Sufficiency

This week has been wearing me down a bit.

I'm feeling really insecure about being a stay at home mom of one kid.  ONE KID!  His 3-year-old behavior (please tell me this is just a phase) reminds me of the sign I saw in my sister's house once:  "Raising kids is like being pecked to death by ducks."  I'm tired of doing mom stuff.  I feel guilty that I don't contribute to our family income at all.  It seems that I fill my days with cooking, cleaning, reminding, and disciplining.  Wouldn't a maid or a nanny be doing a better job anyway?  What is it, exactly, that I do all day?

I feel ordinary.  And small.  And...yes, a bit worthless.

I'm still reading that book by Brene Brown, and I came across this yesterday.  It felt like it was written just for me:

"Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency.  By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything...Sufficiency isn't an amount at all.  It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.  Sufficiency resides inside each of us, and we can call it forward.  It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances."

And then this:

"We seem to measure the value of people's contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition.  In other word, worth is measured by fame and fortune.  Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking men and women.  In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless."

Then she says that while doing research for this book, she found that people who had experienced tremendous loss often held most sacred the everyday, ordinary moments in life.  As if going through the hell they'd gone through woke them up to what is truly important and miraculous about life.

I thought about swinging in the hammock with my son this afternoon, watching him eat a popsicle and listening to him sing his made-up songs about the trees and the dirt and the ants (he seriously can sing about anything these days).  And I thought about the walk I went on earlier this week, after a big rainstorm...and the mountains and sky were unbelievably gorgeous.  And my garden that's growing.  And the books that I'm reading.  And the purse my mom just helped me make.  And all the other little beautiful things in my life.

I get it.  Ordinary and quiet are ok.  I'm just going to forget it again tomorrow, ya know?  How can I remember that I'm enough?  How do YOU remember?  Really though, I'd love some comments on this.  It's a hard one for me...