Bittersweet

Our year in Boise is over. It was a great year, it was a horrible year, it marked our lives indelibly. We survived the adventure. We loved it. We are a little worse for the wear.

This last year has been turbulent and life-changing. It was lonely and painful. We moved to the most remote metropolitan area in the country where we knew no one, had a baby, and learned that my dear mom has incurable cancer.

This last year has been turbulent and life-changing. It was beautiful and joyous. We turned co-workers into friends, made sweet memories with visiting family, gave birth to our precious Anna, and fell in love with an underrated and beautiful state.

In one short year, we experienced incomparable joy, deep love, profound sadness and paralyzing grief. We moved to Boise tentative and excited. We had the whole adventure ahead of us; we were pregnant and hopeful. I look back and realize how different I was then; how carefree I was.

I am not the same person who moved to Boise a year ago. I left a lot of me behind.

But I've learned that if allowed the bad will indelibly taint the good, and this I will not allow. Nor will I cheat myself by glossing over the pain. So I grapple earnestly with all my mixed feelings, all the joy and sorrow, happiness and tears that this year brought. I can't make sense of it all, and I can't fix it. I simply strive to accept it for what it was: both bitter and sweet.

Shauna Niequist writes in her book, Bittersweet, "...is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness."

And to this I say, Amen.