Hope

Winter 2019/2020 was rough for me. Depression, bleak job prospects, and loneliness washed over me like waves in the sea of the dark Norwegian winter. I saw the sun, I experienced good, I had sweet memories. But then the next wave of sadness would hit and wash that away, like a thrown life jacket being swept past my out-stretched arms. Even in the times of calm, I felt like I couldn’t quite get out of that swirling sea. 

In January, I decided I needed a word of the year, a word I was going to cling to and set my eyes on. I chose hope.  

I didn’t realize how important that word was going to be for all of us. I’m glad I didn’t know. 

Backtrack to November, when it really hard. I went to the doctor to see if I had anything medically wrong with me. I was low on iron, but seemed fine besides that. But just admitting to myself that I wasn’t fully myself was so helpful, despite the doctor not seeing anything. I could admit that I needed a word like hope to sustain me and help me ride the waves. 

Generally, one of my favorite coping mechanisms is to make things to look forward to. I’ll say to myself, tomorrow you have to do this really hard thing, but afterwards you can get ice cream! Or you can go on a walk! The reward does not have to match the size of the hardship, but the harder the thing is, the more I need something to look forward to. But the winter of 2019 I could not do this. I’d try my ice cream trick and instead think, tomorrow it’s Sunday, the stores are closed, you won’t be able to buy ice cream. Even if you could, they wouldn’t have the flavor you wanted. Even if they did, you couldn’t afford it. Even if you could, it’s winter, so it will be too cold for ice cream. I could easily shut down any hope I had.

That’s why I needed hope as my word for 2020.

So I did a few things to help myself. I took a day off a week. A luxury, I know, but I knew my soul needed it. I was with my infant son all the time, it felt like endless hours and days of diapers and crying and loneliness. (I cried even writing this.) It was so hard to enjoy, it felt like it would never end. I was supposed to love these tiny baby days, and I didn’t, and that made it worse.

Jesse took off Thursdays so that I could be “off” and I walked to my pottery studio, plugged in my headphones, and felt the clay spinning through my hands with the Evolving Faith Podcast playing in my ears. Exhale. I could breathe. My weeks had a rhythm to them. I had space to engage my brain, my faith, my creativity. I had hope that my weeks wouldn’t be endless baby, and I could come back to him revived.   

I gave myself some hope: something big, bigger than ice cream, to look forward to. I planned a 30^th birthday party for myself in Croatia with 10 other friends. The best! Travel and friends and beach and it sounded amazing was so helpful to have that to look forward to. Our Airbnb hosts even make their own wine and were going to give us a bottle and we were even going to do a weekend in Paris beforehand! The tickets were bought, the house rented, all we needed to do was rent the car and take the train. … But then Covid. This trip was planned for Easter 2020 and I don’t need to say anything more about those plans. 

Jesse jokes that that Covid wasn’t particularly hard for me because it just brought everyone down to the level I was at the winter of 2019/2020. (I don’t want to be insensitive to the year you had; I know many, many people had really hard 2020s.)

For me, 2020 was a gradual climb out of darkness. The sun came out again (Norwegian winters are long and hard and dark and cold and hard). Thursday afternoons helped me breath again. I realized tomorrow wasn’t always Sunday, there were days that the grocery store was open, and I could afford and like that ice scream.

I still don’t have a full-time job. I’ve created two part-time jobs and I’m learning to be satisfied with that—to enjoy being able to say yes and no to work as it comes and as I am able, and to enjoy that I don’t have to “take off” summer, because I never had to work it in the first place.

I enjoy my kids so much more than I did—they have daycare and I have work and I can come back to them ready and happy to be a mom. I’m thankful.

I still can’t reschedule that Croatia trip. Yet. Maybe Easter 2022? (But see that progress? That’s hope.)

I have hope.

One of my favorite pictures of us. Taken by Ryan Burch.