Hindsight is Twenty-Twenty

It could rightly be called The Year We’d All Like to Forget. Or, more obviously, The One Where Everyone Stayed In. Perhaps we will someday remember it as The Year That Few Saw Coming But Everyone is Glad to See Leaving. For me, The Year of One Million Dishes seems pretty fitting.

It was not a good year for weddings or baby showers or postpartum hormones. Not a great one for summer vacations and playgrounds and public pools. Heck, I suppose it was the exact opposite of a banner year for the entire human race.

While our faces were masked, our concerns and cabin fever ran rampant, trampling over our sense of normalcy and taking our dreams for the new decade with them. With shaken sensibilities, we did our best to navigate uncharted waters, some days swimming and some (most) days sinking.

We witnessed real pain. We ached with sorrow for those close to us and even more of those around us. We shouldered our own disappointments while at the same time carrying those of our children, and we pleaded for wisdom because how do you shepherd little ones through hills and valleys you yourself have never walked? We listened to the stories and watched the news, and we kept our distance even when it was hard and even when it hurt. 

2020. It could rightly be called The Year From He**.

Yet, this was also the year the baby learned to walk and the toddler started using the potty.

These twelve months were ones that saw the business grow and the PhD program progress. This year played witness to a marriage that celebrated eight years, holding steadfast when so much around it was crumbling to pieces.

Yes, there were one million dishes, but that means there were hundreds of meals; thousands of minutes spent being nourished in both body and soul. Gratitude was given as four “Happy Birthdays” were sung around the dinner table into candle-filled cakes, one of those times the very first for the baby of the family.

This year also saw some personal growth as the matriarch of the family learned to turn up the volume on what matters and mute the things that somehow no longer do. Pandemic Perspective will do that to you.

There was trial and tragedy and an unprecedented gravity that hung over our lives in 2020. Yet there was also an unparalleled grace that hovered over us–one that beckoned us forward even when it felt like there was no way out.

It is only now, as we prepare to close out this most strange of all years, that I can offer 2020 some sincere appreciation, thanking it in hindsight for both the good and the growth that came from the bad. It is also only now, as we physically turn the page to a new year, that I can finally bid it farewell, something I’ve longed to do for quite some time.

So, 2020, allow me (if you will) to offer you this in your final moments:

Thank you. And goodbye.