There’s this story I’ve listened to all my life. Your story. Your story that says I should have been prettier. I should have tried harder. I should have walked thinner. I should have been kinder. I should have been smarter. I shouldn’t have missed that question; it was a silly mistake. I should have been closer to perfectly perfect.
I remember the first time you came to me, after a teacher told me I was needed in the nurse’s office, and as soon as I walked in and saw Nurse Kuchler, she said, “I just need to check your eyes, sweetie. Your mom told us you’ve been having some trouble seeing,” and I felt your flush burn my body like a warm wave of lava had broken from the dormant volcano inside. It would scorch me long after I failed that eye test and found out I would need glasses, which meant I would never, in fact, ever be perfect.
I could have spent the rest of my life avoiding every mirror I came across so I could still believe I was perfect even though I could feel the weight of those corrective lenses indenting the bridge of my nose and worming their way to my heart, too. I could have pretended like I was a completely different person, this was happening to someone else, when the emotions came swinging, because it would have been more convenient to the ones who bore their news. It would have been closer to perfect. I could have ignored the disappointments that stacked up down deep inside that these eyes had failed me.
I would wear glasses. Everyone would know, now, what I had suspected for a while: Perfection could not live in one such as me.
It seems silly now, over something so insignificant as a pair of glasses, but you had already written the story. You. Shame. You had already scrawled your words across the landslide, and this is what your thick black pen said: Because of you.
He left because of you. He won’t come back because of you. There’s no money because of YOU.
It was such a shameful place for an 8-year-old to be, that needing help to see all the colors of the world.
That’s when you started talking to me. That’s when you started lobbing your accusations at me. You are not enough, you said. You must be more, you said. Who you are is nothing, you said.
I tried to argue, but the truth is, I believed it. I believed every word you said. I tried to be better. I starved myself to be thinner. I turned away when I needed a good cry. I folded up in on myself.
I tried to prove my worth in the way I studied and the way I ate and the way I made friends and the way I brushed my hair and the way I put on my makeup and the way I picked out clothes and the way I tried to find a career that came easily and the way I chose to date and the future I planned for myself. I tried to outrun your ever-present being, but there was no running. I know that now. There is only, ever, facing.
Well, I am facing. And what I have to say to you, after all these years, is this:
I am enough.
I am enough.
I AM ENOUGH.
I am enough.
It’s okay that I can’t see two feet in front of my face without corrective lenses. I am enough. It’s okay that sometimes I feel like I’m going to snap in two for the stretching six boys and a job and a home and a husband can do to me. I am enough. It’s okay that I’ll go a little crazy if I don’t get a half second break. I am enough.
It’s okay if I sometimes get frustrated because things aren’t getting shared the way they should be getting shared and I wish someone would just pay attention in this saturated marketplace. I am enough. It’s okay if sometimes I have no idea what to have for dinner. I am enough. It’s okay if sometimes I feel in over my head with this parenting thing, this raising decent human beings thing, this love-without-conditions thing. I am enough.
I have always been enough.
It doesn’t matter if I got a B in my first college creative writing class, or that I quit my dream job for a job much less satisfying and then settled for eight whole miserable years, or that I didn’t have a little girl, or that my body doesn’t look like it did before kids, even though I’m killing myself trying, or that I have a few more gray hairs than I used to have, or that my eyes have constant bags under them now because of kids and work and worry, or that sometimes I wear a Snuggie because it’s the warmest thing around or that sometimes I don’t get a shower every day.
We can all feel it take flame in the backs of our throats, when we think maybe we should have spent a little more time with our family instead of playing on our smartphone. We can feel it rake our faces when someone mentions they’re a stay-at-home parent and we think we should really stop letting work bleed into family time. And we can feel it numbing our legs sometimes when we see someone who looks so much better than we do, someone who is the very definition of stunning and we are so far from it.
We can feel it after we’ve yelled at our kids or said something we shouldn’t or slammed a door that should have stayed open or crumbled the world in a snap of our jaw.
Shame speaks different things to all of us, but those words are always nothing more than fancy lies.
We are enough.
So just move along on your black-path way, shame. Leave us all be. We are enough. We are all enough, no matter where we come from or where we are now or where we’re headed.
We are born enough.
