Bring It On, 2009!

I didn't VOX much in 2008. For me, it was a year of adjustment and change, turmoil and stress, and while I really enjoyed parts of it, I'm wasn't sorry to bid it farewell last night and begin a new year. As a lot of you know, I got married at the tail-end of 2007 (Dec. 29th to be exact), and I began my 2008 with angry in-laws who intentionally made my life worse than pure hell, a confused husband who was attempting to play all the roles he'd played his whole life while adding on the role of husband, and me, little ol' me who did not know the first thing about how to be a wife and maintain a household and all that jazz. Bundle that with my first year of teaching and you can probably see why much of 2008 was a doozy (as my Nanny likes to say).

Around March, I decided I'd had about all I could take, called the mother-in-law and really just explained how I felt. Just to back-track a moment, she didn't even say one word to me on my wedding day. Not "hello" or even "I hate you." Just nothing. When I called, I simply told her that I felt like her son could have done a lot worst than me. I care about him and put his needs before my own. I have an education and work a steady job in an admirable field. I have a good family that raised me well, and I have manners. I don't go on drunk binges, and I've never been a whore. And in the end, he chose me. There was no forcing him away from her. He picked me.

Things got a little better until June/Julyish when his whole family went bat-shit crazy again. Now, we don't speak all that much, nor do I really find the need/opportunity to with them conveniently located an hour and a half away. But somewhere along the way, I realized I was focusing much too intently on my relationship, or lack thereof, with my inlaws, and not nearly enough on my relationship with my husband. We figured a lot of stuff out in 2008--lessons that will hopefully make 2009 not only bearable, but more enjoyable as well.

But of course, it wouldn't be a new year without some resolutions, which I'm hoping to keep.

1. Start my graduate degree. Application goes in next week. I should have no worries about getting accepted, it's just going to be difficult fitting it all in the amount of time in which I want to accomplish it.

2. Be better at life. This is a broad one. I want to take time for me, eat better, move more, love more, write more, etc.

3. Save money. Obviously, this is not the easiest time in the world to save money, when we're stretching our budget paper-thin as it is, but we're going to try our best.

4. Spend more time with family. As I sat at my Nanny's New Year's Eve bash last night, as I have every New Year's Eve except two (one of them I was eight and at home sick with a virus and the other we all went to a family wedding on New Year's Eve), I looked around and was so happy to be surrounded by my large, boisterous, and somewhat obnoxious family. My mother's family is HUGE, and we ALL get together at least once a month for a family dinner. We are pretty tight-knit, and it made me happy to be with them last night. I realized, though, that I want to be with them more, so I'm going to work on that in 2009.

I have a feeling it's going to be a good year. We shall see.