2023 in 3 Words
Faith. Joy. Roots.
There are a lot of words that come to mind when I reflect on the last year: wild, exhaustion, transition, unexpected, expecting, delight, fulfilled, hilarious, exciting. I could go on and on and on. Faith was the word on my heart at the turn of the year, but as I sit at the end of it, reflecting on all this year held, now three stand out to me: Faith. Joy. Roots.
When I entered 2023, I had the word faith on my heart. After coming out of a year of experiencing just how faithful God and my loved ones had been to me through challenging times, I felt called to have faith in response. January 2023 coincided with the start of my second trimester carrying my son, along with the due date of our first pregnancy that we’d lost the previous summer. The ghost of the past hovered over this second pregnancy, as every day I wrestled with having faith that this time I would hold my baby in my arms. You’d think that once I hit the second trimester, I’d breathe a little easier. You’d anticipate that by the time I could feel my baby squirming around inside me, I’d relax. And certainly, by the time I hit the third trimester, you’d expect the edge of panic to wear off. But it didn’t. The grief of that lost pregnancy was raw and hard and the fear of experiencing it again terrified me. That’s what makes faith a powerful thing — in the face of all that grief and fear, I chose to keep reaching for faith in this pregnancy, in life. Admittedly, I had a LOT of help along the way — the regular texts and check-ins from friends, the advice and encouragement from family, and most of all my husband’s gentle and enduring love as he reminded me day after day how strong our little boy was getting.
Wandering the streets of Quebec City.
Faith often looked different than how I expected. As anxious as I was because of the past, our baby-moon in Quebec City in March was an act of faith, as Austin and I both set aside time from our jobs to spend time together, celebrating our journey together as a couple and imagining what life would look like once the little one arrived. Our spring baby showers in PA and MA were similar acts of faith, as we gathered together with friends and family to celebrate the new life on the way, believing that he would join us soon. Even those quintessential nesting urges — like doing all the baby laundry and prepping the nursery that our son wouldn’t need until he was six months old — were acts of faith as each one was done in anticipation of the life that hadn’t quite arrived yet. So amid the fear, I celebrated and dreamed and prepared myself and our life for the arrival of our son, and in so doing, I chose to live in faith, no matter how hard it was.
And that brings us to joy. Joy is a funny thing. It exists in and above and through whatever life happens to look like at the time. You can be happy and experience joy; you can be sad and experience it too. It’s almost a spiritual state in that way. So as I kept the ghost of the past at bay, I also lived in joy. Joy for the life growing within, joy at the way my life was about to change. And then life did change. Nothing compares to the intensity of the joy I felt the moment I heard my baby’s first cries in the operating room. Nothing else felt as real as the sound of his voice filling the room — and simultaneously my whole world.
A quick family photo at one of our favorite Adirondack vistas.
The next six-ish months of the year passed at a breakneck speed, or so it feels. Sure, those midnight feedings and fussy nights and mid-road trip meltdowns were tough — but they still were cemented in so much joy. Joy that we had this little boy to feed, joy that this little child was in our life to calm, joy that we had friends and family eagerly awaiting us at the end of a long drive to meet our son for the first time. And so in joy — and exhaustion and frustration and happiness and laughter and everything — we endured those late nights and long days. We delighted in adventures here in New England, in the Adirondacks, in PA, and beyond. And in joy, we lived our life as a family of three here in our precious corner of the world.
Finally, roots. There is so much about childbirth and parenthood that surprised us, but perhaps the most unexpected of all is how our son’s arrival cemented our life here in Massachusetts, deepening our relationships with our church community and the friends we’ve had in the area for years. It’s the new parent community, though, that was the biggest surprise. After our son was born I started attending weekly support groups for new moms sponsored by our hospital, and, in addition to advice from the labor and delivery nurse/lactation consultant who ran it, I also got to chat with other brand new moms. As we traded stories of our trials and triumphs and ooohed and awwwwed over each other’s babies, friendships formed. We dragged our husbands with us to coffee together, started book clubs, and enjoyed seasonal get-togethers. They’re our emergency contacts for daycare and the people we called to pick up our son when we were so sick with the stomach flu that we couldn’t move. These half-dozen families have become a community, each one helping the rest of us feel perfectly normal when our baby refuses to go down for a nap.
Our favorite bit of New England coastline.
Our roots go deeper than just the people — it’s the place too. Now that we’ve lived in New England for over a year, we know so much more of our way around. We know where the local hiking trails are and the shortcuts through downtown to the coffee shops. When we want to find a quaint backroad to enjoy the fall leaves or find a fun activity on a Sunday afternoon, we know where to go. That’s not to say that there isn’t always something new to find and explore, and I have to confess that we still wildly mispronounce locations from time to time, but we’ve found our footing in the last year. Simply put, this beautiful place is now home.
Admittedly, there’s something reductive about summarizing 365 days (well, just about) in three words — 2023 was so much bigger than I could express with 30,000 words! It’s simply impossible to capture all the laughter, all the love, all the memories from friends and family near and far. The afternoons with coffee and Italian pastries and babies. The walks along the Merrimack River and the Atlantic Ocean. The many, many third-trimester dinners at our favorite taco place. Bookstores and coffeeshops. Hours at the Apple Store after I accidentally wiped my laptop. But amid everything that 2023 was, faith, joy, and roots were the themes that wove in and around the biggest, best, and most important parts of our year. Together they’ve helped point me in the direction of my intention for 2024, but more on that another day. It’s still 2023, and I want to soak in every last tender second of this year that gave me the child I spent nine months clinging to faith that I’d hold, the community of friends I never anticipated, and a home in a place I spent my entire childhood dreaming about.
