Every February, we ask a rodent whether we can have our lives back yet.
We call it Groundhog Day, as if naming the ritual makes it reasonable, as if a small animal pulled blinking from the earth can tell us how much longer we’re supposed to endure. Shadow or no shadow, we lean in. We want a deadline. We want winter to agree to the terms.
This year, I believed him. Briefly. The way you believe anything that promises relief when you’re already tired.
Television prepared me for a gentler version of snow. Lorelai and Rory could smell it before it came. Felicity once stood beneath pink flakes and felt the city soften, as though winter were a mood rather than a force. In those stories, snow is a signal: romance, beginning, pause.
In real life, snow is an argument with gravity.
A few weeks ago, after a hearing, I stopped at a friend’s house to drop something off. I was wearing heels. Not because I had to, but because I assumed I could. I assumed the ground would meet me halfway. I assumed winter followed rules.
The first fall happened before the car door was even closed—a sudden slide backward on invisible ice, saved only by my hand on the bumper. I laughed. It felt like slapstick, the kind of fall that exists to warn you.
The second fall corrected that interpretation. Forward this time. Hands flat against ice so cold it erased sensation. I stood more slowly, noticing the cold now, noticing myself.
By the third fall, flat on my back, papers lifting into the air and settling again, I stayed down longer than necessary, staring at the sky, thinking about how quickly confidence leaves the body once gravity has spoken.
The fourth fall was theatrical. Face-first. Glasses flung into the street. Girl Scout cookie forms everywhere. I lay there long enough to imagine the scene from a distance, the way winter invites you to do once it strips you of dignity. If I died here, it would not be tragic so much as instructional.
Still, I didn’t stop. Because the errand still existed. Because children were expecting their cookie materials. Because winter does not cancel responsibility, it only raises the price.
Falls five and six came on the way back to my car, quieter, slower, almost formal. By then, I understood the rhythm. Stand. Move. Slip. Pause. Stand again. Each fall hurt more, but surprised me less. Repetition clarifies what optimism obscures.
Television never shows this part. Getting up again. The way persistence stops feeling heroic and starts feeling procedural. The way motherhood teaches you to keep moving, not because you believe the ground will hold, but because stopping is not an option.
I eventually made it into my car. My hands were numb enough that the heated steering wheel felt theoretical. At home, my husband asked why I wore heels.
It was a reasonable question. It always is. But it wasn’t really about shoes. It was about faith. About the quiet belief that competence, preparation, and good intentions ought to be enough to keep you upright.
Groundhog Day asks us to believe endurance has an endpoint: if we wait long enough, someone will announce that we’re done. But winter doesn’t announce itself, and neither does motherhood. They repeat. They persist. They knock you down again just as you think you’ve learned how not to fall.
Snow is still beautiful, from a distance. I’ll concede that. But up close, underfoot, it teaches a different truth: that the ground makes no promises, that optimism is not traction, and that the only reliable forecast is this—
you will fall,
and you will get up,
and you will fall again,
and somehow, the work will still get done,
long after the rodent has gone back underground.
