Today is my birthday. Every year on my birthday, I take the day off work to reflect on what has gone wrong during the past year and what I can do to make it better. After some contemplation, I then resolve to make this next year my year. It’s a term we millennials use to say that we are going to do something that resembles living our best lives now during the next 365 days. When I say it, it means I am going to find a way to stop feeling like I’m trudging through life, and feel like my steps are my choice. Maybe even bust a few dance moves in the moving along process to make it look good.

Every September 19th, I give myself a few moments to plan how awesome my life is going to be this next year like somehow the sheer power of a birthday can change the space-time continuum. It doesn’t matter that I have tons of student debt! It’s going to be my year!  It doesn’t matter that we’re starting a ton of businesses in a small, economically depressed area of Alabama. It’s my year! Love handles? Not anymore! It’s my year! Gray hair! Nope (yep)! It’s my year!

But the my year philosophy usually crumbles by Christmas. The timeline goes something like this:

• September: Last year sucked! But not this year! I am going to do XYZ this year. I’m going to have XYZ this year. Everyone is finally going to know for sure how amazing I am! My children will finally stop doing dumb things! I will finally have a clean house we’re going to have family singalongs with matching pajamas that I handmade! I’m not taking any garbage from anyone! (Cue music: “This girl is on fi-yaaaaaahh”).
• October: Still feeling good about this. XYZ is coming for me, baby! I’m working hard every day! My business is growing! My kids are doing okay in school AND I organized a junk drawer that was bothering me! My plan to get a new vehicle is on track, because my van looks and smells like something died in it, and there are literal chunks missing from the dashboard. Not suitable for someone who’s in a my year situation. Haters better stay back! I’m about to stun you all with my new ride and put together lifestyle.
• November: Somebody dumped a bag of cheese crackers in that drawer I organized, and scribbled all over the organizing tray with Sharpie that I thought I hid. I don’t even know which kid did it and when I confronted them they got into a fistfight with one another. Also, traveling for Thanksgiving means that the van gets a fresh coat of interior funk from the kids eating and traveling in it. We hit a skunk somewhere south of Birmingham, and some of the guts have gotten caught in the engine. And my muffin top is back because of my arch carbohydrate nemesis, Sweet Potato Casserole. I’m tired, but if we can just get through the holidays, I can be back on track for my year.
• December: God miraculously came to earth as a baby, and we celebrate by destroying our bank accounts and lying to our children about a fat man who breaks and enters. I planned to do all of these magical holiday things for my kids (carols, lights, hot cocoa, adventures) in true my year fashion, but instead, I’m hiding in my closet drinking bourbon that we were going to give as gifts, and they are downstairs making homemade slime and throwing it at each other because they are over-sugared and overstimulated and I’m over it. Bah humbug. Also, the muffin top has doubled in size because #Christmas. This year is no different than the last. It’s not my year.
• January: I re-organized that junk drawer that was bothering me, and I went to the gym a few times so maybe my muffin top shrank a little. Our bank account is dead, so no new vehicles for me for the foreseeable future, but the van is paid for so I will just keep rocking it until the wheels fall off. I did clean it out, so at least it smells like the inside of an old lunchbox now, instead of the inside of a decayed camel. All is not lost. Maybe I can pull myself up by the bootstraps and reclaim my year.
• February: Somebody used my brand new bottle of shampoo to make home-made slime and then put the slime in the drawer I organized, along with a toothbrush, some sand, and a bottle of acrylic glitter paint with the top missing. The van’s sunroof leaked rain and then froze, creating a mini-ice rink of biohazardous materials in the back row. My business is barely enough to be worth it. I’m tired. My kids fight all the time because they are stuck in the house together. I wanted to pack organic lunches for my kids to take to school, but instead, I pack whatever piece of lunchmeat I can find clinging to life in the back of the deli drawer and leftover Christmas candy for them to eat. Game over. Goodbye, my year. I hardly knew ye.
• March: Next year will be my year if my business can keep it going long enough for us not to be in poverty.
• April: Next year will be my year if we can make it through the summer.
• May: Next year will be my year if I can ever get a nap.
• June: Next year will be my year if I live that long in this heat.
• July: Next year will be my year if I’m not convicted of murdering my children who have been home all summer and driving me crazy.
• August: September is just a few weeks away. Hang on. School is starting and my year is coming! I’m due for something good. I’ve earned it!

