So you know how I was a little wary of the summer holidays? Well it was with good reason, ‘cos it turns out a few things happened that I totally didn't anticipate, hence I feel like getting through the holidays was an accomplishment for me. You know how on a CV, when you list your jobs and maybe a separate field for the ‘accomplishments’? That’s me - ‘Surviving Summer Holidays 2017’, right under where ‘Position: MOM, from 2009 to present’ is.
What happened? Well one thing I didn’t anticipate was the fighting. Sure they fight sometimes, but not like this and I’m not sure why. Maybe my ‘do nothing’ plan backfired, maybe one of them is usually in school all day so they’re not in each other’s face, or maybe the other is two years old and now Has Opinions (aka Tantrums). All I know is that the screaming in the household has gone up a disproportionate amount. I’m also older and more deaf (thanks to said screaming) so maybe when they raise their voices to speak to me I misunderstand this as screaming. I just know I sometimes can’t even think ‘cos everything is just - Noisy.
The point is, I was READY. Ready for them to go to school, to resume regular life, and to have a routine, and you know…Have Some Free Time, and Less Noise.
And then the first day of school started for my oldest. Boy did my heart hurt. I missed her even though I still had the younger at home. A grade older, that much wiser (uhm, in some ways) - there is something poignant about sending them off on the first day after seeing how much they have grown (sometimes quite literally) over summer. Even the little one missed her, walking into her room with a sad face and lying on her bed saying ‘jie jie- gone’ . That made my heart hurt even more and although the decibels were lower in the house, I suddenly missed the Noise.
Therein lies a parenting paradox. I love them to bits but I also love when they leave - and then I miss them. What’s up with that?!
The answer might lie in this book: ‘All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood’. A writer named Jennifer Senior wrote it in 2014 and after scouring decades of social science research where she concluded that children do not improve their parents’ happiness. They have a net effect of zero, or they ‘slightly compromise their parents’ happiness’. (I have to admit that on some days this is actually not news to me). But she goes on - apparently what was missing in the indexes was a ‘joy’ component. On most of the questionnaires and surveys, Joy was indistinguishable from other kinds of pleasant feelings. Parents could say they were a ‘5’ (on a ‘happy scale’ from 1-5) but Joy could go up to 11. ‘That 5 you're feeling when your kid laughs or when your kid says something that's so totally, like, amazingly weird, or insightful, or sensitive — it's not the same as like getting a good laugh out of watching a movie or having a really nice time with a friend’ says Senior. It's a different category of experience that doesn’t numerically translate, and hence can’t be measured.
This made total sense to me– that first smile you get from a newborn after you’ve spent the past weeks in a sleepless haze; the day they decide to walk properly after a few false starts, when your toddler strings together her first (long) sentence, the grin you get from your 8-year-old (shared just between the two of you) when you’ve shared a joke and someone says something related – it all takes your breath away in the moment and there are no words. Just Joy.
So I sort of get it now. Sure, some people don’t separate the joy from the happiness, but I can see it. It more than make up for all the crappy parts so even if happiness index might be zero or negative - the Joy……it explains all the paradoxes. At least for me.
For more Dragon Mama columns, click here.
