Working Toward My Own Private New Year

Lately I feel I have been tying up some loose ends of a period in my life that I have been slowly moving out of. I am unsure what I am moving into, but I have now finished all my moving business when I finally negotiated the final charges for my previous apartment. I disputed most of the charges and finally decided to accept about 1/3 of the ridiculous amount they wanted me to pay just to be done with it. But, I am so glad I was able to dispute what I did because I was able to just pay the final amount without incurring any more debt.

I have reconnected with my family and longtime friends and done most of what I need to do in order to move on from Roberta’s passing. I have mostly decided to reduce my interactions with Berta’s family to my being open to them reaching out to me, but not actively encouraging it as all of my interactions with them have been lukewarm on their part at best. I am glad I had the opportunity to help them weather some rough times with their children, but our views on parenting and approach to relationships are hard for me to feel comfortable with. I keep trying to give them opportunities to take advantage of my years of successful parenting and my work in early childhood education, but my relationship with their mother was the glue in our connection and that has dissolved. So I am backing away hoping that I gave them enough insight and modeling to have a positive effect on their lives moving forward and knowing I was able to help them with care and finances to weather some personal and health issues. So I am feeling like I had mostly a very positive impact on Berta’s family. I am now moving forward in my life trying to connect with people from my church, work and other places in my community as well as continuing to rebuild some of my long-term relationships with family and friends, all still sadly long distance.

With all the tying up, pruning, and reaching out, I am in the process of developing the concept of a special day kind of like the ones in spiritual traditions for atonement and forgiveness, and moving into a new year refreshed with a reset attitude toward relationships and goals and updated routines, my own personal New Year ritual. This is still in the initial conceptual stage of development, but I am shooting for a couple of weeks from now or maybe next week if I can put a few minutes together and review the year and what I would like to focus on in the next phase of my existence.