New Year's Resolutions 2012

No time for blogging in my new life as a mother and yet so many things to write about and celebrate. My little Johnny is taking me on a magical tour of all the wonders of the world as I share in his awe and delight of light and beauty and trains and car washes and monkeys and goats that eat corn from your hand and jumping and running and spinning around.

Now we have another baby, David Ezra--born just a couple weeks ago. Two boys. Oh my!

I feel the need to ponder again the qualities I most want to develop for the upcoming year and so I return here to my blog to try to revive my New Year's tradition.

I cannot quite come up with the name of the quality I feel I need the most...

It is something like "can-do-ness"

Perhaps I am trying to verbalize a complex cluster of qualities that are at the heart of what is means to be a mother...

What I feel I need is much more than just determination or perseverance...

It is something lighter and more open than these... a radiance and joyfulness powerful enough to penetrate through the haze of sleep deprivation...

It is more than magnanimity because it is powered by such an outpouring of love that there is nothing to forgive

It is transcendence and a powerful state of calm when the baby is crying while the toddler is kicking and squalling...

It is sparkling and alive with creativity and resourcefulness and generative of good humor capable of carrying us over the contrariness and the "no, no, no"s and the wrangling power struggles

It is faith and contentment and gratitude for the multiplying blessings and for the toughness of the challenge

It is discipline, vision, energy, foresight and organizational skills that enable the pursuit of other vocations alongside the rigors of mothering

It is uncomplaining

It is motherhood Level II... may I please be granted capacity to cope with grace!