Happy everything. | January 2021 Love Note
Today is January 1, 2021. We are turning the page on 2020. Happy New Year, lovelies. And happy 1 year anniversary to us! It’s Love, Maaden’s birthday!
I birthed this community one year ago, bright-eyed and excited to finally do my thing. The thing that God created me to do. A happy marriage between the things that I care about, have expertise in, and am just plain good at. A sweet spot between women’s wellness, ministry, communication, and gathering people together.
On the first of January 2020, I pushed Love, Maaden out into the world publishing my website and sending out my first ever Love Note.
On the first of February 2020, I aired the premiere episode of Love, Maaden: The Podcast alongside my friend and co-host, Tennille Daniels. Around that time, I also learned that I was a few weeks pregnant.
By the first week of that March, I would lose that pregnancy. My fifth loss. And by the following week, I found myself having to cancel my only living child’s first birthday party. A milestone I’d dreamed of for years.
And on the first of April 2020, one day after our state went under lockdown, I brought in my 37th birthday at home.
My birthday gift to myself? Branding for my business. The colors were bold, the fonts clean and modern, and it included a beautiful new logo emblazoned with the tagline, “get together & talk.” I’d built an entire brand around gathering together with friends, face to face, around the table. And then COVID hit. If ever there was an antithesis to Love, Maaden, social distancing was it.
The weeks and months staggered on, bruised by inequity, fear, and relentless stress. I saw my husband cry for the first time in the ten years since we’d met. The trauma of seeing Black men lynched, and left for dead, in broad day light wore heavy on his spirit. We suddenly and inexplicably lost his cousin at the tender age of 19. My mother had to undergo a major surgery with none of us able to stay with, or even visit her, in the hospital. Loved one after loved one contracted COVID-19. Some grew gravely ill, close friends lost parents, in-laws, and grandparents. COVID-19 aside, it was a difficult season for so many good friends — divorce, miscarriage, cancer, heart problems, panic attacks, even a brain aneurysm. I prayed and prayed some more. The constant undercurrent of anxiety tethered to me like a clingy shadow on a sunny day. Yet we found ways to bear it, to endure it, and to hope and believe for better.
Despite the distance, we managed to grow closer. We had virtual check-ins and regular FaceTime dates, game nights over House Party and happy hours over Zoom. We sent voice memos, and texts, and video chatted on every app that offered it. We drove by, and honked, and waved. We brought balloons, and made signs, and sent flowers. We left food and gifts on one another’s doorsteps, made care packages, and mailed cards. We cooked out on decks and picnicked on porches, we visited vineyards and went for hikes — masked and cautious — yet happy just to be together. We had real and hard conversations about race, and privilege, loss and grief, depression, anxiety, stress, and trauma. Always careful to be gracious with one another as we balanced all the things, the feelings, the kids, the businesses, the loneliness.
We grew this Love, Maaden community, together, too. Thirty podcast episodes, twelve Love Notes, eight virtual speaking engagements, and over 200 posts and 2,000 new friends and followers across social networks. Thank you. I am so encouraged by our renewed faith, by our persistent hope, but most of all by all of our generous and reciprocal acts of love.
Love,
Maaden