By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
Last June I fell in love with a painting. It was of a beautiful young woman in a green dress, and it had a saying, right on the painting, that said, “After all these years as a woman hearing not thin enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough, almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’ ”
Celene Terry had painted it for an art show whose theme was women’s empowerment. I’ve never seen a picture of Celene’s I didn’t love, but I really loved this one.
I posted the picture on my facebook page, www.facebook.com/aroundthetown and wrote a whole column about it. I had recently lost some weight, and having jazzed up my image a bit, was feeling very good about myself. In my column I questioned whether this was a little superficial: I should have been enough already, I guessed. I argued back and forth with myself, and then ended my column with this:
“Best I can figure, the point is, each of us, and nobody else, gets to say what our “enough” is. If or when we decide to get skinnier or smarter or whatever–or not–that is our business. And what other people do is their business. And it is probably fine to be pleased with our choice if we don’t over do it. We need to be gentle with ourselves and one another. We need to let one another be what we will be.”
I wanted somebody else to quote on this idea of being enough, so I Googled it. I found this quote by Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist: “What I know now for sure is that full of love is the only thing we need to be, and loving is the only thing we need to do. When I am full of love, I am most fully me, and that is always enough.”
I loved that picture, but we needed another one. Easy for that beautiful young woman to say she’s enough. (Well, maybe or maybe not, but it looks like it would be easy for her to say.) I urged Celene to paint a scruffy old lady with a determined twinkle in her eye, whose presence also said, “I am enough.” She said it sounded like a good idea, and said she would think about it. I think I brought it up a couple more times as months passed. Maybe I volunteered to pose for the rumpled old lady. Was I that pushy? I don’t remember.
Then late last summer the Star Harbor Watercolor Group arranged to spend a morning at the Surls Sculpture Garden and Jo Ann let me help hostess. Celene caught me resting on a settee in one of Jo Ann’s little houses in the garden, and snapped my picture. I kind of suspected maybe I might become the rumpled old lady. But I heard no more about it. Until I saw the painting at Sunday’s Star Harbor Watercolorists Art Show. She named it, “She’s Enough.” There I sit, in brilliant colors, on Jo Ann’s elegant settee, relaxing with my glass of wine. I am not scruffy at all. It is a beautiful picture. It looks like a woman who has decided she is enough.
Of course I bought it.
But is it true—have I really come to understand I’m enough? Well, sometimes, some days. I still question much of what I’ve done, and what I’m doing. I almost always do the best I know to do at the time, and sometimes my performance is not particularly stellar. But I’ve come to see that is what most of us are doing—the best we know at the time. And that helped me be a lot easier on myself and the people around me.
So lots of days I do believe I’m enough. And even on the worst of days, I am now almost always able to pull up an honest “I’ll do.”
