full of promise

Dear January, we make you a lot of promises.  Please may we intend to keep them.

Tolliver asks, every morning without fail, after we've gathered his milk and a blanket and have settled on the couch, "Hold meem, mom-mom?"  And although I might like to get the coffee going or feel eager to hop in the shower, I hold him.

He was born and we promised to hold him, promised to feed him and put clothes on him and protect him. Promised to do our best.
Oh little boy, we make you a lot of promises.
I hold Tols in my lap for lots of reasons, but mostly because he asks me to, and because I can.
It's only for a few minutes and then he's off my lap and on to the next thing, plastic safety goggles askew across his face, basketball in one hand, mofo guy in the other.  It's just a brief time before he's launched back into a world where donuts are for special occasions and markers are for paper, where rules don't always make sense and sisters die.  Where promises are hard to keep.
Please may we intend to keep them.

The end of one year is ripe with reflection and the beginning of the next invites small ambitions, but nothing has changed this week simply because the calendar did.  There are people cleaning up New Year's Eve party debris and folks sweeping pieces of 2013 under the rug, relatives celebrating first birthdays blurry eyed behind grateful tears and friends sitting bedside in hospitals with cries stuck in their throats.  None of us know how to figure it all out, but most of us have just gotten a new lease to do the figuring.  Nothing changes simply because the calendar did, yet everything feels like it could.
And all of the promise feels like it means something, because it must.