Cheryl’s Corners

Happiness is trendy right now. Have you noticed? People read books about being happy. They argue about the best way to get happy. There are hundreds of tablets, tricks, tools and tchotchkes mass-produced with the expressed intent of making you happy. I have it on good authority that some of them may even work. Of course, we’re all different. Some sweet souls are made happy by little more than an ice cream cone, while others fall into ecstasy at the purchase of a new handbag or pair of shoes. I even know a few women my age whose universe can be more or less put right by a plastic tiara and a literal roller coaster ride (yes, I’m guilty as charged. And it still makes me laugh.) In addition to chocolate Hostess cupcakes, my personal happy place can also be reached by several other different paths, but the one of the most direct has sunscreen and an ocean view.

But to be completely honest with you, I still wonder what is going on in my confused little brain and heart when it comes to “feeling” happy in my 32 year marriage. My husband is a good man. He’s committed and faithful. So why do I wake up many mornings not really “feeling” marital happiness? Well, as I’ve mentioned before, long term relationships are lasting longer then any other time in history. I remind myself that I am in mostly unchartered territory and that it is natural to question the “happiness” of the unknown. So I’m trying 3 small steps each morning before I get out of bed. First, I look over at my snoring husband and think a kind, new thought about him—such as “I sure am glad he still wants me to sit in his lap when he watches T.V., or even thank goodness he takes the trash out,” –you get the idea. Second, I think of one little act of whimsy that would make me smile during the day—such as “I hear a chocolate Frappechino calling my name this morning.” And, last but not least, I think of one thing I am grateful for—such as “how blessed I am that none of my children are sick today.” Then after I remind myself to live in the moment and quit agonizing over the past and the future, I roll out of bed.

I know this is not a perfect solution by any means. But it does keep a pretty common damaging emotion from occurring in a long term relationship. That emotion is “Complacency.” It is way too easy to take nearly everything for granted after so many years together. These 3 little steps keep me in the much healthier and happier place of “Consciousness.” This does not mean I am jumping for joy by any means. But it does mean I am aware of my true feelings. I am consciously avoiding the sadness and hopelessness of “Apathy.”

So just keep in mind that any person who tries to convince you of a one-size-fits-all strategy for achieving happiness is probably just selling you something. Yoga doesn’t work for everyone. Some people just don’t enjoy pedicures. Exercise means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And though I suppose many of us would benefit from the effects of a year-long trip around the world or a couple of weeks in Tahiti, it’s probably not the most realistic course of action. I’m pretty darn sure I wouldn’t meet Javier Bardem in Bali.

I mention this because most of the women I know haven’t had the easiest time of late.  For many of us, the combination of big picture, newsworthy crises and personal challenges has created a perfect storm of frustration, sadness, anger and stress of category five proportions. At times when most women I know would settle for just okay, claims that you can achieve perfect happiness seem foolhardy at best. It’s no wonder we’re thumbing through self-help books in the checkout line.

I find it more than a little ironic that the end result of all this happiness talk often makes us feel bad about not being happy enough. It’s as if we’re just not trying hard enough if we don’t bounce through our day to day lives like Glenda the Good Witch on a sugar high. Like many Southern women, I was raised to grin and bear it, to attend to the happiness of others instead of (and occasionally at the expense of) my own. But I doubt even the most sugar sweet southern belle would honestly claim to feel utter fulfillment and radiant happiness all the time.

Truth is: it’s okay to not be happy all the time. And when you are happy, it should be on your own terms. You should feel free to let yourself relax and enjoy things when you want, but you’re under no obligation to strive for perfect balance and fulfillment or whatever the author of the latest best selling memoir thinks she found at a yoga class in Bali. And yes. You are entitled to be happy, but you’re also entitled to be angry, scared, confused, amused, content, lazy, indifferent, sad and the countless other variations of human emotion.

Real happiness for me is knowing the people I love are well-taken care of, knowing that I love and am loved and knowing that I’m being true to myself, even if being true to myself right now means being a little bit grumpy.

After all, sometimes that cloud’s silver lining just means I need to take my umbrella.

