A tad too late to the decade-ender party but as always taking my time to process it all—the decade that has passed, the new one that has just begun. I started writing this post in December, only to write up the last paragraph while in quarantine. Ha! I’ll save the quarantine thoughts for another post, this one is dedicated to the decade that was.
If you told me at the end of 2009 that I’ve already met the man I was going to marry and that he and I would be raising twin daughters 3 years later, I would have laughed (or ugly cried) in disbelief. I was 26 years old, moving on from a bad breakup, unhappy with my job, ending an apartment lease and not knowing yet where to move next, basically crying myself to sleep at night and wallowing in self-pity.
2009 was not exactly the best of years for me, and let me just add that it was also the year I contracted H1N1. Needless to say, I could not wait for 2009 to be over.
And so when 2010 began, it felt like God forced a restart button in my life.
I wish I could say I let Him freely do it. The truth is, I fought hard, resisted, complained, refused to let go, and drove myself to a dead end and right through the cliff. But because it felt like it couldn’t really get any worse than that, there was also no way to go but up.
Fast forward to a decade later, the start of 2020, I honestly couldn’t have predicted that this is the life God was setting me up for.
I still sometimes stare at my sleeping daughters, weirded out that they’re mine. And I still often catch myself staring at David with a dorky smile on my face, remembering that he’s the same 17-year-old boy who sang me love songs and wrote me love letters from thousands of miles away and yes, he’s your husband, silly, for 8 years now.
As much as I’d like to avoid making this a rehash of our love story, it’s just impossible to ponder upon the past 10 years apart from David. After all, 2010 was when it all began—the one-way ticket, the saying of I do’s, the union of two lives. Our calendars and closet spaces and wallets and dreams have been tightly intertwined since.
Somehow between the years 2010 to 2019, David and I became husband and wife, life partners, business partners, parents to twin daughters, homeschoolers, him a Registered Nurse, me a mother.
And somehow in those years, said twin daughters grew, crawled, started walking, started talking non-stop, started homeschooling, turned 7 years old, and last time I checked, started losing baby teeth.
But as with any significant and meaningful growth, we had to go through seemingly endless stretching, and pruning, and wrestling with God, and getting back up on our feet, and healing, and moving forward. Rinse, repeat.
The decade is marked with itineraries that didn’t materialize, calendars that kept changing, bucket lists left unchecked, empty suitcases stored at the back of the closet indefinitely. There was a lot of dreaming and letting go of those dreams. A lot of waiting and working hard for a YES but getting a NO instead.
In retrospect, all of this growth is not possible without having to let go of old dreams to make room for new ones, and without letting God close doors so we can step into new ones — and only the best ones.
For me, 2010 felt like a hard restart. And now, 2020 feels just like it.. but on steroids.
Seriously though, 2020 is something else huh?? This pandemic, this lockdown, the natural (and man-made!) calamities striking the world at all sides, there’s really no knowing how this new decade is going to play out and how to navigate it.
All I know is, a decade from now the twins will be 18, and David & I will have more white hairs and wrinkles, hopefully still strong enough (and feeling young enough) to keep chasing dreams, and maybe living some of those old dreams.
And God! God will still be good, and He will still be God. And for all the things I don’t know about this new decade, the certainty of His goodness is good enough for me.
Take that, 2020.
Thank you, Jamie, for these photographs.
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