Good Enough

I used to think, “If I do everything perfectly, everthing will be alright.”

It’s not that I expected a perfect life.  But I thought “If I floss my teeth every night – like I should – if I keep my house clean and in order (that is never going to happen), if I do everything I’m ‘supposed to do’, in the order I’m supposed to do it, nothing bad will happen, and I’ll have a happy (if boring) life.”

I didn’t even care that much about happy.  I just wanted to be safe from the boogey man.

But as we’ve all since learned, trying to approach anything that even sort of resembles “perfect” achieves only worry lines and heartburn.  It offers no protection from the unknown, boogeyman or otherwise.  Therefore, we shall strive for “Good E. Nuff” in the things that don’t matter so much, such as housework, dishes, and laundry.

There is honor, there is valor, in “good enough”.  If having a little baby crawling all around didn’t teach me that, this experience with breast cancer certainly will.  I’m a slow learner, and this has certainly impressed upon me the fact that I will change how I live my life.  I’m not talking about the physical – eat right, exercise, monitor my health, floss “perfectly” every night.  I mean the BIG stuff.  How I think about my life, how I feel about myself, my strengths and weaknesses, how powerful I really am in this.

The Husband has told me often that I am impressive, amazing, capable of creating greatness.  Yeah, I never believe him.  In my head I keep thinking “You don’t know what a coward I am.”  Nearly every day, it seems, I’ve either been on the verge of a panic attack, or a raging ball of screaming irritability.  That can’t be easy to be around.  I can’t be easy to be around.

On Wednesday, I couldn’t face going to work.  The Husband says I need to feel whatever I feel and know that that’s okay.  That I need to be okay with it.  You have no idea how freeing that is for me.

My mother always scolded us – don’t be grumpy, don’t be crabby, smile!  It was never okay for us to just feel how we felt.  That sentence sounds weird.  It’s better when The Husband says it.

This post has taken many days to write.  I’ve been interrupted, I’ve run out of steam, I can’t find the right words. There’s just so much to say, and I want it all to make sense and be purposeful, and I want to write it while it’s fresh.  But it’s just so much to process.