We keep deluding ourselves that happiness is just around the corner, but always in the future. “If I could just get out of school”, “if I could only find a better job”, which becomes, “If I could just find someone to love”, and so on, potentially for the rest of our lives. How many of us said, “If only I could have children, then I’d be happy”? We soon found that children brought us great joy but also countless hurdles and frustrations. With happiness always round the next corner, we could come to the end of our lives to find that we never allowed ourselves to be happy in the present moment and that we therefore wasted countless opportunities to experience joy.
We ceaselessly categorize our experiences into “good” or “bad”. Then we try to arrange our lives so that we can avoid the “bad: and attract the “good”. Despite these efforts we live in failure: Life presents “ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows”. We must meet pain as well as pleasure, so we can’t afford to hook our happiness to external circumstances.
In our clearer moments we may glimpse what’s going on—this endless pursuit of transitory happiness seems futile but what can we do? Rather than acknowledge the inner deprivation we try harder in the outer world because we obviously need more of what is can offer. We might convince ourselves we need a world trip, new things, or an exciting new career change. And we’re back in the cycle of demanding from the outside world.
Happiness, or the lack of it, can be an issue that mothers feel desperate to resolve. This is especially the case on the arrival of a second child. A parenting magazine reported the results of a study which found: “…a woman’s life satisfaction falls to its all-time low the year after the birth of her second child. Another sturdy found that many second-time mothers had stress levels high enough to warrant medical treatment.”
Mothers spend so much time attending to the “have-tos: of life: housework, errands, paper work, phone calls, taxiing, appointments, birthdays. We need to give all our family members quality time and maintain contact with a string of relatives. Our brains are shuffling so many details that they feel close to exploding.
With family responsibilities we are far less free to seek our own happiness. We have less time for our careers, hobbies and friends and we may discover that a ‘family holiday” is a contradiction in terms. At times any hope of happiness for a mother is quashed by a baby’s bellowing, a toddler’s tantrum, a sons sleep problems, a daughters anti-social behavior or workplace inflexibility. There’s no end to the hoops our children and others can put us through. At times happiness is the most distant of our dreams and we humbly confine our wishes to “a little peace and quiet”.
Certainly a mother has new sources of happiness from the world outside her: watching her children grow into little characters, laughing at their capers, perhaps a new circle of friends. Still she may find herself in the cycle of postponing happiness, wishing, “If I could just have them all at school”, “If we could just get through this stage”, “If they’d just move out!”
We sometimes catch more experienced mothers musing: “They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” Some of us don’t believe them but still, this period of our lives will pass and that makes it precious. In postponing our happiness until the children are older, we lose sight of the importance of this stage of our lives. When we’re older, perhaps as we leaf through a scrapbook brimming with images from their childhood, we might regret that we didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy our small children as much as we could have. The studies keep finding that the first few years of life are the most important to a child’s psychological and intellectual development—another reminder of the preciousness of our moments with our young children…
We ceaselessly categorize our experiences into “good” or “bad”. Then we try to arrange our lives so that we can avoid the “bad: and attract the “good”. Despite these efforts we live in failure: Life presents “ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows”. We must meet pain as well as pleasure, so we can’t afford to hook our happiness to external circumstances.
In our clearer moments we may glimpse what’s going on—this endless pursuit of transitory happiness seems futile but what can we do? Rather than acknowledge the inner deprivation we try harder in the outer world because we obviously need more of what is can offer. We might convince ourselves we need a world trip, new things, or an exciting new career change. And we’re back in the cycle of demanding from the outside world.
Happiness, or the lack of it, can be an issue that mothers feel desperate to resolve. This is especially the case on the arrival of a second child. A parenting magazine reported the results of a study which found: “…a woman’s life satisfaction falls to its all-time low the year after the birth of her second child. Another sturdy found that many second-time mothers had stress levels high enough to warrant medical treatment.”
Mothers spend so much time attending to the “have-tos: of life: housework, errands, paper work, phone calls, taxiing, appointments, birthdays. We need to give all our family members quality time and maintain contact with a string of relatives. Our brains are shuffling so many details that they feel close to exploding.
With family responsibilities we are far less free to seek our own happiness. We have less time for our careers, hobbies and friends and we may discover that a ‘family holiday” is a contradiction in terms. At times any hope of happiness for a mother is quashed by a baby’s bellowing, a toddler’s tantrum, a sons sleep problems, a daughters anti-social behavior or workplace inflexibility. There’s no end to the hoops our children and others can put us through. At times happiness is the most distant of our dreams and we humbly confine our wishes to “a little peace and quiet”.
Certainly a mother has new sources of happiness from the world outside her: watching her children grow into little characters, laughing at their capers, perhaps a new circle of friends. Still she may find herself in the cycle of postponing happiness, wishing, “If I could just have them all at school”, “If we could just get through this stage”, “If they’d just move out!”
We sometimes catch more experienced mothers musing: “They grow up so quickly, don’t they?” Some of us don’t believe them but still, this period of our lives will pass and that makes it precious. In postponing our happiness until the children are older, we lose sight of the importance of this stage of our lives. When we’re older, perhaps as we leaf through a scrapbook brimming with images from their childhood, we might regret that we didn’t allow ourselves to enjoy our small children as much as we could have. The studies keep finding that the first few years of life are the most important to a child’s psychological and intellectual development—another reminder of the preciousness of our moments with our young children…
3 comments:
I love the way you write Stacey. It is everything I am thinking or have thought at one moment in time, only with smarter words. I for one, have learned my lesson to grasp the moments, good or bad, because you never know when there will be nothing left to grasp. You never know when those moments will be taken from you. Happiness is... what you make of it. The definition being different for every human. The thought of my son coming back to me.... happiness, bliss. For along time I felt I wouldn't be happy until that day, but then sadly realized I was taking my own happiness away from me. Living in the future and not seeing the present. Not seeing and grasping what is right in front of me. Instead, wishing and hoping that something missing was home. I can't live for happiness around the corner anymore. It has to be the now. Because you never know when there will be no future.
First of all...that picture is pure sweetness... the gentle touch of your hand on your sweet baby is so tender. I hope you scrapbook it with the feelings you have here. What a wonderful thing to have now and many years from now.
Motherhood is one of the most rewarding and one of the most challenging... and lets face it way under paid, however the riches we gain over the years are priceless.
I must say that I needed that in everyway. As crazy as my life is right now it is my babies that keep me going. They make me get up and go. I know that they need me because they are so young, but I need them more than ever to keep going. It is such a blessing to have children. When I am sad or feeling overwhelmed all it takes is one hug, kiss, little laugh or smile to cheer me up. I dread them getting older I am not going to lie. I am scared to see them get hurt or have to live in this crazy world. Yet seeing them become who they are going to be when they "grow up" is exciting. I just want to be there from their 1st step and on.
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