Enough

Like many of you, I've been trying to focus on gratitude this month.  I try to live my life by that standard, but too often I slip into cranky, snarky, tired, jealous, or down-right mean.  So do we all, I suppose, but I want to believe that most everyone tries to be their best selves the majority of the time.  All I can really do is to try to hold myself to that standard without being a self-congratulatory twit.

The gratitude posts on Facebook, which I'm doing for the first time (at least, I think so---I don't remember doing them before), have had me thinking about my concept of gratitude when I was younger.  My siblings and I were not handed a lot of material stuff, because we had some very, very wise parents.  We had all we needed and some things we wanted, but by no means everything.  I don't recall ever feeling that I was deprived.  But like most kids, I had a few things that were perennially on my list of burning desires in life.

My number one was not the same as most little girls' number one dream; I did want a horse, but it was not at the top.  What I really craved was a pool, preferably an indoor one so that I could swim year-round.  I simply loved the water from my earliest memories.  This wish held on so long, however tenuously, that when my mother called me up before Christmas about 12 years ago and told me to bring my swimsuit with me when I came home, I lost it for a minute, accusing her of fulfilling my heartfelt desire nearly 20 years after I left home.....before I came to my senses and said, "You got a hot tub, right?"  Right.  And that was great for them, great with me.  That little-girl fantasy would always be firmly in the realm of fantasy.  Yet there was more to it than that.  I never had that pool at my disposal---but I probably swam in more than half of the man-made lakes west of the Mississippi, all of the three ocean borders of our country, a wide variety of streams and rivers, and dozens of snow-melt lakes in the American and Canadian west/northwest, because the one great luxury my parents did believe in for us was the benefit of travel.  All those trips would have, no doubt, paid for a pool a few times over.  But I had more natural pools than one could ever wish for---and that was enough.

There's no doubt in my mind that I owned store-bought clothes when I was a kid, but I don't recall getting a store-bought dress until I was about 10.  I remember picking out a church dress, maybe for Easter, from the Montgomery Ward catalog:  an apricot dress with a yoke in front outlined in white lace, with a white Peter Pan collar.  Why does this make such an impression?  Because I had a seamstress mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who were geniuses at their crafts.  My grandmother even worked in the field professionally at the Cherokee Togs factory in Pryor for more than 30 years.  Having homemade clothes was not that unusual then, but they did go beyond the pale.  My three older cousins and I, if memory serves, all had matching quilted coats that Grandma sewed for us from leftover scrap material from the factory.  She and my great-grandma pieced quilt tops and hand-quilted the quilts; only they would have had any idea of how many they might have done, but it was enough that Grandma's two children and all seven grandchildren had many quilts apiece.  I don't think I ever felt any remorse about having homemade clothing, but I surely didn't act properly grateful.  Those clothes, coats, covers, all were things I took for granted then---and they were enough.

To my child's mind, there was only ever one profession that lay down the road for me:  I would be a country-western singer.  I literally cannot remember ever NOT wanting to be a singer.  When we kids would sing little songs for the congregation on Sundays at church, even before I was in school, I would be looking for a way to stand out so I could sing by myself a little.  I truly don't remember if that was consciously borne out or if I started singing first and got attention for it, so I played it up.  But I was up there singing my little attention-monger heart out, more and more on my own as I got older.  That I wasn't really good enough to be professional was probably in the back of my mind as I hit high school. but I could still dream.  When college arrived and a more practical plan had to be put into place, through a convoluted and absolutely nonsensical series of judgments, I wound up in education.  It wasn't clear to me until I stepped into that first classroom that my stage was set, waiting there all along.  It was not at all what I was expecting---but it was enough.

They say the key to being happy in life is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.  I say, that is simple, everyday gratitude, a most essential part of being both happy and useful in the world.  I know that having what I want is not always feasible, but wanting what I have---being aware of, and gracious about, the gifts life has given me---is enough.  It's more than enough.