What did 2013 bring?

The last day of the year is a good timing to reflect, to look back on your year and plan the year ahead. Naturally we spent the whole day in front of the TV, watching all Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies (had to force my parents to watch the first one. After that they refused to stop). I am not good with sums, of the maths kind or of the soul ones, and yet here I am trying. After all it's what one does for the new year when one is the kind of person who is in touch with one's feelings and all that. I can't say that I'm not, and I actually really like taking "life inventories" every once in a while (say monthly or so), it's the having to do that on command, while the house is full of people who keep talking to me, and nicer things to do that makes this task seems impossible. 

So as a first step I went back to last year, because last year I wrote a 2012 recap that wasn't easy for me to read even now. At the start of the year I've had such high hopes for London and my 2013 - What will 2013 bring? I really can't say. At the moment we are here, building back the foundations of our lives. Getting the kids settled in and feeling secure again, Hidai progressing with work, as a family we are trying to enjoy everything London has to offer us, making memories. And for me? I know it might sound silly or stupid, but for me this year is that - to see that everyone's settled down. This year is about the ability to just breathe easy.
My next move was to sit everyone down and ask them to summarise 2013 for me, to tell me about their year so I could think more clearly of my own.
2013 has not been an easy year around here, and as I listened to everyone else summarising the year the good and bad mixing together, the laughter and the tears, the two side of the coin, it seemed harder than ever summing up this year. If I have to choose one thing to say about 2013, it is that it brought us fights and battles in every aspect of our lives.
2013 made us look at the way we react to what life throws at us and change it.
2013 was a year of change.

Changes are a funny thing. While we crave stability and predictability, most things in life change all the time, in ways we don't even realise until one day we stop and look back. We change all the time, in ways we don't realise, in places we don't imagine we could or would or want to. It hit me last night, after we've finished a bottle of wine and watched John Bishop on BBC1 until 2am how much I have changed in the course of one year. Silly enough this year is the year we learned to drink, and the year we discovered British comedians, it's also the year I've discovered I have white hairs and got a fringe, it's the year Yon went to school full time and for the first time in almost a decade I had free time to discover who I am and what I want to do, it's the year I went out to have fun with friends and without Hidai for the first time in more than a decade. 

2012 taught me to not plan anymore, to live in the moment and never have certainties and fantasies about how things "should" be. 2013 taught me to be fearless. It's the year I decided to stop being afraid and never say "no" to opportunities.

2013 will forever be Yon's year. It was the year in which we discovered Yon's Ocular Albinism and learned how you live with being a parent to a child with disability. We've opened the year with an EDD test to get a diagnosis to something we didn't even understand and ended it with getting Yon's Partially Blind registration recommendation. 

2013 will forever be the year in which we've had to deal with the Home Offices's ability to make life near impossible for people just because they can, and learned how it feels to really be an immigrant.

2013 is the year in which Hidai's product hit the market (and people in Portsmouth can now use Nectar Local).

2013 will forever be the year in which we discovered how our control and ability to help our children is slipping away more and more every day.

2013 will forever be the year in which we discovered we no longer have babies, or toddlers or young children. We have left that party never to come back.

2013 will forever be the year I started my blog, and have build my own place. I want to write a separate post about what my blog gave me, but I will say here it gave me friends, and memories, and confidence, and a voice of my own. I started 2014 with 600 Facebook likes, 100,000 pageviews and a place near enough to the top 500. All of these are things I couldn't have imagined are possible. All of which things I still don't believe are real. 

2013 was a year with less photos than usual, we didn't buy anything new (ok, except for my new Nespresso machine), we stayed in the same house, in the same city, in the same country, in the same job, in the same school. 

We haven't changed any of the big things in life and yet I can't help but feel it changed so much. 

As for 2014? What will it bring? For the past 5 years, every time I am asked this question I give the same answer. What I wish for next year is a new iPhone and some peace. I replaced three iPhones in this time, and have yet to have one year of peace. 

Will 2014 be any different? Probably. 

After all I want a new Mac this year.