In my previous post, I confessed that last New Year’s Eve, I wrote my intentions for the New Year on small pieces of red tissue paper and burned them ritualistically in my firepit as midnight approached. A girlfriend who read this helpfully texted me saying you do know that you are supposed to burn the things you want to let go, like old relationships, and write your intentions down and stick them to the fridge?
Clearly I did not know this. If I had known this, I might not have spent the entire twelve months of 2018 single. That’s 365 days. 8,760 hours. 525,600 minutes. I could calculate the seconds but I think we are all done here.
My fridge has a lot of pictures stuck to it. A photo of me and my brothers when we were kids. Snaps of my daughter and her friends. Postcards from Italy, and a picture of the Burrow Beach near my dad’s house in Dublin. Still, there could be room for an intention or two. I am actually thinking that since I’m so late coming to this concept, I should gift-wrap my fridge in paper with the words Find Love printed in tiny font on it. It could make getting cream for my morning coffee a bit of a trial, but I figure if you do not suffer a little to find love, it may not be so worth finding.
Since New Year’s Eve is rocketing towards us, I am trying to get my 2019 resolutions list in order while there is still time. To assist me in this taxing endeavor, I just ate a whole Toblerone bar meant for my daughter’s stocking. Yes, she is seventeen and still gets a stocking. But I don’t think I am supposed to eat the chocolate I had bought her for it. I feel like a bad mom, and a weak person. And yet, somehow, that it is not my fault. It’s a dark time of year. There is delicious triangle-shaped chocolate with chewy bits hiding in a bag at the back of my wardrobe. I’m alone on my couch trying to make my New Year’s resolutions list, and realizing that I have now been single more than a million minutes. I can buy her a replacement Toblerone.
It reminds me of when she was a little innocent one and I used to tell her that the Halloween Fairy would leave her a present if she would just eat a few pieces of her Halloween candy and then leave the rest in a plastic bag up on the lawn of our house. Late Halloween night I would go retrieve the plastic bag from the lawn so the raccoons wouldn’t get it. When Jessie woke on November 1st there would be a sweet little gift by her pillow, delivered directly and by hand in the middle of the night by the Halloween Fairy. Other moms had told me about this great tradition. Saves on dental bills, they said. But then I would single-handedly consume her Halloween candy over the next week. I was grateful to those moms, but I sort of hated them at the same time. I was just plain relieved when she was too old to go out on October 31st collecting sugar.
I can foresee one problem with sticking my new year intentions to my fridge. People come into my house. They get things from the fridge. Some of my intentions are a bit private. I can envision a moment during a dinner party where some guest is getting milk for their tea and says loudly Why do you have Field trip to Good Vibrations written on your fridge? Maybe I could write them in some code? An obscure foreign language that only I speak? But would they then be unintelligible to the...Intentions Gods? Or is it the Intentions Fairy, and if so, are they related to the Halloween Fairy? I feel concerned that I am losing control of my material here.
So. 2019. Forget all the work out 7 days a week stuff. My New Year’s resolution list for next year includes a crazy bike ride in northern Italy called the Stelvio; European odyssey to visit lots of family and old friends; finishing the book I’m writing. But also, and I know I won’t be alone here: gift-wrapping my fridge.
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