Stuff I Did in 2017, including Accepting my Balding Head and Becoming a Soccer Mom

I'm a big fan of reflection. I feel like it's better than resolutions. Way better. And it's nearly Setsubun, an obscure and hardly explainable holiday in Japan where you throw toasted soybeans out your window or sliding glass door and scream at demons.  (no joke)  "Oni wa sotto, fuku wa uchi."  Demons away, fortune come hither.  Or something like that.  My distant countrymen sure know how to celebrate the coming of spring.

Here are a handful of things I did in my 39th year that seemed momentous or odd or horrifying. Take your pick.

• I became a soccer mom.  It was time for my son to try organized sports, and soccer was the thing that worked for our schedule.  I felt terribly awkward, trying to figure out how practices and games and uniforms and chit chat worked. And before I knew it, I had created the team banner (and was responsible for bringing it every week), kept the parents organized around snacks and made a few new friends. This sounds so tame. Which is why it so thoroughly freaked me out. And the depths of my freak out were deep. NEVER would I have envisioned myself doing this! And it was great. We lost nearly every game, the boys learned a lot, and had a good time. I'll be back again next year.
• I accepted my baldness. Yes. It's true. I have a disappearing follicle problem, courtesy my maternal genetics. I considered "row-gain" (ha) for women, but decided against it; primarily because once you stop using it, the hair loss just progresses anyway. I started taking biotin, fashioned a really clever comb-over hair style, and (mostly) stopped worrying out my stupid hair. I try to pretend that I'll be fine shaving it all off and getting wigs if it thins any more, but alas. I'm still just that little bit too vain to truly not care.
• I started opening up about my husband's anxiety and depression. I started dropping subtle hints to a few friends that I was struggling and badly. One or two picked up on it and chimed in with their own stories of marital hardship, disappointment, inexplicable hope, desolation, loneliness and resilience. I'm developing a probably very overdue view of marriage as something that only a lucky few really get in healthy, big, lasting doses. The rest of us work harder, suffer longer, receive lesser and feel lower than those fortunate ones. We smile and put on makeup and show up to ladder-climbing jobs anyway. But it's gritty and bitter and exhausting most days. Mental/emotional illness is simply nasty stuff.
• I decided it was time for a make over. I've spent the past three decades cultivating my intellect, character, and other insides. To the neglect of my outsides. Unfortunately.  And damn.  I decided to start working on that oh-so-coveted "executive presence" I keep hearing about. But this time, I started working from the outside in. Some makeup tutorials, trips to Macy's and many blog readings later, I've achieved some starting motion that will likely take me a couple more years to manifest. It's a start.
• I proudly wear granny panties. Although, my sister disagrees that my nomenclature is incorrect. While true granny panties go all they way up to just under-boob, mine go all the way up to my waist, which is a considerable distance with my bulbous gut and extra-long torso (courtesy paternal genetics, this time). God bless cotton and the right cut around the legs that doesn't chafe.  That's all I have to say about that. And also this: ladies - being comfortable is always underrated.

It's been a year of many internal changes.  I'm proud to call these decisions mine, although I perpetually feel underdeveloped, at least half-way clueless and victorious all at the same time.