Why Am I Not Fully Content?

Why Am I Not Fully Content? June 20, 2016

Not to brag, but my life is perfect. I have the sweetest husband, a beautiful child, a home. I’m blessed to be able to stay home to raise my son. Sometimes I look around my living room at my husband, my son, my dog and my cat and I feel so incredibly lucky. In my twenties I never thought I would have these simple things that I wanted so badly. And now here I am, living my dream.

Yet in the back of my mind something constantly niggles at me.

After thinking about it, I believe there are two things that stand in the way of my full contentment…

1) Money issues. I’ve told you before about the difficult relationship I have with money. I am good at living pretty cheaply and frugality brings me comfort, but I still always feel like there isn’t enough. I feel a lot of guilt that I never found a career or even a job I could stand. I’m sad that living on Brad’s income as a teacher means denying him a lot of pleasures. We can’t eat out as much as he would like. We have to plan very carefully for any vacations. Stuff like that.

But now that we have a child I definitely can’t get a job outside the house. I don’t have the qualifications or experience to get any job that could cover the cost of day care for the little one! Rather than that knowledge taking the pressure off, it makes me regret my choices of many years ago that led to me not having the qualifications for a well paying job.

In part my job is to worry about money and stress about how to get everything paid so that Brad doesn’t have to. I have always wanted to be a stay at home wife and mom. Now I just wish I could get that without the guilt!

2) The need to feel productive leads to a lot of dissatisfaction. I’ve always been afraid to waste life in any way. I stress about whether I’m fulfilling every potential of every second. Because of that I can’t relax and enjoy our frequent evenings spent with the whole family on the sofa watching TV for hours. Though I think if I felt more productive during the day then I could be not antsy through TV watching. I’m not sure, though, because although I love TV and the stories, it feels wasteful to indulge in it.

So we’ll see, but I think if I can make peace with these two things I’ll be fully content. It’s nice to be old enough to be able to see fairly clearly where my issues are and what I need to work on to move towards bliss and enlightenment.


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