The Good Woman

Thanks to my daughter doing . . . well, doing something, I have no idea what . . . I have been getting a Southern Living magazine with her name on it delivered to my house each month. For free. For nearly a year now, I think.

Being a pretty thrifty woman (read: cheap), I am generally not one to complain about anything given to me at no cost. But . . .

Have you seen Southern Living magazine? Or one of its sisters (there is apparently a family of these periodicals including Midwest Living and Coastal Living)? My mother had a Southern Living subscription. It’s definitely a Wilma Poland kind of magazine. Full of beautiful pictures of beautiful places (and information for traveling there), beautiful homes with beautiful gardens (and how to recreate them), beautiful food on beautiful plates and tables (and the recipes for making it all), that kind of thing.

When I get one of these magazines, I set it aside for a bit until I find a few minutes to thumb through it, and that’s the extent of my interaction. I thumb through it, scanning all of the lovely with appropriate appreciation for the loveliness, making sure there is no information in there that really would be pertinent to my life, and then it goes in the recycle bin.

Now, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, that would not have been my routine with a free Southern Living magazine subscription. I would, first of all, have looked carefully at every recipe to see if there was anything in there that someone in my family might like . . . and then considered if the ingredients were things I could find readily . . . and then read the instructions to see if it seemed like a dish I could manage . . . and then probably have torn the recipe out and added it to my file of Try It Someday Dishes that I kept for years and only gave the heave-ho a couple of years ago.

Then I would have looked through the pretty pictures of the pretty houses and pondered what was in those pictures that I needed to do in my own house and yard to make it more pretty. And, again, probably have torn out pictures to keep for future reference.

And then I might have looked at the wonderful travel destinations and made suggestions to hubby about trips we needed to take as a family someday . . . someday relatively soon, I guess, before the girls were grown and gone.

And the goal-setting itch in my personality would have been scratched real good to where I felt like a Good Wife and Good Mother and Good Woman Overall In This Fallen World.

And then I would have gone to bed feeling . . . rather discontent about my life. Without even fully realizing it.

Y’all, I am SO not interested in those recipes anymore. I have food that I like, and I know how to make it or where to buy it. New options are unnecessary. A pleasure when they come, but not something I need to seek out.

I have NO interest in having a magazine-looking house. I love my house. There may be nobody else who appreciates it like I do, but I don’t care. When I had to downsize a couple years ago, I got rid of everything that was not comfortable to me, beautiful to me, or meaningful to me. And I don’t buy anything new now that doesn’t fit those criteria.

I’ve got a couple destinations that I’d love to see before I die (British Isles, anyone?), but I have figured out that I am not really one of those people with an urge to see the world. I don’t necessarily mind travel per se, but I’m going to spend my travel money and energy visiting people I love – especially now that both of my daughters have moved out of state. That’s what I really want to do. That’s me.

And it’s nice to be content being me. It saddens me how long it took to let go of the burden of those Good Woman mantles and realize that God thinks I’m a good woman just the way he made me.