Everyone’s year comes with ups and downs. Sometimes that means a long period of a gentle, smooth ride with a few kiddie-thrill hills tossed in. Sometimes it means a year filled with corkscrews and double loops. Heaven help you if you’ve experienced the latter this year, and remember to count your blessings if it is the former.
However, a year for me always comes with two tracks. The first runs January 1 through about the third week of August. Anything can happen, of course, but generally it’s a pretty smooth ride from January until May, when madness and few races up and down hills hit due to that being the wrap-up for the school year and, lately, one child or another graduating. The track smooths out again for the summer, with an occasional car repair or holiday thrown in to make things interesting.
The new ride kicks in as August is fading, when I climb that first hill of getting kids back to school. The first hill is a doozy, chugging upward, multiple stories high, over those weeks until it crests on my birthday at the first part of September. The coaster train pauses there at the top for a little bit before plunging into the steep, terrifyingly fast maze of twists and turns that make up the remainder of the year.
Between my birthday and New Year’s Day, life is littered with family birthdays, my wedding anniversary, and the three biggest holidays of the year (the biggest we celebrate, anyway). I learned long ago that once my birthday hits, I have to just hold on and try to occasionally catch my breath, because it’s going to be the end of the year before I know it.
I’m in the middle of the most maddening section right now, the triple-barrel-roll-loop formed by having three of my children’s birthdays and my anniversary all within a 17-day period.
I expect the rest of the year to finish out with more than the usual frenetic pacing. I’m packing additional stuff in there, including releasing Finding Refuge in paperback, publishing Taming Scrooge, and wrapping up the third book in the Heart’s Redemption series for release in January.
I clearly did not think through the timing of all that in conjunction with the rest of my life. But I will do what I always do as my roller coaster tears through the end of the year: Hold on tight, breathe, and enjoy the ride!
How does your year flow? Do you have an annual crazy section?
Lucy Francis 