Happy New Year, my faithful readers! While your girl has been busy with some end-of-year / early-January blues, I do hope your holiday season has been as tranquil as the rich Southern matriarch Victoria from The White Lotus (when on her pills), that your friends and family showed you more affection than a love-bomber on a second date, and that your plates were as full as if it was my Bulgarian grandma filling them up for my American brother-in-law.
Now, having anxiously cosily settled into the new year and beaming with cliché-driven zeal, let me tell you about the lessons the very last day of 2025 had in store for me.
“We only have 5 hours to get ready”, my mom conveyed to me with utmost urgency at 11 am on December 31st, having seriously overestimated both the accuracy of her math calculations and my will to live towards the end of the year.
Following the ancient Slavic ways, I spent the last days of December caught between constant intrafamilial conflict and severe overeating. At least for me, spending holidays with family often makes for an uneasy coexistence of care and conflict. But a true Slav has learned to function in this orderly-disorderly economy of love and resentment… And as the land’s traditional hospitality dictates, to warmly receive guests even amidst the emotional minefield of tensions (colloquially referred to as напрежонка).
Only an hour before our lovely friends were about to arrive for a girls-only New Years Eve, me and my mom fought: the type of fight one could only ever have with their mother. Emotions were out. Extremely unlikely connections were made. Both our psychoanalysts were evoked!
Yet, no matter how infuriating, illogical, or dramatic, once the turbulence had passed, the match that first ignited our frustration quietly transformed. It became yet another great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key… What did we even fight about, cry about? At this point, our therapists should do the heavy-lifting and duel it out to determine the details.
Meanwhile, to keep my sanity, I’ve been trying to hold onto an idea from Christy Wampole’s essay You Will Never Be Able to Thank Your Mother Enough read here:
To have a mother is to be in perpetual deficit of thanks toward her. This missing gratitude is a kind of high-interest loan that can never be paid back.
Wampole unfolds this idea through imagery of the biological and social consequences a mother bears in bringing a child to existence, yet ultimately suggests that thankfulness is not a balance sheet to be settled but rather a lifelong surrender to the imperfect, ineffable essence of maternal love.
Of course, if you and your mom are throwing plates at each other – easier said than done, right? For me, this type of deep existential gratitude for being brought to life or whatever (by mainly causing pain to your mom, while your dad’s contribution was the fun part) – is one of those thoughts that doesn’t resolve anything, but quietly rearranges how I see things.
If my mother could literally grow me, the chonky little baby I was, and accept that by virtue of our biological existence, I am not conscious enough to appreciate it – shouldn’t I be able to graciously swallow her occasionally brutal, always unsolicited critiques of how I chop cucumbers?
One might assume so. However, the chonky baby grew to become a fit but sometimes bitter young lady with a complicated relationship to generational differences. That being so, she, as well as I assume many others, could use a little reminder around the holidays that we can indeed never thank our mothers enough. And while we are not debtors owing an immeasurable emotional loan, the complex nature of becoming a mother makes it so that, in my case at least, I would like to bring a bit more daughterly grace into 2026.
Now, after that slightly heavy topic, let’s get back to the New Year’s Eve plotline. My mom and I had silently buried the hatchet mere minutes before we absolutely had to, and I dare say we managed to host a peaceful girlboss dinner (as true Balkan women do).
In Bulgaria, New Year’s Eve isn’t complete without banitsa – a flaky, savory pastry that somehow manages to taste divine and inspirational at the same time. The real fun, though, comes in the form of tiny paper fortunes tucked inside, often rhyming, always cheeky. This year, I pulled two: and yes, I will absolutely assume what they say to be 100% a prophecy because it is convenient:
Simply put: the female heteronormative romantic dream.
And if you’ve waded through A Contemporary Lover’s Discourse (read here) – my confessional self-proclaimed magnum opus on modern dating, you will know – this girl could use some delusionally positive forecast for 2026! Or else, as Elena Ferrante puts it:
I’m in danger of going deaf, mute and turning nihilistic thanks to the countless failures and the unpredictability of the rare successes.
Yet, for now, I shall self-impose a non-nihilistic peace of mind given that the banitsa baaasically guaranteed my romantic triumph this year! Sure, modern romance might be pushing its luck these past 10 years, but insofar as a ChatGPT-generated fortune can still light a new hopeful spark within me, I guess I remain a devoted and optimistic contemporary lover…
Later on that evening, in the midst of pleasant conversations – as the French say, de tout et de rien (of everything and nothing) – I had two thoughts. First, my tight black jumpsuit was about to explode both from the banitsa (we need many good fortunes, hey) as well as from my friend Lily’s brilliant chocolate-raspberry tart. And second, with a heavy stomach, I needed to tend to yet another girlboss in the apartment – my dog.
My baby, my moon and stars - Jara, had stayed alone in my bedroom while we ate because she is too socially awkward to handle more than one new person at a time. Else, she gets snappy – relatable, I know.
So, as I entered the room to walk her before my two girlfriends and I went out clubbing, I stumbled upon a highly unpleasant picture.
Devastatingly for everyone involved and with an ounce of cruel irony: Jara had produced a poopy.
I then acted on a weird impulse and announced in the living room: “Okay, listen up. I have good and bad news.” As if our guests didn’t already deal with enough disappointments in 2025, I had to quickly reveal there was in fact no good news, only bad. In all likelihood, the joke failed to amuse the audience at the no-boys-allowed dinner, since graciously handling disappointment is, after all, a skill most women cultivate over decades.
So what is the great annual lesson here?
Well, firstly – do not radically change your dog’s diet before big events as they might get diarrhea and embarrass you in front of your friends and family!
Secondly – if Jara was to ever poop herself, doesn’t it show a great existential understanding on her part that she chose to do it on December 31st 2025, and not January 1st 2026? What if I had come home at 4:30 am to discover she shat all over my 2026 vision board? Or I had woken up on January 1st, full of naïveté and hope that this year would be my year, only to have to clean dog feces?
Instead, my dog gave me the dignity to deal with just one last messy situation and intellectualise it as the End of an Era. Sure, I might have slightly teared up in the taxi, but ultimately I choose to believe that Jara’s upset tummy was an omen for a greater wisdom:
May all of our shit stay in 2025 <3
P.S. Shout out to the divas who shamelessly danced the year away, faced their ex’s new girlfriends in the club and graciously accepted the very first disappointment of 2026: all the cute guys at the club were gay!
