The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

children.
    Of course, my children are also a tremendous source of worry, irritation, expense, inconvenience, and lost sleep. In fact, some happiness experts argue that although parents—like me—insist that their children are a major source of happiness, this belief isn’t true. One study that examined a groupof women’s emotions during their daily activities showed that they found “child care” only slightly more pleasant than commuting. Marital satisfaction nose-dives after the first child is born and picks up again once the children leave home. From my own experience, I knew that Jamie and I squabbled far more often once we had kids, we had fewer adventures, and we had less time for each other.
    Nevertheless, despite these findings, I had to reject the experts’ argument that children don’t bring happiness. Because they do. Not always in a moment-to-moment way, perhaps, but in a more profound way. After all, in a poll where people were asked, “What one thing in life has brought you the greatest happiness?” the most common answer was “children” or “grandchildren” or both. Were all these people mired in self-deception?
    In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all—yet somehow they do.
    I identified fog happiness during a party. My host was bustling around the kitchen, juggling the preparation and presentation of the three major dishes he was serving to thirty people.
    “Are you having fun at your own party?” I asked him, when I probably should have gotten out of his way.
    “Mm, not really right now,” he said distractedly. “I’ll have fun when it’s over.” Really, when? I wondered. Doing the dishes? Rearranging the furniture? Carrying sticky bottles of wine to the recycling bin? Where and when, exactly, was the fun?
    That started me thinking. Many activities that I consider enjoyable aren’t much fun while they’re happening—or ahead of time or afterward. Throwing a party. Giving a performance. Writing. When I stop to analyze my emotions during the various stages of these activities, I see procrastination, dread, anxiety, nervousness, annoyance at having to do errands and busywork, irritation, distraction, time pressure, and anticlimax. Yet these activities undoubtedly make me “happy.” And so it is with raising children. At any one time, the negative may swamp the positive, and I might wish I were doing something else. Nevertheless, the experience of having children gives me tremendous fog happiness. It surrounds me, I see it everywhere, despite the fact that when I zoom in on any particular moment, it can be hard to identify.
    Before I actually gave birth, the aspect of parenthood that intimidated me most was its irreversibility. Spouse, job, work, location—most of the big decisions in life can be reconsidered. Change might be difficult and painful, but it’s possible. But a baby is different. A baby is irrevocable. Once Eliza was born, however, I never gave another thought to the irreversibility of parenthood. I sometimes miss the freedom and leisure of my pre-Mommy days, but I never regret having children; instead, I worry about being a good enough parent. My standards for parenting aren’t especially high: I never fuss much about whether my daughters’ food is organic or whether their rooms are tidy. But when I started my happiness project, I was uneasy about the fact that I wasn’t living up to my own standard of behavior. I lost my temper, I didn’t make enough time for fun, I knew I didn’t appreciate enough this fleeting time in my children’s lives. Though the stages of diapers and dress-up clothes and car seats seem interminable, they pass quickly, and too often, I was so focused on checking off the items of my to-do list that I forgot what really mattered.
    Eliza, bright-eyed and snaggle-toothed at seven years old, is even-tempered, loving, and oddly sensible for a child. She’s wildly creative and loves any kind of imaginative play or homemade project. Apart from the occasional histrionic sulking fit, she’s a delight. Eleanor, at age one, with her dimples, her big blue eyes, and her never-growing hair, is a darling toddler. She has a