Dear Elissa,

Do you remember 2008? I know, it was awhile ago. But think hard. 2008 came right after 2007, so it was supposed to be a good year, at least a better year.

It would be the year in which your father did not die, the year in which life moved on and things normalized. Instead, 2008 was the year when the rest of the world wanted to forge ahead and forget that there was once a man, who loved dogs and politics and Dr. Pepper and Sushi, who had a family, who lost his mind and then died. 2008 was the year when you were supposed to let go of that grief (what ridiculous pressure to put on yourself! what unrealistic expectations!). The fact that on New Years Eve 2007 you cried for a full hour, sitting alone on your kitchen floor listening to John Denver, should have cued you in to reality that the hard part had just begun. Because the hard part is not grieving: the hard part is living the rest of your life and letting that grief have it's place whenever it needs to, giving it free range to little pockets of yourself and not fighting it any longer.

Ah, but 2008 was promising! 2007 was the year when you made a decision that had been years in the making and left the religion you had been raised in, the one you had tried so hard to follow every day of your life, the square peg in that proverbial round hole. Most people leave the LDS faith more gradually than you did. You left gradually psychologically, of course, but you played the dutiful outward part every second of your life until you no longer could, and you told your husband you were done. You would not be a liar. The next afternoon you had your first cup of coffee and the heavens did not strike you down. (It was a disgusting beverage--acquired taste? psychological block? You still have no idea.) All the other firsts followed--changes in underclothing, your first glass of wine, meetings with a small group of socially active Quakers on Sunday mornings. 2007 was the hard year, when you had to re-envision everything about your life, when your entire social community shifted in a day, when you wondered if your marriage would survive, when you had to see the disappointment and sadness in the faces of people you loved. You wanted to tell them: this is not easy. I'm not doing this because it's easy. I'm doing this because it's hard. 2008 was supposed to be the year when things settled, the calm after the storm. And then your husband surprised you with the news that he no longer believed, either, and you had to watch him go through the same hard emotions you'd been through yourself, the same firsts. You watched his family pull away from him and his tears because he loved them too much to lie to them.

What you learned in 2008 is that it is easier to have all the pieces thrown in the air above your head, willy-nilly, than it is to adjust once they land. They never land in exactly the right place. There are shifts, aftershocks. You can't lose a father and have your entire religious paradigm shift all at once without some kind of fallout.

So 2008 became the year when your depression and anxiety returned with a vengeance, when everything you looked at--every second, every day--was being interpreted through the lens of that illness. 2008 was the year your doctor changed your medication to something you had a severe psychiatric reaction to, the year you were inches from hospitalization on many different occasions. Because of that, though, 2008 was the year you finally got your shit together. Your husband and your mother loved you enough to make you appointments with doctors and psychologists. They drove you there. They took time off work and watched the kids when you couldn't turn your head or swing your legs over the side of your bed. And all these professionals taught you that you had sacrificed yourself to everything around you: taking care of a sick father, helping a son with severe health problems of his own, trying for years to be the perfect mom. 2008 was the year you put into practice what you already knew but were programmed for so long not to believe: that being the perfect mother, for some moms, does not mean staying home all day with your children and letting go of your career. You started writing again. You started teaching again. You became actively involved in a political campaign you believed in with your whole heart.

And so you head into 2009 with a sense of peace that you didn't have when you headed into 2008. You head into 2009 without the unrealistic expectations that failed you a year ago, knowing that the year will be anything but perfect, but that, as Stafford says, "That's the world, and we all live there." You know that you don't want to let go of your grief, that there's room for it in your life as long as it doesn't push out other things. You know that some of the people you love the most might never understand the decisions you and your husband are making for your family, but with the sure knowledge that they are the right decisions for you. Come what may, you have a partner who will always hold you up and you him; you have children who are amazing little people with their own minds and their own eyes through which they see the world in their own ways; you have given yourself permission to be a person and not just a mother.

2009: Bring it on, baby.