A Year in Review

Happy Blogiversary to me! I started this blog one year ago today. Since then, I’ve:

-amassed well over 200 posts
-gotten a new blog design
-sought and received diagnostic testing for infertility
-had surgery
-conceived…
-…TWINS
-found myself thrilled to be part of an incredible community of people
-broken bread with FOUR other bloggers, whom I now count among my friends
-written some posts I’m really proud of
-written some posts that really suck.

And now, a little story…

In January of 2005, I was stressed out. I could be considered a generally stressy person, but, around that time, it was particularly bad. I was working on a very difficult project that I didn’t have all the answers to, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing, and the work kept piling up, and I was generally just feeling overwhelmed. Ty and I decided to go away for the weekend. Not just to the country, or to another American city—no, no, no, we decided to go all the way to Europe. Specifically, Amsterdam. Why did we pick Amsterdam? Well, I’d always heard it was a great city, and I really like cheese, and I’m a native New Yorker and was somewhat interested in Dutch culture, and, last, but certainly not least, it was the dead of winter and the whole trip was very cheap.

The night before we left, I was sitting on the floor outside my bathroom, as is not at all unusual, going through tiny plastic bags and bottles full of travel-sized toiletries, and crying. I had a big meeting the next morning (we weren’t leaving until the afternoon), and I had to pack, and I was worried about the meeting, and about making the flight, and was probably doing something strange or vaguely scary, like counting the number of cotton swabs in the same tiny box over and over again. Ty came over to mutter some comforting words, and I exploded about how I hadn’t learned any Dutch, or cracked open any travel books, and I didn't own any long johns, and I couldn’t believe how much I had to do the next day, and I didn’t even want to go.

But go we did. Somehow, I dried my tears, got to sleep, got through the meeting, made the flight, and arrived safely at our hotel room, with dark-wood furniture and cream-colored upholstery. It was cool, modern, and soothing.

We spent most of the weekend without a firm plan. When we were hungry, we got Brazilian grilled meats, or Indonesian rijsttafel (spicy assorted dishes with rice), or prosciutto sandwiches drizzled with fragrant extra-virgin-olive-oil, or a ham-and-cheese tosti (a hot pressed sandwich), and washed them down with handcrafted liqueurs. No one had told me that Amsterdam is a foodie’s paradise! When we wanted to see beautiful sights, we went to museums and looked at Flemish paintings. We walked everywhere. I didn’t even notice the cold or the dark. I was, quite literally, too busy gazing at the tulips, or watching boats glide down canals.

One afternoon, we flopped down on our hotel bed to take a short nap, right in the middle of the day, recklessly wasting the daylight hours simply because we wanted to. We woke up, looked at each other, and smiled.

That’s when my husband said something to me that I always keep in the back of my mind, often repeating to myself when things get too hard for me to bear.

“Sometimes,” he said, “You just need to feel like a person, with desires and appetites and senses to be satisfied. You need to eat and sleep and stretch out and look at pretty things. No one can go through life feeling only like a piece of machinery.”

I think that this is why I blog. Because, no matter what else is going on, it makes me feel like a person, like I have things to write and things to say, and things to read, that other people have written.

Thanks, everyone, for making my first year so wonderful.