What I Learned This Week: Contentment

This was a post I wrote for Musings of a Housewife’s (today known as Jolynneshane.com) weekly blog carnival, where participants shared something they’d recently learned.

What I learned this week snuck up on me as a quiet epiphany. It wasn’t something I sought out. In fact, it came to me somewhere in between cleaning the upstairs bathroom and rearranging some overflowing kitchen cabinets: I was content.

Where did that come from? And why was it in the midst of a domestic moment? That would be the last place I would normally look for that word. But there it was! No mistaking it. Now, I’ve never considered myself a domestic queen, one that revels in cooking fancy dishes or keeps her house fastidiously clean. But the more time I have on my hands, the more I seem to relax into and enjoy those day-to-day tasks.

I know that one day soon I will have to leave this little cocoon again and find some sort of work.  For the moment, however, I am trying to put that off a little longer despite the odd opportunities that seem to come my way. Yes, someday my house will be empty. The downstairs bathroom will be ridiculously clean, and the meals will be for two, not four.  So for the time being, I’m going to enjoy these last days of being needed in this capacity, before my status goes from stay-at-home-mom to empty-nester-mom, mom-on-the-sidelines, and mom-no-longer-needed. Not that I’ll ever stop being a mom, but I know it will be different.