Having two children is next level in every way imaginable: the busyness, the joy, the lack of sleep, the love, the extremely fast and disorienting pace in which it all goes by. M sits up now. L reads (he reads!). The two of them cuddle and stare deeply at one another, full of adoration. Future arguments and fist fights feel far away; I’m sure when they arrive, they will feel too soon. Despite the fact that I spend a good chunk of my day staring at dates on a calendar, moving the logistics of our lives around like a jigsaw puzzle, I can’t believe it’s already 2020. Time has become impossible to comprehend.

The passing of a year has marked me, too. My face and neck are wrinklier, my hair longer and wilder, my nerves a bit more frayed. Yet I am also happier, more focused, more impressed and in awe of myself than ever before. There is no confidence booster like birthing a baby in the backseat of a car; I can do anything now! And somehow, in the middle of this barely-controlled chaos also known as raising two kids, I feel more at peace than ever—or perhaps just more acquiesced, which, I suppose, is a version of peace.

My mom’s birthday recently came and went, another marker of time that continues to confuse me. She would have been 66 this past Christmas Eve. We ate pinto beans with a ham hock over cornbread, followed by cookies we’d made from her handwritten recipes. She was all around us, happy in our offerings. I like how death and birth stop time. Or rather, how they take us beyond time. Time doesn’t stop, it refuses everything except forward motion, but in death and in birth, we go beyond.

2019 was so extremely full. Beautiful and powerful and transformative, but also, A LOT. I am ready for a year of less, though of course I have no control over how much, or how little, comes my way. Perhaps it’s wiser to let go of any expectations and instead find more moments to relax, even within all this muchness. Time won’t slow down, but I can.