2025: It Happened

What else is there to say?

It’s all so arbitrary, isn’t it? We want to take stock, to make meaning, but most of all we want to change. We want to wipe clean the board and start anew. General sentiment about 2025 is pretty not great, and I agree—endless political horrors, many galling losses for people I love—but it was also, for me, a coming home. Graduating beyond the postpartum era means having to identify my own desires once more, follow my own instincts, and as terrifying as that is, it is also a giddy kind of teenage release. I want so much to be thoughtful and considered, chic and refined, and instead I am a whirling dervish of horniness and angst. I threw a lot at the wall this year in my attempts to become new, just to see what might stick, and not much did. Next year, though — surely next year will be the year it all goes right?

Here in our house, Lily turned three and Mira turned six, and they remain the primary subjects of my rapturous attentions. Vic got a vasectomy this spring so now I am no longer a vessel, no longer a useful piece in a grand production line. What else? Last year Mira smashed her head open on Dec 31 so I hesitate to make this pronouncement BUT we may make it through the year without any emergency hospital visits and for the parent of a chronically ill kid, that feels like cleansing, like benediction. I am trying to finish the final (maybe???) edit of my novel, which is currently putting me in mind of the grand Little Women gesture of tossing my entire laptop into the fire. Never have I ever hated anything I created so much, not even Lily that time she told me, “Mama, your pants are boring and you are NOT a great cook.” We went to a lot of really nice places and saw a lot of really nice people. We are so lucky, and we want more.

The world keeps turning and we stagger on, trying to be better kinder bigger brighter, trying to mend what we can. Here are some 2025 superlatives. Thank you for being a friend.

2025: The Mosts.

Song I would have identified with way too hard at 28: “Sex and the City”

Artist I would have chewed my own limb off for at 28: Cameron Winter

Lesson I continued to fail to learn: The work will not get better. It will not get easier. You will keep doing it regardless. It will continue to feel mostly awful.

Best thing I ate: Eva’s linguine and clams in a house by a lake in Maine, served in a beautiful bowl alongside a beautiful bottle of white wine to my beautiful girlfriends, while our combined thirteen children were in the care of people who were not us.

Best drugs: Rizatriptan, Lexapro, that one therapeutic ketamine session where I got to introduce my daughters to my dead grandparents (they were really proud of me!!!)

Best bouquet:

i grew these!

Best ringlets:

i grew these, too!

Hardest decision: Whether or not to abandon my efforts at a middle part and go back to the traditional elder millennial side part, ongoing, please weigh in.

Favourite TV: Diego Luna’s cheekbones; Michelle Williams’ pixie cut; lots of broken bones and broken hearts; my gay hockey sons.

Thing I’d love to say I never think about but instead am going to devote at least three paragraphs to now: I turned 41 this year and it all feels very Sword of Damocles. Getting older has filled me with a frenetic mania that so far has no satisfying outlet. I feel the need to do something dramatic, something intentional, but mostly I just stare obsessively at the lines on my neck. I did finally pin down a skin care routine and I also inherited a red light mask that I hate to report seems to…work? To be clear, I’m fully on the other side of my agave death bloom and also I am apparently losing all my hair, so many more horrors await. 75 Hotter was mostly a bust in that I didn’t really do it and my sexy little pedometer broke, but like every other self-respecting perimenopausal woman I have also started experimenting with strength training and that’s something I expect to become really insufferable about in 2026. There is so much more I want to do with my body and brain and face before they all fail me. I want to have power. I want to feel the way every white man has felt, like I could walk into a room and demand something and get it.

Best new (old) habit: I started wanting again, and god, what a rush. What a feeling, unhinged desire. To want a thing, to be naked with want, to put yourself in the position of being hungry, tooth to neck.

Best new (new) habit: I now volunteer once a week at a local family shelter, playing with the babies so their moms can have a few hours off. I have nothing eloquent to say about this other than that I feel very grateful to get to do it.

Wardrobe MVP: Literally no one in my life likes these ridiculous $1.99 thrifted sheer cotton bloomers except for me.

i feel great

Books I read and loved: Heart the Lover. Wreck. Katabasis. Loved & Missed. The Antidote. The Bright Sword. Deep Cuts. The Wedding People. The Float Test. Consider Yourself Kissed. Martyr! Audition. The Anthropologists. Writers & Lovers.

Last minute contender for most played song of the year: “I’ll Believe in Anything” (IYKYK)

Most elation I felt in any one moment: Singing along to Rilo Kiley playing “A Better Son/Daughter” at MGM Music Hall. Hot days and hot nights with old friends in LA. Sitting on stage with Catherine Newman. “I’m coming to the cottage.” A summer night in Uzes with V, two glasses of wine and cobblestone streets, when he promised me we’d move to Europe for a year (he took it back). A beach day in October.

Best friends: Mine, no contest. Taking Aminatou’s words to heart: “Date your friends. Make plans and keep them. Bring them cheap flowers from the bodega. Sit on the same side of the banquette at the restaurant. Hold their hand when you cross the street. Tell them your secrets and guard theirs with your life.”

Resolutions I still stand by: Every one of these.

Resolutions I’m adopting for the new year: I assume at some point wisdom will kick in, the great knowledge will descend and I will be freed of earthly concerns, but for now I want to get weirder and hotter. I want not to acquiesce but be baroque and furious, full up of my own righteous desire. The world is trying to shuffle me off its edge and I will not go gently into that good night. I will take what’s left for me in my teeth. I will make a meal of this life yet.

Yours, as ever -

m.