Twenty Five Quotes for 2025
My sister came to visit for the holidays. Her son is two, almost a full year younger than Emmy and a year older than Elizabeth. She lives in a part of Florida that has no direct flights to this part of Pennsylvania so we rarely see each other. Which is why I just learned that he’s not allowed sugar.
He’s never tried peanut butter – outside the kind she makes herself. He can’t have pizza or anything with cheese. No milk or dairy – because he may be lactose-intolerant. And because she’s a vegetarian, absolutely no meat. When he woke up screaming the second night at 1 a.m. and someone suggested Tylenol, she said she doesn’t do that.
I don’t understand this. Any of it. But one thing you learn becoming a parent is it’s bad etiquette to judge or comment on how someone raises their kid. Even if they’re family.
I guess I used to be like that. Not that extreme, but I had my grand theories of what I would be like…as a mom, an adult, a woman. My kids would never watch TV. They would eat well. I wouldn’t bribe or negotiate. All of that has gone out the window.
Which might be why I can’t stop wondering, why is she making it so much harder on herself? Why not give him medicine and candy? Why not throw a frozen pizza in the oven when she's exhausted and he’s inconsolable?
I think it must has something to do with her basically being a single mother. Since she can’t control his father, what her son does when he's with him, she overly controls everything else. I think we all do this. Make life harder than it needs to be. Try to control things we can to make up for all the ones we can’t. We don’t realize we’re doing it though. We get these ideas stuck in our heads, of how things should be, want them to be, and then stick to them even if we’re miserable, even if they’re not working.
Then again, who am I to judge? It is December thirtieth. Two days before the new year, and I am writing this from my closet. I've come in here the past week, stealing minutes, sometimes hours, amid screaming kids, tension with my husband, anxiety and rage coursing through me, telling myself to write something good.
Something akin to a child raised on quinoa and broccoli and homemade peanut butter. Yet the harder I try, the more standards and expectations I put on myself, the less I write. Which leads me to one of the things I've wanted to tell my sister: done is better than perfect.
A happy mom is better than a perfect kid. A hotdog for dinner is better than no dinner. That's one of the bigger things I've accepted this year. The older you get, the more you have to let go. And I've been forced to let go of a lot.
I’m sitting here thinking about how naïve and pompous I used to be. How I used to boast about my good luck. I’m serious, it was a thing. I used to believe I was born under some lucky star. Because that had been my experience. Whatever terrible thing seemingly happened, another, bigger, better door opened.
This year, however, my luck seems to have left. Even Jay, Mr. Science, Mr. Facts, Mr. “There is no such thing as energy or zodiacs or reincarnation or good and back luck” agrees.
You could not pay me (one million, ten million) to re-do this year. To go through it again. I experienced more rejecions, knocks and humiliations than I believe some people will in a lifetime. Yet that sentence makes me feel something like… pride.
Maybe I needed to lose my luck, to gain this strength. Bad years, real tough times, will do that. Knock the illusions, the naivety, out of you. Yes, I’ve lost my illusions. My blind faith in the world, in things going right. I still believe in karma. In manifestation. But now I’m more realistic about the process. What I've lost in faith, I've gained in wisdom.
So this New Years newsletter is my box of it - the quotes and lessons that have been beaten into me this past year. The ones I've clung to in my darkest hours. The ones that are no longer just words, but truths I understand and believe in more than ever. The ones I am armed with, going into 2025:
1. "I really believe that things don't happen when we're trying to will them into being. They don't happen when we're waiting for the phone to ring, or the email to pop up in our in box. They don't happen when we're gripping too tightly. They happen - if they happen at all - when we've fully let go of the results. And, perhaps, when we're ready." - Dani Shapiro
Muriel Spark said, “you learn a lot from kids about dealing with life.” I agree with that. Their toys, for example. You do research, listen to friends, spend money on some new shiny thing you're told they’ll love, only to find they want nothing to do with it. You shake your head. Another loss, another miss. You put it away -in the closet, below some other toys. Then, six months later, you go downstairs and find them playing with it.
2."Anything I've ever tried to keep by force I've lost." - Marie Howe
Success, I’ve learned, is a lot like this. It never comes when we want it, or expect it. The toy can say age one, but your child doesn’t play with it until they’re three. It doesn’t make sense, but neither does success. You can work harder than you’ve ever worked, do everything right, follow all the instructions and listen to all the advice, and it still doesn’t come. Only when you’ve stopped trying so hard, stopped obsessing over the results, when you’ve let go a little, does it come. Which leads me to the attached lesson: There is no rush.
3."No great thing happens suddenly." -Rebecca West
Do you know how long I’ve been working on Words of Women? On this newsletter? On writing and books and this career? Almost a decade. Yes, I have some followers. Yes, I have a published book. But those successes only remind me how long the road is. How much time it takes.