Music for a new year.

Micky Adams at This from THIS on Vimeo.

As is.

We're just a few hours from a brand new year now. I've spent the evening cleaning the kitchen, watching The Kids Are All Right (which was marked as a comedy in Video on Demand and most certainly is not a comedy but good nonetheless), and mopping the dining room floor. The kids were in bed criminally early tonight, because they needed to be.

I spent the day mediating fights and wiping tears and enforcing discipline and exercising remarkable levels of patience as the girls pushed each and every button I possess. Wayland worked, came home, played games with the girls and helped Mad build an ant colony. I started the book "The Orange Eats Creeps," and it's pretty incredible.

Yesterday I ran four miles for the first time in forever and rode that high for the rest of the evening. Wayland and I had dinner out, which was good despite terrible service. I read all of "I Am Number Four," which was pretty good.

It's nothing remarkable, is it? But: yes, actually. Highs and lows and marching on. It's what we do! We tangle with our lives, trying to sort out strands and make sense out of things, give ourselves a purpose, find something that makes us feel noble or useful or grand in some way. Oh, life. It's a tricky thing! Our highs and lows and marching on: it's what we have. This is the noble thing, right? The useful thing. The grandest thing of all. Look at us all, tending to our shoulds, the little pieces of our lives that stack together and take an amazing shape even when we're too mired in it to recognize how amazing it is.

I try to think of how to sum up 2010 all succinctly and I'm at a loss: Wayland and I both started new jobs. I am working full-time in an office and miss my girls acutely. Wayland worked so hard toward a new career that had to be sidelined a bit while he stuck to the support-his-family-pay-the-bills job, which sucks, but again: how grand. Madeleine started play therapy, Violet started physical therapy. We floundered a bit financially, gained some ground, floundered, gained again, floundered.

It's all in flux, a great big question mark. 2011 is on the horizon and I want to see something grand for the year, I want it to be the year our lives change for the better, the year things settle, the year we are all content right where we are, and all I can think is: those things do not go hand-in-hand. Content right we are does not mean our lives have to change.

Maybe it's boring, but what I see for 2011 is highs and lows and marching on, everything the last two days have been, everything this year has brought us. We unfold pieces of our lives as we go and maybe we'll uncover something we never saw coming, good or bad, and it will become a part of us, of what we do, add texture to what we've been doing all along. Just living, and finding joy in it, just like we did at 5 or 15 or 25 or thirty-freakin'-one, something we've been working at our whole lives.

The shrinking, spinning heart.

We're just saying goodnight to Madeleine when she says, quite calmly and sweetly, "I don't like you, Mama." I feel that little clench of dismay around my heart but squelch it. I know she's looking for a reaction, so I don't give her one. Instead I lean in and give her a hug. "I love you, Madeleine. Goodnight."

She wiggles, kicks her feet a little. "But I don't LIKE you," she says in that same sweet tone. She turns to Wayland. "I don't like you either, Daddy." You'd think she was telling us how much she loves us based on her tone, but no. "I really don't like you."

Our faces are drawn and weary, and even though I know she doesn't mean what she's saying it still hurts. "I'm sorry to hear that, Mad, because I love you so so much," I tell her. "Goodnight." Wayland kisses her forehead and she hugs him tight. "I don't like you, Daddy," she says again.

We look at each other with the same blankness, the supreme effort of trying to wipe emotion from our faces and failing: we're stressed, tired of her antics, more than a little concerned. We leave the room.

She's running out of her room a few minutes later. She hurls herself into my lap. "I'm sorry I said that," she says. "I DO like you."

"I know you do," I say. "So WHY do you say things like that?"

I'm surprised when she answers. "It's my heart," she tells me. "My heart sometimes goes around and around like this" -- she whirls her fist in a circle -- "and it gets really tiny and it doesn't look like my heart anymore. That's when I get wild. But then it calms down like this" -- she slows the whirl of her fist -- "and then it's like my heart again, and that's when I feel sorry."

I give her a hug, and as she snuggles close against me, Wayland and I make eye contact. We're both...flummoxed. I appreciate her description but worry about all that turbulence inside her. "Thank you for telling me that," I finally tell her. "That was a really good way to explain how you feel when you start behaving that way. But next time you heart starts spinning and getting smaller, do you think you could tell me that's happening? I'd like it if we could find a way to help it stop spinning before you get too wild and say hurtful things to the people you love, Mad. Do you think we could work together on that?"

She nods and then snuggles in closer.

I don't know. I can't think of the right way to end this. I have no answers, no deeper meaning, but I wanted to write about it because I so appreciate the simple strength of the right words, the way even a 4-year-old can feel things and express them so perfectly. We've all been there, haven't we? Our hearts shrinking and growing, pounding and trembling, felt feelings overcome us in such a way that we don't even feel like ourselves anymore. I want to say: I understand you, Mad, and I see your heart: It's bigger and stronger than you even know.