Learning to be Content

I’ve opened up a couple times about some of the anxiety I’ve experienced since having Finn. Well, it’s been six months and a lot of those anxieties haven’t gone away. In fact, I still don’t always feel like myself. I’m getting a glimpse of my old self here and there and try to fake it a lot, but oftentimes I struggle with mild postpartum depression, which I know is very common, so I’m not too concerned. I try to remind myself it’s just my hormones and other chemical imbalances, but a lot of is gets into my head and creates low self esteem. So, it’s been months of this, right? And I’m trying hard to deal with it and figure out how to “wake up” in a sense.

There’s a saying a lot of people say in our church, that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. It a lot of regards, that is a good motto. We need to continually be striving in all aspects of our life.

But there gets to a point where we may just be too hard on ourselves. Expecting too much. If we are constantly telling ourselves we need to be more, doing more, it can weigh us down. I realized I’m so hard on myself as a mother and as a wife. I would find myself crying at the end of the night because I felt like I hadn’t been the best mother that day. I felt that my kids deserved more. I’d compare myself to other moms.

So, I guess this is where the idea of contentment has come up. Learning to be content so I can be happy. How can we move forward if we don’t even like where we are today? We’ve got to learn to be content with our current lives and our actions first or else we are never going to be happy. It’s good to have goals, work towards something. But the goal can be as simple as: live today as well as you can, be happy with it, then move on to tomorrow.

We watched a movie the other day (it was edited for TV, so usually it’s an R but it was a TV-14) called About Time. If you have a chance to watch this on TV (like if you have the FX app) then do it! I don’t want to give it all away, but basically the guy can time travel. He can go back to anytime he wants and then also hop back to regular time with the changes he made. Quite convenient, right? If he had a bad day, he could go back in time and fix that specific incident. But after time traveling he realized it kind of took the authenticity out of life so he finally figures out a way to be content with his actions without time traveling. It was such a motivating movie (I don’t watch R rated movies, but I’ve heard this one unedited for TV is still worth seeing…) and made me realize how I can’t go back in time, obviously. So, I just need to be happy and stop wasting each day thinking I didn’t do good enough. This is where I am right now. Be content. Or else these days are going to pass by and I’ll wonder what happened to them.