when i was ten or eleven, my best friend megan’s birthday meant spending a day at magic mountain for the first time. there were a handful of us there to celebrate, megan and i wore matching osh kosh b’gosh overalls and i had my silver hoop earrings on, having finally had my ears pierced for my birthday six months earlier. we rode every ride we could, standing in line for roller coasters and twisters and rides that spun you around. it was exhilarating, and i remember later that night, back home and in bed, still feeling the plunge of the roller coaster, the fear as we rounded a corner and it felt the car would fly from the track, the adrenaline and thrill and terror of it all. i was dizzy and exhausted, sinking in to the familiarity of home while hanging on to the rush of the day behind me.

it is a similar sort of ride my family has been on, with all the measured ascents, crazy curves, and blinding plummets of a roller coaster. my sister and i spent a small and intense set of years doing what we could for my father as he sat at the edge of alzheimer’s and dementia. since losing him almost three years ago, we have jumped through hundreds of hoops as our gorgeous mother has faced her own set of health scares, surrendered in to retirement, and let go of her house, her bird’s eye view of the glorious mountains we grew up with, and her community. just to be close to us. she always wanted to live near the ocean; after crossing 3 billion t’s and dotting 2 billion i’s, we have, at very long last, been able to help her do just that, and she is now settling in to her freshly remodeled, cozy little house a long road or two from us.

i spend a fair amount of time thinking about gratitude, and responsibility. i suppose that’s because life, for the most part anyway, feels like a gift. and though i look around and see the utter and profound mess that is our world currently, i am still so grateful for the beauty of nature and of human kind, and the fact that i am one teeny participant in both for the blip of time that i get to be here. this particular blip of time in the united states the past two years has had me daunted and incredulous, and i have posted several times in different social media locales about how hard it is to explain the how’s and why’s to my daughter. the one who is 15.5 and angsty and angry and takes every single thing i say with a grand measure of disdain and even though she trusts me doesn’t trust me at all and somehow thinks my brain fell out of my head at the exact moment she hit puberty.

this push/pull has been a part of our vernacular for some time now. its preface is most often exasperation, annoyance, anger and in a final sweep before i am given up on entirely, the eyeroll. you know the one: it starts low, moves dramatically toward an upper corner, and is commonly accompanied by a sigh that could knock a root beer bottle from a fence post. following may be a door slam, the pitch of a book, or just recently, an f bomb falling squarely at my feet like a broken satellite as i looked down incredulously and then back up again in to the face of my daughter, surrounded by students, and parents, and school staff, right at the start of her high school open house. all i kept thinking was, wasn’t she just starting kindergarten? and also, if i twinkle my nose, could i maybe disappear?

back then, before our collective mother-daughter innocence was lost and her adoration of me was immense and unmovable, i wrote often in that other blog of maya’s tenderness, that cake batter smell that seemed to emanate from her very pores, and her linguistic acrobatics. maya is a deeply intelligent and complex child, and parenting her has put me on a path that has shown me i have more tenacity and patience and insight than i ever knew, or maybe just that i am a mom who loves my daughter with every fiber of my being. i have been taught again and again by maya in those exact moments i have been working to imbue her life with whatever knowledge my humble experiences may provide her. as much as i would like to think that as a mama my role is to teach her more than she is able to teach me, the truth is, we have been learning alongside each other for fifteen years now, and the playing field is probably pretty even. i am a better person for having parented maya; i hope one day she will be able to say she is a better person for having been guided and loved by me.

but until that happens, we are here, in the land of all things teen: anxiety, passion, insecurity, dread, bliss, possibility. the sway and rhythm of this dance are things i well remember from my own adolescent years trying to figure out who i was, how things worked, where the pieces connected. but my god that world – and it really wasn’t all that long ago, relatively speaking – would be utterly incomprehensible to my girl given the world she moves through, one that is both so big and so small all at the same time.

navigating my fifteen year old existence meant moving through a landscape fraught with emotional land mines, and those times were simpler. not easier, necessarily, but certainly not so nuanced (read: buried) by a vast and still unfathomable accessibility to images and ideas and perversions in numbers that sit comfortably in the millions. tens of millions. with just a keystroke or three, on phone or tablet or laptop, our kids literally have the ability to find anything. giving maya a mobile phone just before she started middle school shifted her dynamic in the world, and it shifted our collective dynamic as a family. it was a necessary evil we felt we couldn’t avoid – we wanted her to be able to reach us whenever she needed to as she left the tiny campus of her primary school behind and found more autonomy. but that little device in her backpack threw her in to a world of careless connectedness that i find incredibly unhealthy, and i long for the days when a cup of tea and a book were enough to make us both happy.

so as i close up the house on this cold and windy 25th of december and prepare to say goodbye to another christmas, and the new year hovers on a very near horizon, i look beyond a rain-splattered window to thoughts of what the path of 2019 will look like. this is my internal abacus, the one that always shows up in times of big transition – the weighing of what to examine and what to embrace, what to strive for and what to blissfully shed, how to live authentically and with kindness.

the distinct path i see is one of simplicity, and necessity. how do i live my fullest life, encourage my child to live hers, and maintain a space for the world at large and all the care that it needs? I’m not sure, and truthfully the idea of it makes me tired. for now, i think that this year, my 53rd, will be about a return to a more simple way of living, for me and my girl. i will work to see with clear eyes, to eat well and get both of us stronger. to create space mentally and physically, spend as much time as possible with a paintbrush in my hand, and less time in front of a screen. i want more rest, and reading, more road trips and walks in search of shells or stones. i want to find a tai chi class, learn how to make a soufflé, get back to rescuing some perfect dogs.

can i affect great change for me and my girl as one year ends and another begins? create clarity and grace and health and find more space for benevolence?

talk may be cheap, but i am going to try.