First, let me say that 22 has been my lucky number since I was a little kid. Why? I have no idea but because of that I have reason to believe 2022 will be an awesome year. :) Back in my BYU days I used to tell people turning 22 that that was a particularly good year of life and I got a lot of strange looks.
Trevor just pointed out to me that his birthday is on the 22nd, so there you go. Proof it is a good number.
I thought long and hard about what my word of the year should be. I really struggled with it this time around. Finally, though, I decided it should be reclaim.
The last two years have been tough for me as I'm sure they have been for everyone. I became a mother two months before we settled into the pandemic. Adapting to motherhood was wonderful and scary and challenging, and doing it during the pandemic was so isolating. At first I was still working 20 hours a week, but often times needing to sacrifice my sleep or meals to fit it all in since child care options were extremely limited.
I knew that working as a marriage/parenting researcher wouldn't mean I would have all the answers to parenting... but I didn't realize how much it would frighten me to know that I wasn't living up to the perfect textbook answers of how parenting "should" go. For whatever reason people tend to be quite judgmental of parents, and I often found myself taking that judgement particularly hard.
Then of course lately society has become so divided, along political lines and along pandemic lines. I found myself in a strange place where I am politically conservative but also a believer in masks and vaccines, and deeply dedicated to protecting my at-risk family members from contracting covid. People would sometimes judge me and my politics incorrectly based on my mask. Suddenly I found myself taking a lot of heat from people that I usually agreed with on things because to me covid was a real illness. Sometimes people would argue to me that the odds of dying of covid are small, but having family members who have been struck with rare conditions or deaths before this wasn't much comfort to me. One of my uncles passed away from covid on Matthew's first birthday last year. Other have said that covid is just a flu and not a big deal, but Matthew and I caught it in September (likely from church, unfortunately) and it wasn't just a flu for us.
In the end, to me, covid is a health condition, not a political issue. It hit the world at the same time but like any health issue it impacted everyone differently, and everyone needed to make their own choices about what precautions to take and how to move ahead. It makes sense to me that different people came to different conclusions, but there was no room for that in the public discourse. It seemed that no matter what I did in the pandemic, I was judged for it--called out for not being cautious enough or called out as a stupid sheep for trying to take precautions.
So basically the last two years have been a lot of adapting, a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of feeling judged even when I'm doing my best. In all of this, I feel like I've gotten a bit lost. I've forgotten to take care of my own needs instead of focusing on my family's needs. I've forgotten that my opinions and feelings matter too, even if they are different than someone else's. I've even forgotten some of my strengths and talents and things that make me a worthwhile person.
I don't like that. This year, I want to refocus on reclaiming myself, being stronger against opposition and judgement, and taking better care of my own needs and wishes. This is going to be a year of Shelece.