And so it continues. Each year I think I’m due for something amazing because, after all, it is going to be my year. And the other years have been hard and disappointing and everybody should get a break once and in a while, right? I see my friends, other moms, other people I know who are having what seems to be a great time in life and I think “Why not me??? I’m not dumb. I’m not ugly. I deserve to have my year!!”

Then the other day I was reading a book with Eloise. She loves history so her teacher gave her a book about the history of girls in America. We’d had a hard day with her and with our finances and the struggle of being a lower-middle class American family in this day and age, and I retreated into the history book, mainly because I was tired of listening to her complain about not being able to watch YouTube or whatever trivial thing she was upset about at that particular moment. I read the story of a family of Slovakian emigrants with 6 daughters during the Great Depression. They moved here with just the clothes on their backs and found work in the coal mines. They needed all the financial help they could get, so the family cut their oldest daughters’ hair short and dressed them up as boys so that they could go work in the coal mines with their dad to help their family. Each day they would get down on their knees at the opening of the mine and ask God for protection. Each day they came out and got down on their knees and thanked Him for keeping them alive. I thought about the mother of that family, cutting her daughter’s beautiful long hair and wiping her soot-covered face each day as she came home from the mines, not even daring to ask her girl what she saw or what she heard while she was down there, because she knew that it was something a young girl should never see or hear in a my year situation.

There was another story of a young slave. She was kidnapped from her home in Africa, sold into slavery on a plantation in Virginia, grew up there and married a fellow slave. She had three babies and they were all sold to other plantations when they were 7 or 8 and she never saw them again. Her story broke me. What must it have been like for her to have her own Eloises, her Milams, her Trumans ripped from her arms and sold into the same system that had damaged her so badly? Who spoke up for her? When would her year have been? What did I know of this kind of pain? Not a thing.

Who am I to reject entire years of my very-cushy middle class American  life because things didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted them to? Because my junk drawer is disorganized and the car that I own isn’t as fancy as I want it to be? Each year, month, day, hour, second is mine because it is time that I have been given to do a certain task with it. And compared to the rest of history, it has been a cake-walk. It’s been mine. My years to be free, be loved, be educated, be empowered, and whoever else I want to be. My months to spend working using my gifts to make this world a better place without fear of pain or captivity. My days to pour into my family. Maybe I’m not making homemade pajamas and feed them potentially expired deli meats sometimes, but they are safe, clothed, educated, and loved beyond comparison. My hours to work at a job that I chose, building a business that I like, enjoying freedom and authority and influence that women even one generation before me never knew. I come home to food in the fridge and I bathe my children in hot water and snuggle them up in their warm, safe beds. My minutes to feel the freedom and safety and health to dream and think of what could be better, because I’m don’t live in fear.

I’ve been having my year every moment my entire life.

Money is tight, but we’re not sending our kids into the coal mine. My kids drive me crazy, but nobody is taking them away from me to sell them into slavery. My business is hard work, but it is mine. I am free to go where I want and do what I want and nothing and no one can stop me. Isn’t that what I’ve been hoping for this whole time? Isn’t that the definition of my year? How long have I been waiting for everything to come together to look just like I wanted it to, only to realize my year has been happening all the time, and I’ve missed it!

So-and-so cue the sound track : “This girl is on fi-yaaaaaahh”!! This is not just my year, but my life. I’ve done 34 trips around the sun so far, and I don’t know how many more the Good Lord will grant me, but each day is my best life now. My new goal for this year is that I will have the foresight to see it for the gift it is, and not the struggle it isn’t. It’s definitely my year this year, because it always has been.