As the new year turns into plain old winter, it is no wonder that we get a little blue, a little draggy.  For most of us around the country, the skies are gray, it is chilly at best, or worse, and we have about twenty minutes of daylight each day.  But there is one factor in my life that has changed dramatically over the past year and that is this: I now have hope.

For probably most of the last 15 years I told myself I had hope and I tried to manufacture hope and I pretended to have hope.  But pretending to have hope is more pitiful than having no hope.  Even after I had been dragging myself through the muck that was my marriage, I still clung to an atom of hope for some miracle: maybe my husband would get it, that he was tearing apart his children’s family, and make real change.  But, I know now that it wouldn’t have worked out.  I was done.  I was pretending that our family could still have life.  But all the King’s horses and all the King’s men…you get it.

I don’t know exactly when I let the hope go, but the letting go didn’t make me hopeless.  The hopelessness was in having false hope.  And, once I knew in my heart that I was never going back to that life, I freed myself up for hope.  I made room for it.  Now, I couldn’t be more hopeful.  I actually have a smile on my face most of the time and believe me, that was not the case a year ago.  I smile for no reason, just walking down the street.  Sometimes, I catch myself smiling while I am walking the dog, for no reason.  I am watching TV and smiling, crazy.  At the grocery store, smiling. Driving and singing with the radio, smiling.  Knitting, smiling. Cooking, smiling.

And, I really have nothing to be hopeful about.  It doesn’t matter.  That hope comes from within.   I don’t know where I am going, but I know it can’t be as bad as where I have been.  I am so optimistic about the future that I feel excited every day when I wake up.