Day 1: What was the most prominent theme for your life in 2012? Why?

Throughout this past year, tangled up within the struggles and adulations, there has been one common thread to just about everything I've done.  I've been trying to find a name for that thread, a single word to use as a title for it, because it seems to want that kind of cohesion.  It's something that I've wanted as a theme for life, an overreaching impetus, for a very long time.  That theme is matriarchal; the nurturing of family.

I have been a mother for almost 14 years now.  Longer if you include gestational periods.  But in those 14 years, I never really felt like a matriarch.  I didn't feel I was nurturing, so much as I was doing my best at just scraping by.  I didn't feel... Powerful in it.  But that's changed.  And while that change has been happening slowly over the past few years, it's really come on full force in this last one.

At the end of 2011, the very end, we had Christmas here at my house.  Not just any Christmas, but a Christmas where my dad, and his girlfriend, and her daughter, and my brother, and my boyfriend's grandmother and mother came.  This was my first Christmas where I hosted my dad in my house.  Where I cooked for him in my kitchen, on my stove, with my pots and pans, and served him at my table, in my chairs.  It's something that held, and still holds, so much personal and cultural identity for me, having grown up in a family dynamic where food, and feasting, was a core expression of unity and affection.  It was a rite of passage, for me, cooking for my father.  And I went, in one 3 day period, from being "daddy's little girl" to being the female leader of my family -- a matriarch.  I took on the role that my grandmother, my mother, or my father's ex wife, had played for so many years, and I made it my own.

Since that point, I've seen so much more of that matriarchal nurturing in myself.  I don't know if it was there all along, and I just wasn't seeing it, or if last Christmas was a turning point in my personality, or what.  I suppose I could ask other people and see what they think.  But that's besides the point.  The point is, I see it in myself now.  I'm even embracing it.  I'm much more comfortable "mothering" the people I care about.  I'm more at ease with my protective instincts towards the people I love.  And this year has had a lot of occasion for me to be hit full force with those instincts.

Playing "nurse girlfriend" (no, not the kinky sort) for one boyfriend, when he had a health issue.  Fighting tooth and nail to protect my son from his fucked up father.  Working to find solutions to mother-not-quite-in-law financial and health problems.  Adding a second boyfriend to the mix, and supporting him with problems he's dealing with.  Being there when my sister got married.  Increasing connections with extended family that I haven't interacted with much, but should have.

I've put in a lot of effort (I won't call it work, because I don't really see it that way) to protect family, keep it safe, healthy, and feeling cared for, this year.  Even in doing things to better myself, so that I can be a better resource for them.  And family has grown for me, and thrived, because of it.

I think that's a pretty great theme to have for the year.  And it's something I'm proud of.