Broken

I love Christmas, but not New Year. As a child, as I remember it, Christmas was the most special part of the year in our home. Easter, when we got new clothes and a small chocolate egg each, was a close second.

Christmas, a certain aunt and uncle gave our family a box of sweets and our dad's boss, Mr. Kennedy, the bar owner, gave us a tin of biscuits. This was bounty of Willy Wonka proportions. There were also new clothes at Christmas and of course presents from Santa and gifts, however small, exchanged amongst the siblings and from us to our parents. On Christmas Day, we all ate together and there was a feeling of plenty — another marvel.

I have zero recollections of New Year's from childhood. However, I also have no recollections of my family ever celebrating any of our birthdays. I don't think we ever did, but I might be wrong. I could poll my family to get their take, but that never goes well.

I do remember that I started celebrating New Year's in my late teens, that  it was about going to the disco and being drunk and getting that slow dance with a certain someone and oh if only getting a date with him too. I can tell you that even if I got the dance and the date everything about New Year's was always disappointing and never lived up to the hype.

I am an anxious person and, sad to say, have a history of dreading things more than looking forward. I was always that girl waiting for the next kick in the head. Thankfully, I've  healed and continue to heal and everything's not so scary any more.

Yet I'm still not a fan of New Year. On so many levels, this is the strongest and most content I feel going into January 1st. On other levels, with food and other crutches, I've regressed. My life is a constant struggle, a constant balancing act. All I can tell you is that I keep trying. I also take care of my sensitive little self as best I can. For me, that means keeping New Year's as low key as possible. In recent years, I've slept through midnight and enjoyed that more than any New Year's Eve party I ever attended.

As I look back on 2010, on the writing front, I've had a wonderful year and I'm so thankful. In a composition notebook, I keep record of every submission I send and rejection and acceptance I receive. I've had the same composition book for ten years. I sent my first submission on November 15, 2000 to  Zoetrope: All Story. A decade, friends, a decade. Eight years of rejection. Pages and pages and pages of entries with red lines through them, enough to paper my office. Seriously. The shift started in 2008 and has rocketed in recent months. That girl who always got kicked in the head, who expected to continue to always get kicked in the head, cannot believe her luck.

But it's not all luck, is it? Alongside the girl who was beaten down, there was always me holding her, nursing her wounds, saying it's going to be okay. We deserve better than this. We're going to make it.

In 2011, I want to keep mothering that broken little girl inside of me until she's all better. I want to keep making it.