January: Oh man, 2023 started off with a bang! I got my G2 driving license and basically spent the next few weeks with the goofiest grin on my face—like, so proud of myself—and THEN I had a fibroid surgery that I'd been sort of on the fence about/dreading for the better part of a year, and it went....totally fine! It was totally fine. Starting the year with two things I'd been dreading and then aced was a huge boost! Noah turned seven and I finished my zine about knitting, so those were also pretty great things!
February: Former Toronto Mayor and Noted Old Person John Tory resigned in a sex scandal! Responses ranged from Yuck to LOL, which is correct. We started watching Bluey on Disney+ and everyone fell in love with the Heelers. Nothing much happened, really: there was some weather and we went out with friends, but overall, it was February so we were all just trying to survive.
March: March break, again, which was another trip to Toronto. In 2022, we went to a hotel and it was very Covid-fraught; this time, we went to my in-law's place and bummed around with friend and rock-climbed and it was much more chill. I did March Madness on the theme of theme of Strong Female Leads and it was sort of...meh? Like, there are definitely a lot of movies that I love with strong female characters, but it felt kind of flat to focus on them exclusively. Anyhoo! Noah also joined the garden club at school, so that was pretty cute!
April: Halfway through the month, I woke up with the fastest heartbeat I'd ever had in my entire life. I went and sat on the toilet—still half-asleep—and by the time I sort of realized what was happening, it was probably topping 200 beats a minute. To this day, and I write this in December, I don't know what that was or why it happened. Was it POTS? Menopause? High blood pressure? Allergic reaction? Stress? Anemia? Dehydration? Panic attacks? Sleep apnea? I don't know. I never found out. It kept happening for weeks. It was so stressful. I helped organize an Earth Day party and I went to Trashion Week for the first time ever, and both were just really nice moments of affirming community and my place in it. I've now lived in Stratford for five years and it's been exactly the right place to participate in civic life on a scale that feels meaningful—I sit on boards and volunteer and know my kid's principal and many of my neighbours. It's so nice to be embedded somewhere; technically, I know this feeling is possible anywhere, but it has manifested the most in co-op, in my 20s, and here in Stratford, in my 30s.
May: I long-term borrowed my parent's very very old Prius and started driving for real this month. We started with a trip to the Beaver Valley in which the car broke down and it was very annoying (but ultimately totally fine). There was also Mother's Day and organizing Mike's 40th birthday party; I spent his actual birthday evening in the hospital because my heart rate would not calm down, and it turns out I was pretty dehydrated! Mostly it was just so nice to welcome the sun back in a meaningful way, to get some independence, and to gear up for the summer.
June: Mike's 40th birthday party, which was a backyard shindig and well-attended by many people who love him. Then: The Smoke. Remember when the air was absolutely disgusting with wildfire smoke from coast to coast? And the kids were encouraged to stay indoors during recess, and New York looked like Blade Runner 2049? It's moments like this when it's like, oh, man, right: we are living on a planet in great crisis, and it's so hard to navigate the grief of feeling like our Earth Mother is dying of a disease we gave her ourselves, and that we could do something about it (only the "we" in that sentence is concentrated to a few dozen members of the human race, and I'm not in that club). On the summer solstice, I walked a labyrinth and meditated on all the ways my body felt connected to the earth.
July: Summer holidays! Trips to Toronto! Weddings! Landlord troubles! Grandma health concerns! Multi-day internet outages! Neighbour issues! Man, this was a month of high highs and very low lows. For a minute, I was convinced we were going to be evicted because we hadn't mulched our garden beds. It was stressful as hell, y'all. On the plus side, the Barbie movie came out and that was a fantastic moment for feminist memes and the Indigo Girls.
August: We spent two weeks at the cottage and that was really nice. Noah went to the hippie Christian day camp of my own youth; Mike and I went out on a date and ate Mexican food. I continued my months-long stretch of waking up in the middle of the night. When we got back home, Noah and I spent two weeks going to the library every day and helped build a city of recycled materials. August sort of felt like a hangover from the mayhem of July, to be honest.
September: September is the dividing line in the "before" and "after" of 2023. In September, I got some explosive news about my relationship. And that was the end of it. It was the end of nine years of marriage, of five years of trying since the last explosion, it was the end of wanting to keep trying. I was shocked and appalled and anxious and sick about it. And I was also relieved, because now, finally, I could stop holding on to something that wasn't working. In the first few weeks, I would rage out or cry my eyes out—a remix of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" had me sobbing for an hour—but my anxiety damped down and my heart stopped racing so much. I started sleeping through the night again. Marriage is hard work, but I think we made it harder than it had to be. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to ruin his life, or mine, but I'm not ashamed of what happened here. I hope we both get to move on from this. This was survivable. I am surviving.
October: Okay, all that being said, Mike didn't move out until nearly the end of November, and the next couple months were not easy. I slept in my office, or he slept in the attic. I took a whirlwind trip to Toronto and told many friends about what had happened. Noah's anxiety started ramping up, as if mine was being transferred to him, and it was absolutely terrible to watch. October was a holding month, a month where I just counted the days until something would be different. My grandma passed away and it felt sad to say goodbye to the last of her generation. She was such a beautiful, complicated, interesting woman—just like my mom, just like me, although we each have totally different versions of beautiful and complicated.
November: Mike finally moved out after nine weeks of post-explosion co-habitation and I was sort of dreading being on my own, but I came to neutrality on it in fairly short order: I watched a lot of old Whose Line Is It Anyways? and ate at weird times, and my heart didn't explode and I even found myself enjoying it sometimes. Then I turned 40! I planned a birthday party, but two days before, I tested
positive for Covid (!!), so I had to call it off. What a freaking
bummer. Anyway, I had been sort of mildly convincing myself that I would die before my
40th birthday (#darkthoughts) so the fact that I didn't was GREAT.
December: Noah's separation/general anxiety was pretty debilitating and it was a ton of work to get him to school every morning. I got kind of bogged down in work things and will have to get caught up before everybody comes back online in early January. I hosted a Solstice party and I spent my first Christmas away from my kiddo. The intensity of single parenting means I need to find a way to savour our breaks, because I need them—I need them, and I enjoy them—and I also miss my kid when we're apart. I had a 24-hour trip to Toronto to see old co-op friends and fall in love with the city again. I tried some dating apps and quickly found out that that scene is wild—like, are the men okay?—and 2024 will probably bring some romantic mishaps, or maybe total radio silence on that front, or maybe new love?? Who even knows, because the idea of going on a date with someone right now makes me want to barf.
In a nutshell, 2023 had a lot going on! Like, a lot. Friends showed up in a lot of amazing ways, from couches to crash on to weddings and weekend hangs to just letting me cry in their backyards while our kids played together. I loved being in Stratford and the roots that I've been slowing growing here seem real and true. I got to see Toronto friends many times, and that was nice. I read books and magazines, I walked on the beach, I worried about things that didn't happen and things that did. 2023 felt like a watershed year—the end of my marriage, milestone birthday, important deaths, important friendships—but it also felt like a compilation of moments where I felt really proud of myself, or like I was growing in a direction I liked. I have no idea what 2024 will bring. I hope it's good!
