Finally, a sharing mood
catching up as the year (ends) begins ✨ notes on home and a prediction for 2023.
I started to write this a few times over the last couple months. Our family had a long, up and down end of year. No ER visits, no life or death moments for our nuclear fam but the back to back deaths of our beloved 93 year old Lauer Matriarch and Chapa Patriarch in the late fall really took a toll on our family at large. Both deaths bringing lots of tears, cross country airline miles, so many hugs, beautiful words and a very clear transition of generational power, respect and responsibility. And still a void.
I have been keeping quiet and trying to be considered, thoughtful and purposeful. I retreated a bit due to this, due to work and due to the grudge of parenthood. Taking lessons from the year and thinking about how I can best grow and evolve as a new year on Earth is here.
We packed up our home and life in Portland last week and returned to Mexico New Years Eve. The transition last week was unexpectedly emotional for me. I was fried. The ill and undiagnosed baby and subsequent 3 weeks of no sleep were mostly to blame. But also spending two extra months in our house in Portland. Two mostly rainy and dark months where our life seemed to explode in the house and make for a tougher clean up, move out, purge week than I have been used to in the past. I blame the holiday decor for this. I may or may not have taken down 50% of our decorations by 3pm on Christmas day.
Emptying our house, donating items and cleaning it top to bottom is WORK but it is also extremely liberating and a process I feel fortunate to experience more than once a year. And as a bonus, this summer I unilaterally decided our home’s interior aesthetic and identity to be ‘eclectic minimal’ and redecorated to suit this new vision. The minimal turns out is extremely useful when you come and go with the plan to rent your furnished home.
If you are thinking ‘wtf is eclectic minimal?’ I just shared some fotos my cousin Brit took of the house in early December on IG. Our living room (above) probably best brings this idea to life for me.
*TANGENT* Which reminds me! I have been locked out of my @lydialauer account since September. A dumb mishap when I tried to login on our ipad and entered the wrong pw. If anyone knows how I can recover that account I would greatly appreciate it!
Back to the fotos… Initially I had just wanted her to snap fotos of the newly painted kitchen but then we decided to go rogue and shoot a few more spaces that have evolved over our six months in Portland. Thanks to Brit you can’t even tell that we had our full Christmas set up including fully decorated tree in the living room. I did however briefly dismantle the mantel garland and stockings decor as well as the newly and hastily acquired ‘winter critters display’ (similar) on the credenza.
As I mentioned above I swiftly un-decorated the house. And it felt so good. I might spend time in a future send talking about that house and how good it feels to land there when we do.
I am always wanting to write more and in turn share more. Writing for me is a therapy. A reflection and a study in myself. I was an excellent journal-er and home/fam gossip reporter as a tween and teen. Filling empty notebooks with comments and stories. Nothing important and nothing juicy. But feelings and observations. The advent of social media has allowed me to return, explore and ultimately redefine this practice.
So my prediction for 2023 is that blogs and long-ish form written content is going to make a comeback. This might be a self fulfilling prophecy but outside my writing and content creation I am finding myself discovering new voices on substack or returning to blogs like it is 2009! So please share any thought starters, questions or topics that you want this senior journal-er to explore. In turn I am sharing some of the reads I have been enjoying lately:
Maybe Baby - most recent send breaking down “the trouble with ‘trying’” to get pregnant
The Grudge Report - Bess Kalb is a comedy writer and her weekly sends on parenthood are fantastic. This one made me LOL and I am sorry if I already texted it to you!
Culture Study - I started following Anne Helen’s writing in the early pandemic days as she wrote a lot about work culture and WFH/ zoom culture. Her sends push readers to explore and think more about the culture that surrounds them. It is always great.
More to come. Happy New Year, Feliz Año, talk soon & thank you for reading.
xx ly