I cleaned out my closet yesterday afternoon. Today there are two shopping bags filled with shoes, six shopping bags filled with shirts and tees and knits and sweaters and jackets and skirts and dresses, and one laundry basket stacked full of jeans and pants pushed into a corner of my bedroom. In the back of my station wagon are a couple of old dress coats and two yard-sized garbage bags filled with the clothing I suspect won’t interest the women working at the consignment store tomorrow morning. When I finish writing this I’ll pile Archie, Kit and Jack into their car seats and leave for the Goodwill nearest our home. There I’ll wait in line to hand those dress coats and garbage bags over to whoever’s working at the donation collection door today.

I did this last year, I know, and knowing as much makes me smile at my memories of what was because, my god, so much has changed. My children, they’re growing, and as they are they’re teaching me to move forward as well.

I went to the gym Thursday morning and as I was wrapping up the W. O. D. one of the ladies with whom I usually workout stopped by with her husband to visit. She’s been away from the gym since Thanksgiving, recovering from a back injury, and when we spoke on Thursday she gave me hell for not writing here more often. “Come on, Anne,” she chided. “November fourth? Give me a break!”

She’s right, of course, as she usually is, so I spent the last few days going about my business, trying to figure out how to come here and begin again. I’ve thought about it and it seems that no matter how I turn things over in my head I keep doubling back to the same explanation for my absence, to the same way to start over.

The shortest way I know to explain it all is simple: I got my shit together. I know it’s always appeared that I had everything figured out. And I did, in a way. But I’ll tell you that all that figuring out didn’t come without a great deal of emotional wrangling.

I don’t really know when it began to happen, but at some point over the past few months everything began clicking into place, my conflicted feelings dissipated, and what I’ve found again is the kind of confidence I’d been lacking since Archie was born. It’s noticeable, too, this change in me because a couple weeks ago I did something or I said something or maybe it was a little bit of both and when I did whatever it was John looked and me and declared, “Hey, look! It’s the old Anne! She’s back!”

I understood exactly what he was saying so I smiled hugely and replied, “Yeah, but I’m a better version of the old Anne.” I know that’s true because I’ve been feeling as much for a while. And maybe that’s why I didn’t write about it, because I worried that naming it aloud would render it untrue. I wanted to protect the way I was feeling. I hoped to keep it under wraps until my revised sense of self felt comfortable again.

So here I am, a wiser woman I than I was six years ago, but one who finally forgives herself. Yeah, I said it and now that I have I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to do so.

The truth is that I haven’t really figured out what I’ve forgiven myself for, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with Archie… For having a baby like Archie, for sometimes resenting a child like Archie, for loving Archie because of his imperfections with such ferocity that I usually find myself excluding the people surrounding us who don’t feel the same way I do. As I already wrote, whatever it is I’m forgiving myself for I don’t really know. All I do know is that when I’m on my game, when I’m running like the wind and I can’t feel my feet hit the pavement or my breathe in my lungs, when I just am, in my heart and in my head I hear my own voice repeating this one thing: “You’re redeemed. You’re redeemed.”

And that feels like a new start.