A little self delusion can make for a great life.

Someone said this to me recently and at first I was shaking my head.

No. Keeping your head in the clouds about looming realities is a terrible plan.

For the first few months of this pregnancy my husband and I talked about the tough times ahead. Our first baby was colicky and cried a lot and didn’t sleep well for a long, long time. Our first year as parents was both wonderful and stressful. I still look back on some of those nights and days and shudder. I had no idea I could function on so little sleep for so long.

As the weeks ticked by the conversation about impending change turned positive.

We’re going to have a quiet winter here on the island. I’m expecting to spend a lot of time in flannel pajamas. My husband is taking two weeks off work, my mother will be visiting for a week and we’re going to get some housekeeping help for at least the first six weeks.

Is it ridiculous that I’ve added ‘download classic novels to Kindle to read while nursing’ to my ‘get done before baby arrives’ list? I keep having this vision of myself with a sleeping baby on me as I read Jane Eyre. I see Henry playing peacefully with his train set, or flipping through a book, his sibling snoozing in a rocker, as I take a cat nap on the couch.

A bit of delusion can be a good thing.

A touch of it. Enough to keep your spirits up in the face of something daunting. Enough to quell fears and create a positive vision for the future even if that vision is unlikely to happen.

I’m using this same technique to stay positive when people tell me:

Once your son is in school he’ll be begging for all the toys his friends have.

When your child is older you’ll have to get a car to go to football(soccer) practice and such.

It won’t be practical to live in an apartment with older children.

Maybe all of those things are true. Maybe we’ll be in a big house with two cars and my son will have a cell phone when he’s eight. Maybe.

Maybe I’m kidding myself if I think I can keep these low/no gift birthday parties up.

But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe a touch of delusion is why I haven’t given up on living with less stuff.

I can see I’m delusional about a few more things. I’m entering my fourth year of being out of the traditional work force.

Yet, I still think that if I need to or want to in the future I’ll be able to find a job that I like and that was at least equal in pay, skill required and seniority to the one I left when I had my son.

So I’m not shaking my head now. I’m nodding.

Yes, a little self delusion can make for a great life.

Twenty year-old me would think my current life is heinously boring.

Mostly stay-at-home mom, living in a small town on an island and I work part-time for myself making a teeny tiny fraction of my previous salary.

Fame and fortune haven’t found me.

I’m not training for anything exciting like an Ironman and I haven’t tested myself at a new sport in a few years.

I read a lot of nonfiction and couldn’t name a current top ten single.

Meal plans excite me. So does my son willingly brushing his teeth. I’m content with and fascinated by things I once thought mundane like having a family no-spend day once a week.

I’m okay with being boring. But being boring does not mean I am bored. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was truly bored.

While a much younger me would think my current life was boring, that younger me was also bored at times. I’d be out of books to read, have no money for movies and no energy to do much because I was training three times a day. If I was lucky enough to have cable I would spend the afternoon flipping through channels just killing time until the next workout. I was ‘living the dream’ trying to make it to the Olympics but I was, in fact, sometimes bored.

Today: not bored. The life of a mostly stay-at-home-mother might sound boring, and yes, it is filled with a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks, but for me at least, I’m never bored. It’s a good thing.

Boredom often lead me to buy things I didn’t really need. Some people buy things because they’re under stress or feeling bad. I bought for those reasons but I also bought things because I was bored.

Shopping was a way to fill time and feel like something had happened.

One thing I’ve found through simplifying my possessions is an appreciation for the mundane aspects of my life. SimpleMom wrote about living a good story, even when your story includes a lot of diapers, dishes and a like clockwork tantrum before dinner.

But what does it look like to live out a good, relevant, gets-me-up-in-the-morning Story when it still just feels like…. regular life?

- Tsh Oxenrider

My life is regular and sometimes quite boring to the outside eye. That’s okay.

I’m the one living it.

If I can appreciate the simple things in my life, if I can enjoy them, that’s what matters. So I’ll be here, washing my dishes with some frugal flowers on the windowsill, tweaking next week’s meal plan so I can buy what’s on sale and when the weather is better than expected, skipping the library story time for the park.

I may be boring but I am not bored. And the difference between the two has lead me to spend less, save more and enjoy the my life as it is right now.

Do you feel like your life looks boring from the outside? What about from the inside? Please note, this does not mean I don’t get bored with some of my repetitive tasks like mopping out the bottom of our fridge every week from the condensation build up.

photo credit: Valeriano Della Longo

One of my guilty pleasure movies is Under the Tuscan Sun.

Have you seen it? Diane Lane takes a trip to Italy to get over a nasty divorce and ends up buying a house in Tuscany. She heals her wounds by renovating the house and building friendships in the small town.

It’s a great little movie and it will make you want to grill up zucchini and serve antipasta platters. Or set you day dreaming about living in a farmhouse in the south of France.

One of my favorite scenes is when our protagonist is lamenting that she doesn’t have what she’d hoped for: a baby and a wedding in the garden. Her friend points out to her that she has both: her friend and her baby are staying with her and she just hosted the wedding of a young couple at her home.

Sometimes what we wish for comes to us in a different package than we expect.

Three years ago I often day dreamed about a windfall that would get us out of consumer debt. I kept a lottery ticket in my purse for a few months, never checking if it was a winner, and on bad days I would tell myself it was the one.

That’s how I imagined we would get out of $82,000 in consumer and student loan debt. A windfall.

I never imagined that we would work for it. That we would sell a lot of things, my Olympic Torch, our car and that we would cut bills and I would stop spending $100 at the drugstore when all I went in for was my husband’s shampoo.

I never imagined that my husband and I would track all of our spending. Every penny. Every pence.

Living overseas was always a dream of mine. Several of my siblings have lived abroad and my parents emigrated to Canada from Scotland in their 20′s. I loved the idea of a stint overseas for Chris and I and Henry.

We even toyed with the idea of renting our home out for a few months while I was on maternity leave and living in Spain or France. Unfortunately the timing and the numbers just didn’t add up. I shelved that dream thinking it would be something for retirement.

Since my teen years I’ve wanted to be a writer. It seemed impossible. It was a fantasy and the fantasy was selling a screenplay or scoring a big publishing contract. The dream got farther and farther away. I was happily working in a marketing and sponsorship role before I went on maternity leave. I thought I had found my calling in the corporate world. That was it. I’d run events, write copy and manage employee engagement projects. Not my dream job but a pretty good one.

Moving to the Isle of Man wasn’t on my radar. My husband getting a corporate job and taking an indefinite hiatus from road life with his band wasn’t something either of us could have imagined.

But here we are. Living in Europe. We’re going to Spain soon. Not as we’d once a imagined but for a quick and relatively cheap holiday (thank you airline points and piggy backing on a work trip).

Some days I feel like we won the lottery. I shake my head and say to my husband, are we really here? Did we really pay off all that debt?

Yes, we’re here in a different way than I imagined. There wasn’t an easy way out of debt and we’re not basking in the Spanish sun every day with our departure back to rainy Vancouver looming over us. I’m not making a six figure salary from writing or on the top ten bestseller list. But I’m earning a small income from self-publishing, freelance writing and this blog.

It’s not how I imagined it: it’s better. Because it’s real.