Yield means to give up and give over. To relenquish or surrender. And I’m not talking about the type where I stretch out on my porch and stamp, “welcome” across my forehead.

I’ve learned much more in the last five years of marriage than I did in the first seven. When I was 21 and only married for a few months, the manager of our apartment complex confronted us because we/I was slamming doors and we/he was yelling too much. She said neighbors were complaining and that we’d have to keep our arguements to ourselves. Point taken.

(Did you really think I was going find an appropriate “X” word?)

Blogging my (failed) attempts at moderate weight loss this past fall has been very exposing. Much more than I thought it would be.

I kept myself accountable to a weekly video post, sometimes winning the seven-day war, but usually fizzling into a post-weigh-in period of laziness and undisciplined eating.

I exposed my actual weight in real numbers, my failures, and my eating habits.

It is so difficult and uncomfortable to show so much of myself. (A little bit like that horrible nightmare you have when find yourself in 11th grade US History and didn’t remember to put on your pants. Or that you are grocery store shopping naked. Yes, I’ve had that dream. Scarring, I know.)

But even though exposure is highly disconcerting, it is a good thing. I’ve learned more about myself in the journey, I’ve become more open with others and I’m learning to be less embarrassed in general. I think exposure also shows others that I am real and that really, at the core, we are all very similar in our fears and struggles.

So, thank you 2008 for showing me that the discomfort of exposure can bring about good results. Even if I am still at the same weight as when I began.

My daughters tear into the bowl of Christmas cookies and ice cream I put in front of them. There are chocolate drips down chins, red and green sprinkles scattered and sticky little fingers. They consume their treat as if they’ve never been fed.

However, if I put a plate of potatoes, vegetables and barbeque chicken on the table the scene changes. They’ll pick, nibble at the meat, never touch the corn and sniff the potatoes. They hunger for the edges of life, not the everyday.

“U”is rich because there are so many un- words.

And I’m guessing that the word “unruffled” has something to do with feathers and birds, but what I’m leaning (and again, this will be the challenge of my life for the next 50 years) is to be un-bothered by things that are out of my control and un-involved with situations that don’t concern me.

This should be on my trying-really-hard-to-learn list.

I’m only tenacious when I want to be, it seems. Its hard to be tenacious about my eating habits and discplining my children consistently, but not hard to be resolved about exercising or running. It takes willfulness and tenacity to get through a single day with a hair-cutting two-year-old sometimes but then I seem to lose all resolve some weeks about keeping my home clean.

I want to have tenacity. Not the stubborn/obstinate kind. But the firm, resolved I-can-do-this attitude. I want to be strong.

But for some reason my knees are weak by 10 am and all good intention I have built up the night before crumbles into a handful of M&Ms and unfiled mail. But other days, I seem to have a purpose in my sight and I know where I’m headed all day long. These days I feel like I have the tenacity to take steps forward in my life.

Resolved living, tenacious motherhood, the courage to stand up to my own temptations – this is what I am only just beginning to learn this year.

When I went to my writer’s conference in March of 2008, I was as much of a writing novice as a high school student in ninth grade composition.

I’d had a 10 year writing “silence” before I began blogging in July 2007 but I’d always looked at writing as my dream job. I thought that I couldn’t really become in a writer (seriously, who does that?), so I would teach school. When I quit my job as a middle school Language Arts teacher to become a mother, writing was the furthest thing from my mind.

I go through reading bursts in my life. Sometimes it comes when I have naturally more time built into the fabric of my day (summer vacation, plane trips, weekends away without kids).

Not for food (although a bowl of ice cream and a good novel on a summer evening do taste quite well together). But hunger for the written word.