The Pursuit of Happiness

Are you happy?

What makes you happy?

I've been slightly depressed about the recent spate of articles about how parents are less happy than non-parents, how children negatively affect marriages until they leave home.  I don't like to think that I'm not happy.  Perhaps especially because I realize that I'm not happy in the way I was as a child-free person, happy doing all the things I wanted to do when I wanted to do them.

And then I realized why parents must test lower on happiness scales than non-parents:  it's not really about how happy each group is but how we all define "happy."

In general, in modern American society, the pursuit of happiness is synonymous with pursuit of personal pleasure, even though they are not exactly the same thing.  We generally view happiness as the outcome of momentary, self-indulgent activities--I'm happy if I sleep in, have dessert, get a backrub, take a long bath, work on my crochet, read a chapter in my book.  And I don't get to do most of those things anymore.  

Am I happy when I help mold my children into useful, productive, happy individuals by enforcing rules, maintaining consistent consequences, listening to them, and being present for them?  Am I happy when I sweep and mop by floor, unload the dishwasher, scrub the bathtub, feed the cats?  No, because those things--those things that take up the majority of my day--are not (always) fun.  They do not make me happy in the usual, accepted sense of being fun or pleasurable.  There is contentment, satisfaction, even pride--and these are all good--but it's not what we usually consider happiness.

And I think that's okay.  For two reasons:  I realize that the current materialist/consumerist, immature definition of happiness is shallow and I understand that what I am doing is important and good.  And that makes me happy--it's just not the same happy that I feel when I do something pleasurable.  

Maybe there are different kinds of "happy?"  

Maybe child-free people and parents are both happy but in vastly different ways?  (This is not to generalize that all child-free people are self-indulgent hedonists or that all parents are miserable martyrs, just merely drawing upon the dichotomy established in these articles. Does this necessarily lead us to the conclusion that child-free people are child-like because they can still pursue personal pleasure while parents are grown-ups who don't?  Is it true, even if it is cliche)?

Maybe that is why the early years of parenthood are so difficult, as we struggle to redefine our concepts of what makes us happy?

Maybe that is why we think of children as the prime example of happy people--carefree, pleasure-pursuing, living in and for the moment?

So, it's not so bad that as a parent, I give up some of the personal pleasure that we often call happiness, to allow my children to be happy.  Which in the end makes me and my children happy.  Even if I don't feel happy everyday.  Which, in the end, is what those researchers discovered.

Because, when special moments with my children happen, such as when my children first said "mommy" or first drew me a picture, what I was wasn't "happy," it was joy.