I am terrible with years. Ask me what happened in 2013 and I’ll stare at you like you’ve asked for my blood type. But ask me about my fifth grade teacher, my junior year of college, or the year Jack had to do school at home, and suddenly I’m fluent. I can tell you where I sat, what shoes I wore, and what the weather was doing because I really don’t remember time by numbers. I remember it by seasons.
Even when I was younger, years were never years. They were grades. They were chapters. They were the year Asia released “Only Time Will Tell,” or the year the space shuttle broke apart on live television—the big moments that became “before or after” in life. Everything else floated into a blur of “back in my 30s…”
Motherhood made that even truer. Years became the year he learned to read, or when school got hard, the year he got his braces off for the second time, and when we finally caught our breath. Mothers don’t live in decades. We live in chapters, which is why March feels like a hinge.
Spring isn’t loud about its arrival, but it is persuasive. It’s the season when everything starts to feel like it might be okay again, not because you flipped a calendar page, but because you sense it. I can finally sit on my porch in my special spot again. The sun comes up before I get out of bed, so I’m no longer waking up like an Arctic explorer bracing for survival.
I carry my plants outside and set them down like children released for recess. They stretch their pale arms toward the sun and soak up the sunshine the way nature intended. They don’t worry about melanoma, and I envy that. They just soak it all in and grow accordingly.
Which is more than I can say for me, inside on the couch, trying to read my daily verses during the 15 minutes of the day when actual sunlight manages to beam through the window and land directly on my lap like a benediction. It’s supposed to be a peaceful, holy pause. But without fail, by the seventh verse—God’s number of completion, mind you—my dogs begin their interpretive door dance. One wants out, one wants in, and one stares at me like I’m ruining his life. I open the door like a disgruntled butler, only for them to switch places and repeat the performance. At no point do all three agree on anything. I am being spiritually mugged by a three-headed chaos beast in fur coats.
And even if the dogs gave me a break, I’d still be doing battle with my own squirrel brain, fighting to remember what I just read, circling back to finish a prayer I started with good intentions and abandoned somewhere between “Dear Lord” and “Wait, did I move the laundry?” Inside, I’m trying to conjure presence.
Outside, it arrives. Because in spring, I can go sit on the porch, where the actual squirrels are. The cute, tail-flicking ones. I don’t have to fight my attention span—I just hand it over to the birds and the breeze and the sunrise creeping slowly northward every day. The doors are open, the dogs roam on their own, and for a few minutes, all I have to do is notice.
Sometimes I imagine the calendar I would keep if I were honest. It wouldn’t have months. It would have entries like Season of Looking for Golf Shirt, The Great Stomach Bug Weekend, Fireside During Winter Storm [WHATEVER NAME], and Week We All Ate Breakfast for Dinner and Called It a Win. That’s the time I know by heart. The real stuff never fits neatly into a grid anyway.
And while we’re being honest: January is not the new year. January is a frozen wasteland full of broken resolutions and unmatched mittens. No one becomes a new person in January. They become a slightly more tired version of the one they were in December, just colder. March is the real beginning. March is when people start opening windows again, remembering the sound of birds, and thinking, maybe I don’t need to retire in Portugal after all.
Of course, some days still fall apart. I try to sit outside with my tea and reflect, and the dogs immediately begin a fence war with the same neighbor dogs they see every day. Someone inside is yelling, “Where’s the good charger?” as if Nicholas Cage just spirited it away with the Declaration of Independence. The wind knocks over my mug. I give up and go inside, but I leave the door open and ignore the pollen that settles on the countertops.
March doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t solve problems or reorder calendars. But it does restore a sense of preferred rhythms. The days lengthen, the air starts to warm, and our moods begin to thaw. Mothers quietly reset the household clocks—not by dates, but by light.
So no, in ten years I probably won’t remember what happened in 2026. But I’ll remember that March was the month I put my plants back outside and started turning my face to the sun again.
And honestly, that’s the kind of time I’m willing to keep. The rest can stay in somebody else’s spreadsheet.