Last week, I received a Happy New Year email from my younger daughter’s preschool giving parents updates on the goings on in the new semester. It was pretty standard and sweet, filled with basic info and well wishes for 2016. Now, before I go any further, I have to say that we really love this school. I like to refer to their methodology as “caring, controlled chaos,” which is perfect for my squirrely three year-old. We are happy at this school, and I recommend it to people all the time. But the email mentioned talking to our kids about New Year’s Resolutions and I couldn’t help but bristle. I have never been the resolution type. At my crowded gym workout just this morning, the regulars were joking about how class would empty out again in a few weeks once the “New Year’s Crowd” stopped coming. But, here I am, faced with a note from our preschool saying that they’ll be talking to the kids about resolutions, so we should be sure to start the conversation. Ugh.
Raised Catholic, I always hated Lent. Hated it. There was all this pressure to give something up. Why? Does that bring us closer to God (that’s the bill of goods I was sold in Catholic school)? Does it make us better people? Better Catholics? Does depriving ourselves of something we enjoy mean we’ve accomplished something? So, I never gave anything up, even though at school we used to have to write down and talk about what we would give up for Lent. I always said “gum”. I never chewed gum after falling asleep with it in my mouth and suffering through my mother using every trick in the book to free it from my hair before finally just cutting it out. So, gum was easy. I give up gum! The nuns will love it!
So, perhaps that’s why I have never liked New Year’s Resolutions: they just smack of deprivation and that Catholic school existence that I came to viscerally resist. Yes, I know there are positives that come out of these resolutions for many people, but I also know that they are designed to fail. Setting goals in the New Year? Fabulous. Resolving that you will or won’t do something within the confines of a year because your father/mother/sister/spouse/friend is pressuring you to do so? It’s possible this will be less successful.
However, I do inhabit the world and in the interest of not being scornful when my daughter comes home and asks me about “resolutions”, I have given this some thought. So, here goes. In the New Year, I resolve to be kinder. I will give more and spend less. I will forgive more easily and be freer with my praise. I will judge others less harshly. And I will teach my daughters to do the same. It’s the least I can do for those little monsters. If it weren’t for them and that email from preschool, I would have (again) dismissed this whole idea out of hand and not given it a second thought—except to feel quietly smug when my gym empties out in a couple of weeks.
Mollie Michel is a South Philly resident and a Philadelphia public school parent. A recovering non-profit professional, Mollie is also an experienced birth doula, Certified Lactation Counselor, and the mom of two awesome girls and a sweet pit bull named Princess Cleopatra. In her spare time, she is usually trying to figure out how Pinterest works, training for a(nother) half-marathon with her dog at her side, or simply trying to keep up with her increasingly wily daughters.
