Another January
I’m not over here trying to drink a lemontini and read context-free Emily Dickinson lines to pretend at feeling fulfilled. I want advice from fellow moms who came out of the holidays feeling tired, tired, tired with more dark snowy months ahead.
So pretty. And I’m so over it.
My daughter is living my dream. For the whole of winter break, icy weekends, and school snow days she has burrowed herself into her tall loft bed, behind a closed office door, or even – for entire days – into our bed in our room to color complex coloring books and listen to audio books. She takes breaks for snacks, the occasional play time with her brothers, and then: back to it.
I’ve been awash in emerald green envy, working at the kitchen table so that I can keep an eye on the three demand-a-tron boys, 7 and under, who might, I’ve been worried, quite literally destroy the house if I locked myself away. For years I’ve imagined that without this eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head approach to parenting, cupboards would be torn from walls, candy pulled down, wrappers littered about, and glucose levels off the charts. One boy might be impaled on a marker brandished by another. Another might be locked into the bathroom, wailing and terrified, by yet another.
My worries aren’t baseless. True story from yesterday: while I talked to my mom in our living room, the middle two found an orange juice container in the recycling bin, filled it with water in the bathroom, smashed orange slices into it, and then added … celery salt. They left a trail of sticky orange-ish juice-ish from kitchen to bathroom and left our bathroom perfumed like fried egg.
Meanwhile, my daughter zens in serene spaces doing what I wish I were doing.
I remember my dad having a fairly allergic reaction to my obsessive reading and daydreaming as a kid. “Snap out of it!” he’d call out at the breakfast table while I escaped into my head. “Look alive,” he’d implore, as I lay sprawled on the couch for a third or fourth hour of reading a novel. I now recognize it as simple jealousy. A dreamish man required to be present in the physical day-to-day of parenting and homeownership, bearing witness to his dreamish child doing what the good lord made her to do.
I don’t snap at my girl, I admire her. But I am jealous. And jealousy, as Liz reminded me, can be an Instructive Emotion, letting me know what I want or need. It seems that in 2026, I want or need to chill the heck out.
I always set resolutions. I love resolutions! I love spending a cozy day thinking about ME. Light a candle, write out all my hopes and dreams, categorize them, prioritize them, settle on what’s doable and realistic.
Good luck to the poor soul doing any of those things in this madhouse. Let’s start with the candle: the minute anyone lights a candle, three boys crowd dangerously around it singing “Happy Birthday” and fighting over who gets to blow it out. So, we’ll skip the candle. But what about the hopes and dreams?
In early January, I settled on two firm intentions for the year: 1) cook mostly vegetarian, 2) travel less for work.
I’ve been toying with a third though: 3) lean out a little. As in: parent less intensively. As in: channel my daughter, turn on an audiobook, and color.
Do I sound depressed? I’m not. I just painted my nails a bright shade of Bahama Mama. Is that a color a depressed person would pick? I think not.
And of course I’m not planning to spend 2026 behind a door while the kids need me. But maybe there’s something Instructive there. I keep waiting for more freedom from baby jail. After all, I have been on good behavior all these years! Shouldn’t I have earned parole at this point? Maybe the instruction is just… open the gates. Walk around the jail yard. Maybe it’s to move the kids’ snacks to a lower shelf for their little arms and teach them – yes, even the messiest, littlest one – to fix their own and then dust the crumbs up after themselves.
In the first days of 2026, I searched “January Inspiration” in the hopes of a great essay that encapsulated my feelings and motivated some sort of forward motion. Alas, the entire internet is drenched in GPT and spam weeds and all I found were page after page of insipid quote compilations, followed by page after page of mocktail recipes “To get you through Dry January!”
I’m not over here trying to drink a lemontini and read context-free Emily Dickinson lines to pretend at feeling fulfilled. I want advice from fellow moms who came out of the holidays feeling tired, tired, tired with more dark, snowy months ahead. What did they do? Did they power through? We always power through. Or, did they take ten minutes – celery salt be damned – slide on some headphones, turn up a good book, and open a fresh pack of crayons to mark the new year as their own?
I never found that essay. But I did find inspiration in my daughter and the memory of a deeply solitary self I once loved. I did find instruction in my envy. So I took ten minute chunks of alone time, day by day, and wrote my own.
The house, for the moment, still stands.
