and plants, somehow; plants always seem to be on my mind when I’m on my period). I’ve finally discovered how to treat my body the way it wants to be treated, so that it doesn’t freak out. And that’s made me treat the rest of me the way I want to be treated. Loving myself had a lot to do with finding someone who loved me (as opposed to someone who loved bragging about my achievements but never where I could hear it).

Sorry, that was the 2006 me being bitter. Loving my family means not feeling bitter about things. This is the first year I’ve spent The Holidays (my father had a mild conniption when he got our xmas card: “happy holidays!”) at my parents’ house. And while I didn’t look forward to it (I’ve always hated The Holiday Season), I didn’t dread it. It took me a while to get there.

I don’t anticipate that the 2007 me will be able to post a comment here about how I’ve done it! I love my family! Moving on to resolving to solve world hunger! But I am hopeful that there will be slightly less bitterness. And maybe fewer tears.

I still hope that, in the new year, I will eat right, exercise, meditate, read, and pass the LSAT with an enviable score. And these are the the resolutions I’ll tell people. But the big one, the one in my heart, is to work on wounds that it’s taken me this long to acknowledge. I’m pretty close with my mother (and some of my sisters), and I think that’s half the battle. But my father and The Twins will be difficult. And, just like Mary Poppins, although I [love] them individually, [I] agree that as a group, they’re rather [insert expletive adjective here].

What is/are your resolution(s)? The profound, the mundane, the amusing, all are welcome in the comments box below.