When we are young, we tend to believe a lot of strange things. We have grand ideas about love, grander ideas about truth and frankly bizarre ideas about experience. We believe that people with guitars are the most exciting people we know and that any relationship will likely last forever so long as our girlfriends approve of the match. A large percentage of us believe we will end up being rich, another famous and an even larger percentage thinks we’ll probably end up being both. We believed, like Stevie Wonder, that when we fall in love it will be forever and that our naturally idyllic marriages will never sour. We believe thirty is very old indeed. We believe we might be a little invincible. We believe no one knows we believe any of those things.

One of the less glamorous beliefs of youth is that life can be broken into four discrete parts. In the first part (the part we are all so anxious to exit at age eighteen), our parents rule our lives. We are their children first and foremost. They make the rules. They call the shots. They buy the groceries.  In the second part, we are independent adults, living by our own measure, free to embrace whatever wild scheme we like, diving fully into wisdom and experience (this part always sounds better in theory than in reality).  In the third part, we are parents. Our children rule our lives, but we make the rules. We nurture and support. We correct the mistakes our own parents made. And if our own parents are around, they are nothing more than benign grandparents, baking cookies and showering affection on the perfect, beautiful, brilliant children we imagine having with  Kevin, the football player in 7^th period biology. And finally, somewhere in a distant future filled with flying cars and free plastic surgery, we will retire with our true loves and see the world, confident that everyone we love is taken care of.

It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it?

I still remember when I thought my life would resemble that term paper perfect timeline, though it’s been years since I last believed it. There are a lot of unknowables and ambiguities youth cannot recognize. We want to believe our parents will be around forever, but as young adults, it’s hard for us to imagine them as infirm, as needing us as badly as we ever needed them. Likewise, it’s easy to invent cherubic offspring with dimples and ringlets, but somehow they never seem to age into young adults in our fantasies. Certainly not young adults struggling to find work and make ends meet in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  We may imagine ourselves as empty nesters, but quite honestly, I knew virtually no one who imagined the possibility of having a kid move back home at the same time that they take on the responsibility of care for an aging parent. Now I hear it all the time. It’s a thing we discuss. No mere conjecture, this is a reality that for many of us must be addressed.

We are the sandwich generation, caught between aging parents and adult children, in the rare position of having to fend for both—financially, emotionally, physically. And though our individual circumstances may be very different, I’m guessing we share a similar shade of stress thinking about the expectations others have of us and weighing them very carefully against those expectations we have for ourselves. We may no longer anticipate flying cars and free plastic surgery, but most of us still have a vision of where we want to be at fifty, at sixty—whether Switzerland or St Thomas or sitting in a porch swing with a glass of wine and a good book—and that vision probably doesn’t include spending a morning with an aging parent’s cardiologist and an afternoon listening to a disappointed twenty-two year old daughter, demoralized by her job search and fearful that waiting tables alone will not pay the rent.

I’ll be the first person to tell you that there’s no easy way out of this particular crevasse. But here are several tips that have helped me, for example, get through this stretch:

1. Take care of yourself. Do like the airlines tell you and get your own oxygen mask on before helping those around you. You simply cannot save anyone else if you’re already drowning. Do what is required. If that means giving yourself a few hours or even a few days to work through your personal needs, then do so. Get as much sleep as you can afford. Treat yourself to a little luxury every now and then.

1. Let others help you. Leave martyrdom at church. No one expects you to do everything all by yourself all the time. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. And for heaven’s sake, don’t turn it away when it’s offered. Going through my own version of this recently was made infinitely easier by the kindness and generosity of my husband, who went out of his way to let me let him help me.

1. This too shall pass. I am not psychic. I don’t know when or how, but I do know eventually the clouds will break and we’ll be able to see the shore. Keep the faith.

1. Remember you are not alone. The sandwich generation is so-called because there’s a whole generation of us. Many of us are going through this right now. Don’t be afraid to talk about it. What you share could help someone else, and vice versa.

Focus on the future, the one you want.

Together we’ll get through this.