Here I sit on the last day of 2011. I am sure we are all in very similar places today, reflecting on the year that we have just traveled through, setting our hopes for the year ahead.

As I stood at the grocery store this morning for the quick trip for milk and tampons, I had the fleeting thought, “Well it [2012] can’t get any worse than this past year.” And then I sucked my breath in and got fearful that I had just tempted fate.  I banished the thought from my mind in a panic cause this year was flooded with news that had me pretty much reeling from the beginning to the end.

And yes, it can always be worse.

Friends and neighbors were diagnosed with cancer, friends and family experienced relapses.  A loved one attempted the ultimate due to PTSD.  Acquaintances were going through divorces and foreclosures.  I dealt with smaller stressors like two kids surgeries in the same month, floods of visitors, gardening disappointments, marriage disappointments, mothering disappointments, last years resolution disappointments, personal ways in which I had let myself down with my own health, my own goals, my own dreams, letting my own fears win.

But today, we each put our list of things which were just plain hard this past year behind us.  Almost against our own instincts, hope prevails.  We get giddy, almost enthusiastic about what lies ahead for us.  We become confident and trusting that the year ahead will bring us something fresh and new as we step into who we are ‘really’ supposed to be.  We lean into our dreams that we might have let go in the past just keeping up with the realities of our daily existence.

This year feels especially big to me.  I will turn 39 in two months.  39.  I am more anxious about 39 than about 40.  It seems a time to take stock in how the last 20 or so years have gone and where I would like the next 20 to go, even the next 10.  My kids are getting out of their hyper needy stages and becoming their own little people, who will actually play long enough for me to write this blog post with only a little whining as a distraction. I am hitting that stage I have heard about, the one in which we as women finally accept ourselves in all our fantastic, mistake making, muffin top jiggling, and wisdom earning glory.  I can feel it creeping into my pores, slowly, methodically, like it can’t possibly give it to me all at once, but at a steady pace instead in which I can relish it, drinking it in as it seeps into my soul; a love for self.

So as I contemplate the new year that I will groggily wake up to tomorrow, it feels especially important to reach deep within and extract that which is still waiting to be born.  With so many reminders this year of the fragility of life, and with my own journey heading toward midlife, I feel a bit of a sense of hurry up and get to it, get to living, get to risk taking, get to writing that damn book you have been dreaming of.  Time is not a guarantee, it is a gift.

On that note, let us each commit to ‘get born’ this year into the selves we want to be.  Those selves that sometimes get hidden under our titles of wife, mother, friend, daughter, employee, chauffeur, and chef .  Let us emerge from 2011 with our goals and dreams in mind, even if they are hidden only in our hearts, committed to watering the seed of our aspirations a little bit every day.  Because if we aren’t dedicated to watering them, who are we waiting for to do so?

“The professional keeps his eye on the doughnut and not on the hole.  He reminds himself it’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.” ~The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Jen Parsons is a homeschooling Mama Bear to a 7 year old and 5 year old, she blogs at www.theevolvinghomemaker.com as she works on a book, dreams of a homestead, and otherwise tries to overcome her personal fears to embark on a life well lived.