New Years Resolutions!!!!!

Well dear readers I know I have been deeply deeply remiss in my blogging as of late and let me state for the record I will be changing that and I am planning to blog more frequently over the next year. It's not an official resolution but just a plan to try to write more often. I hope that you will continue to be patient with my pathetic ramblings as the year continues on, and I look forward to your challenging and deeply insightful comments. Sometimes there are so many comments that I neglect my poor children because I find myself unable to tear myself away from the computer trying to read them all. For those of you who are a little more dim than others this means please please please comment!!!!!!!!!

Of course my first resolution is one that is made every year not only by both Gil and I, but probably by 99% of the population and that is to lose weight and become more fit. I always want and crave to start a regime that will allow us to live healthier lives, have more energy, and be stronger therefore hopefully extending our life span somewhat, but usually by June I'm pregnant and this resolution flys out the window but barring that, the other complication is that our time management skills tend not to exist and as a result we never make or take the time to get the exercise we need. The second issue is that because we don't take the time to exercise we don't have energy which leads to further time management problems which then leads us to skipping by those healthy but more time consuming meals for the fast food option which stops us from losing the weight which then by June leads us to give up on this resolution altogether. We end up feeling badly, our self esteem and body image plummet to the ground faster than a metorite and to make ourselves feel better we do those other things (wink wink nudge nudge) that lead to me getting pregnant and this sick cycle continues.

My second resolution is to clean clean and clean some more. It seems to be a never ending cycle of cleaning when you have four very active and somewhat troublesome children (yes Frances I'm talking about you). I get one area under control and while I'm attacking the other area my little scamps of children set about systematically dismantling the first. Although there never comes a time I completely give up on this (yes mom I am still trying to get my house under control), it seems to be a never ending vicious cycle that closely resembles hell, that at no one time ever seems complete. There is always some other area that needs extra TLC. So my resolution is to continue not to give up and to take a little extra time each day, a little more extra time on week-ends to try to stay ahead of these scamps that are testing every nerve in my body to see if it really is possible to drive mommy insane.

The next goal for this coming year is in the aspect of my other career (hope to be career) that is in my writing. For a long time I have been promising myself that I will write that novel, and I never quite seem to get there. There are always a million excuses but the real truth is that when I started my novel at sixteen, two things happened. First my father read the first chapter and fell in love with it. He was so impressed with it that it gave me writer's fright. What is writer's fright you ask, well it is really like stage fright. It presents itself in the form of a great fear that in writing your words will not quite be good enough and you will invariably disappoint the person you want most in the world to impress. You know at your core that the first chapter must have been a fluke and that the future will not live up to it and so it becomes hard to write anything. You and your fear become your worst enemy and the greatest challenge you need to overcome to make your dreams come true. Add to this the traumatic event of my eighteenth year and you have a recipe for disaster.

I know that to be able to get back to the creative work I need to rid myself of this darkness within (said traumatic event), but to face it and put it into black and white is frightening. I prefer to avoid that at all costs. I am hoping that as I work on the next goal (below), that will help me get to a point where the writing of this history will be just that, a telling of a history and the telling will not be traumatic in and of itself.

So moving on to this next goal, it is one that is hard to define in any real way. It is hard to quantify or qualify this goal but I will attempt to do so and that is this process that I embarked on a year and a half ago to rid Sunnydale of all the demons and vampires thus claiming my destiny as the slayer---the chosen one. For those of you not trained in buffy-verse this means the process of therapy that I embarked on to help me deal with the traumatic event of my eighteenth year that has left me paralyzed in my life in so many key ways. My mind (Sunnydale) has been haunted by that day and it has led to high anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, and a feeling like I somehow do not cut it in this world. That somehow I do not belong and can never belong. The low self-esteem has grown and led me to feelings that I am not a good enough mother and at times I have wanted to give it all up. This baggage that I have carried around for seventeen years has affected every relationship I have had since and changed relationships I had previously and so this baggage (demons and vampires) has to be challenged and defeated so that I can claim back my life before it is too late. My true purpose I believe is to be a wife to Gil, a mother to my four wonderful children, a writer, and a servant of God. So that brings me to my next goal.

This next goal encompases my Spiritual goals for this coming year. For far too long I have been so lax in this area of my faith that I know it has hurt me in many ways. I have not been faithful to the One who is always so faithful and merciful to me, I always wonder why God continues to reach for me when I so often turn from Him. I know that a lot of it is my poor self-esteem and not feeling good enough and so I hope that as Giles and I work together that this too is an area of my life that can change and develop. Having a relationship with God is such an essential part of our beings as we were created in His image and so when we neglect that we are really neglecting ourselves and harming ourselves more than anything and I think that's what we all miss. It's not about all the dos and don'ts it's about knowing Him and allowing Him to know you. Someone said once that life is about love, and that is so true, it's exactly it and that's why knowing God who encompasses love, is all loving is so crucial to our very essence and being.

So I need to make it more of a priority to make it to church every week, and to take the time to read and do devotions with my children. I want to give them the strength that a personal relationship with Jesus can give them so that they have that to sustain them when life gets tough, because if my parents hadn't given me that as a foundation I would have ended up so much more lost than I did and perhaps unrecoverable. A foundation in Christ is key to everything, to our being, to our ability to face life's obstacles. It gives us character and it gives our life purpose. This doesn't mean we aren't in control of our decisions, quite the opposite; God always gives us choice. That's the whole point, we choose how we live and what we do and who we do it with, but when we follow Him, He guides us and gives us direction. The true parent, He knows what it is to grieve when your child does wrong, and He does everything to lead that child to Him, to comfort, sustain and pour grace and mercy upon them. So as I face a year of unknowns my prayer is that by the end I will have found that I am walking much closer to my friend than I have in along time, and that I have allowed this friend to help me in all I wrote above, and that most of all, I have allowed Him back into my life completely.

Okay it only took me a month to write out my resolutions lets hope it doesn't take that long to actually keep them. Also lets hope all my friends and family don't take that long to comment.