My New Year’s resolution for 2024 is for more grace

There’s something about the downtime that follows after the holidays that make me think about how to change things for the better.

I think about how I want to organize my laundry room cabinets so that things aren’t falling every time I open the doors. Or how I should clear out my kids’ bookshelves and closets so we can donate old, underused toys and make room for the new clothes and items they received at Christmas.

When it comes to New Year’s, I start making plans for the healthy meals I want to try cooking this year. I also plan the home improvement projects I plan to tackle. (I’ve determined I’m going to attempt to refinish my hardwood floors myself sometime this spring.)

I mentally plan how to lose the last stubborn 15 pounds, after having lost 80 in the last year. I make plans for family vacations over the next year, or goals of things I want to accomplish at work.

And while this planning is all well and good, how much of it actually happens? And in the grand scheme of things, does it matter if I find time to organize my laundry room cabinets, clean out my kids’ closets, or scrub every baseboard in my house the way I’ve been hoping to for at least six months?

Accomplishing these planned tasks might make me feel better, and more organized in the short run. But in terms of the long-run impacts on my life, I doubt I’ll remember a year from now that I cooked some new, healthy recipes or the fact that my house was more organized at the start of the year. That’s because, next New Year’s, I’ll have a new mental list of “to-do’s” to tackle.

Being a mom is tough, since we never let ourselves rest. And after the hustle and bustle of the holidays, it’s likely that rest is what we need the most, not a long to-do list of things we want to change or tackle as part of a New Year’s resolution.

More than anything, I think we need to give ourselves grace.

A good friend of mine, who is a mother of four, had a health scare about a year ago. It was a moment where, for a short period of time, she was in such pain she seriously thought she was dying. And in that moment, it wasn’t the things she owned or how many friends they had, about what her house looked like, or what kind of car they drove that she thought about. But it was her kids and whether they would remember the things she had done right.

She wondered if she had instilled in her children the things that were important and if they knew how much they were loved. In that moment, which my friend thought might be her last, she thought of her husband, and how he might raise their children without her.

Even though she was in terrible pain, my friend thankfully recovered and was able to go home from the hospital to her young children and husband, who very much need her.

But, that moment also gave her some clarity on things she wanted to do differently, to make positive, lasting change for her family in the way that was important to her.

I suppose for 2024, I do plan on making a resolution of sort, to bring change into my life. But it is to take more time to be present with my children, to be more mentally and emotionally present, and also to give myself grace — a break from the mental to-do list that never seems to turn off.

Because while I hope to clean and organize my house, to tackle home renovations or take a family trip at some point in the next year, it’s not those things that will really matter, in the long run.

Instead, I hope to stop focusing so much on the minutia. Instead, I hope to slow down and just be cognizant about what really matters and to make decisions with that ideal in mind.

Happy New Year’s. Here’s to 2024. Lydia Seabol Avant writes The Mom Stop for The Tuscaloosa News. Reach her at momstopcolumn@gmail.com.