I Have Enough. I Do Enough. I Am Enough.
This month’s mantra is one that is on constant rotation for this perfectionist, type A, Asian woman. The hardest idea to accept with open arms is the bit about how I am doing enough. Obviously, the next question I am plagued by is the idea I am enough. I rarely question the idea of having enough because I have more than necessary and more than I could dream. It’s the idea of doing enough, which then gets the hamster wheel of my brain leaping to the next conclusion of how much more I need to do to accept I am enough, writ large.
My historic, personal struggles of accepting this notion of doing enough is on full display in my participation of “The Moth Stories”, which airs on NPR. By your reading, I will have told my story to an audience that The Moth records both on audio and video. I’m still in disbelief I agreed to do this, much less do it altogether given my record of dismal book readings in front of an audience. I can’t say as of this writing that I didn’t stammer, sweat profusely, and wish I were doing anything else during my 10 minute storytelling.
One part of my story where my lunacy is on full display has to do with baking Christmas cookies. What had started out as an immigrant’s idea of creating Christmas traditions for my son had morphed into a terrible comic-tragedy. Unlike any other rational person, I didn’t bake just a batch of cookies to share with my husband and perhaps our neighbor next door. No, never one to be outdone by what or whom, I quadrupled six or seven recipes. Yes, quadrupled. Not only did my son get cookies till the next century, but I’m pretty sure the four boroughs of NYC got them as well. Each year started the same, the first day I would have Aretha Franklin blasting as I ran an assembly line that would have put the Keebler elves to shame. What made all of this incomprehensible is I hate baking. So, usually, that first day, my hostility about a tradition I created and maintained was on low simmer. By day three, the simmer of hostility was boiling and splattering out of the pot, turning me into a foul-mouthed elf, who cursed Aretha, the goddamn cookies, and myself.
Clearly, I needed the reminder that I was doing enough, so that making just a batch of cookies was more than sufficient to make my son feel the warmth of Christmas instead of turning my kitchen into a cookie factory. I’m happy to report the cookie factory closed after 12 years since I am a slow learner. So, did the lesson of what it is to be doing enough, as defined by the rest of normal society? Do I still overdo, like making enough Korean dumplings to feed an entire platoon? You’ll be happy to know my hostility about running a dumpling factory is not as extreme since I don’t hate cooking like I hate baking. Let’s just say I am, like all of you, a work in progress. Now I don’t force myself to make the dumplings because of some obligation I’ve created, but because I want to make them.