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I have a confession to make. I have a love/hate relationship with the New Year. I love the idea of new beginnings and feeling like I have not just the opportunity but a responsibility to do some type of reset, but I always end up feeling bad about the family dinners I didn’t cook, the unhealthy foods I let me children consume, and miles not walked. I always start the new year ready to try again, to be more like my mom, to cook more, clean more, and take more time for myself. We are five days in, and it has been great, but what I have been doing the last five days is not sustainable. I called my mom yesterday for a pep talk. I asked her how she did it. She simply said, “Times were different, Kim.” True, but not the pep talk I wanted.  

This morning, my eyes wandered across a book I read last year, Canoeing the Mountains by Tod Bolsinger. It weaves the story of Lewis and Clark’s adventure West, looking for a water route passage that would connect the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. The Corps of Discovery planned and packed for water travel. After 15 months of painstaking travel UP the Mississippi River, they found that it was not another river flowing west, but instead The Rockey Mountains. The Rockey Mountains are nothing like the rounded tree bluffs of the Appalachians of the East. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery had never seen or navigated anything like those mountains. Bolsinger described that moment this way: 

And at that moment everything that Merriwether Lewis assumed about his journey changed. He was planning on exploring the new world by boat. He was a river explorer. They planned on rowing, and they thought the hardest part was behind them. But in truth, everything they had accomplished was only a prelude to what was in front of them. 

This is the metaphor I needed for “times were different, Kim.” I cannot canoe in the mountains any more than I can parent and run my home the same way my parents did. When I was 8, most kids played every sport recreationally. Now, at 8, you are late to the game if you are starting a sport and are not on a club or travel team. This means more practice and games and less time for family dinners. My parents did have smartphones, and I definitely didn’t have one. The instant access to ourselves and information has created an entirely new landscape for parenting, one that we can not lazily canoe through. So what do we do?

If we, you, I, want to continue forward, we change. We adapt. Tod says, “We go from being river rats to mountain climbers. We keep on course with the same goals (for me, that is raising successful and healthy citizens who know their family loves and believes in them), but change absolutely everything required to make it through this uncharted territory. We ditch the canoes, ask for help, find horses, and corse the mountains. And when the time comes, we make new boats out of burnt trees.”

You let go, you learn as you go, and you keep going, no matter what. Next year will be another new beginning. Maybe I’ll have a whole new set of goals; perhaps they’ll be the same. Either way, I will likely use a whole new set of tools to achieve them. Happy New Year!