There’s a particular kind of magic in the rituals we create when our children are young, those small ceremonies that mark time not just as something passing but as something we are actively living through together. For years, our family gathered around bowls of noodles and potstickers as each Chinese New Year arrived, reading aloud what the zodiac held for us: my husband, the Horse, with his steady momentum and natural leadership; me, the Tiger, fierce and protective; our Dragon son, bold and imaginative; our Rabbit, gentle and intuitive. We cracked open chocolate-covered fortune cookies and laughed at the predictions, but beneath the lightness lay something quieter and deeper…a shared language for understanding ourselves and each other, a framework that somehow always seemed to know us better than we knew ourselves.

Those evenings feel both close and impossibly far away now. The boys have grown into young men with lives that pull them in directions I no longer guide. My husband and I have traveled separate paths. The kitchen table where we once gathered now sits in another house, or maybe no house at all. As 2025 draws to a close—this Year of the Snake that has been anything but gentle—I find myself returning to that old framework with new eyes. I understand now what I couldn’t have grasped then: the zodiac was never just a description of who we were. It was preparing us for who we would need to become.

The Reckoning (2025)

The Snake year is described as alchemical…a time of shedding and facing one’s own venom: toxic patterns, outdated beliefs, and identities kept long past their usefulness. It asks us to unknow ourselves so we can finally remember who we truly are. That has been the unmistakable work of 2025.

This year has not felt like a transformation so much as an excavation. Layer after layer peeled back, each one asking the same quiet, relentless question: Are you ready to let this go too? There were no shortcuts. No dramatic reinvention. Just the slow, sometimes brutal honesty of seeing clearly what could no longer come with me.

The Tiger in me has always known how to fight, how to protect, and how to hold the center when everything threatened to fall apart. That instinct made me a fierce mother. It carried me through impossible years. It kept everyone safe when I was running on fumes. But 2025 revealed something the Tiger didn’t want to admit… not everything I was protecting still needed protection. Some of what I was holding—old hurts, familiar roles, the identity I had when the boys were small—had calcified into armor that no longer fit. What once saved me had begun to weigh me down.

The Snake asked me to face the venom I’d been carrying, resentment dressed as sacrifice, fear masquerading as caution, grief postponed because there was always someone else who needed me more. This year, I was asked to shed the skin of the one who held everything together and trust that what lay beneath wasn’t weakness, but truth.

The Transformation

What I didn’t understand during those early New Year celebrations—watching my Horse husband nod knowingly, our Dragon son radiate enthusiasm, and our Rabbit son listen with quiet wisdom was that the zodiac was never static. It wasn’t a list of personality traits. It was a map of terrain. Each of us would have lessons to cross. The Horse would need to learn when to stop running. The Tiger would need to learn that not every threat requires teeth. The Dragon would need to temper fire with water. The Rabbit would need to trust that gentleness is not fragility.

These lessons arrive in cycles. And 2025—the Snake year—was my most demanding teacher yet. It showed me what happens when you stop resisting the molt. Because that is what this year has been: a molting. The shedding of a self that served everyone much too long and lost herself, which is why Paris felt like a freeing of the old and a hello to the new. The release of the enabling mother and wife, now more in partnership mode. The letting go of the belief that my wholeness must come second to everyone else’s comfort.

The notes I’ve been sitting with say that what we don’t alchemize becomes venom, while what we face becomes medicine. I see now how much of my pain came not from the hard things themselves but from my resistance to them—from the belief that I should have been able to prevent, fix, or outwork my way through loss.

The Snake taught me something the Tiger never had to learn: that there is wisdom in the pause. In stillness. In waiting long enough for the truth to speak without force. That sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing at all—just listen.

The Bridge: Closing of 2025, Approaching 2026

And now, here we are slithering through the final day of 2025 toward the Year of the Horse. My husband’s year, though he won’t be beside me to celebrate it. Maybe that, too, is exactly right. Because the Horse year ahead isn’t about running together anymore. It’s about learning what the Horse has always known: that momentum born of clarity looks very different from speed born of fear. The Horse runs because it knows where it’s going—not because it’s escaping something behind it.

These final Snake days are for one thing. Not to rush the shedding, but to honor it. To trust that the intuition sharpened in the dark will guide me forward. To understand that I didn’t survive the venom just to stand still. I survived it to remember how to move.

The Medicine

I think about those past New Year celebrations now with tenderness. The boys so young, and the future still untested. All of us reading zodiac traits like instruction manuals, not yet realizing they were weather reports, telling us what conditions we might face, not what choices we’d make.

I wouldn’t change anything. That Tiger mother was exactly who we all needed then. And this version of me… raw from shedding, quieter, clearer, less armored… is exactly who I need to be now. The zodiac was never about prediction. It was about the pattern and the reminder that we are always in motion, always cycling, always learning. That each year brings the medicine we need, even when it tastes like poison going down.

Looking Forward

As 2026 stretches ahead, I feel something new. Not certainty or arrival, but a curiosity about what is to come. My work in 2025 has not hardened me. It has clarified me.

Celebrating the New Year will be different. As Tim and I will be traveling… no noodles, only FaceTime with the boys, now men, navigating their own cycles. Maybe a chocolate fortune cookie will be cracked open in a quiet kitchen somewhere. I will smile at the reminder that magic doesn’t disappear; it just changes shape.

The Horse year will ask me to move. And I’m ready…not because I’ve perfected anything, but because I’ve learned what I couldn’t know before: the point was never to avoid the hard years, but to move through them awake enough to extract the medicine. The Tiger in me has learned to pause. The Horse in me is learning to run again. And somewhere between the venom and the medicine, between the shedding and the becoming, I am finding my way home.