Sitting Still, where you are

Man! I struggle with this. The sitting still, just where I am.

I just filled out the census and realised we have 'usually lived' at the same address for well over five years, almost 9 years, in fact. And almost every Thursday, for at least the last five or six years, I have scoured the real estate guide for a bigger and better option.

Before family life and home mortgage ownership I had moved every 12 months, at least, since I was 18. When I was a kid my mum liked to change houses about every 5 years - a new interior design project, or drops in the numbers of children living at home from 7 to 3 to 1, etc.

The luthier and me, we watch 'Escape to the Country' and 'Grand Designs' religiously. We even go to open houses and view properties in town and in the country regularly.

Something in me craves change constantly. It manifests itself in craving change in real estate. And also in the endless cycling through the questions " Should I get a job?", "Should I go back to uni?", " Volunteer?", " Take more on?" and on and on it goes.

Now, there are two things I suspect about this restlessness:

1. The longer I sit in this house, life and mother/wife space that I have and concentrate on it and on the people inside it, the better off we all are. And so the less energy I focus on this elusive, fantastical and probably non-existent 'better offer' of a life, house, job, plan the better our real lives get.

2. This craving of change is just a manifestation of my own sense of inadequacy. The niggling background noise of 'I am not enough'. My life is not enough. Or in the words that the luthier and I often (probably) misquote, as said via the magic that is beat poetry in Dead Poets Society "you gotta do more, you gotta be more!"

The truth is that I am now old and ugly enough to consider that number two is a lie. Me and my life could be enough. I am a mother and wife. It is my passion.

The truth is that I know what I want. I basically want what I have. To allow a sense of inadequacy to undermine my appreciation of it, is to degrade all of us connected with it. Why do I criticise it and so sell short myself and my family? I should be boasting about how bloody great it is and how great they are. I fear I have succumbed to the fashion for self-deprecation, for "I am not good enough", which seems quite the mode de jour for mothers this season.

So perhaps I could aspire to relinquish the restlessness.

To aspire to control my distractable nature and direct my attention to the mostly smiling and sometimes whining faces and hearts of the loves of my life, unmarred by the discomfort of feeling inadequate.

To aspire to sing out loud the love for the life that I have right now.

To sit still in it. Where I am.

It is enough.

In fact, its a beauty.