The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (27 page)

Pauline never gets a moment of quiet, and so she doesn’t allow herself to contemplate what she might learn if she did. If she asks herself the bigger questions, she might realize that she has some big changes to make. But scarier than finding the answers is never asking the questions.

The pearl: Take time for yourself. Take a breath.

So here’s how to think about the kitchen: You may not love every errand to run, diaper to change, or dishwasher to unload. But if you ask yourself,
Why is this important to me?
it can give meaning to the mundane. The reverse is true when you have to step over the toys and leave home for another activity, knowing they will be there when you return. Sometimes you have to look past the mess to see the bigger picture. If you can’t stand the heat, you’re probably in the kitchen, and that means warmth trumps cleanliness. Being present and pleasant is the goal, not perfection.

Where Everything You Do Is Wrong

W
alk down the hall from your bedroom and you’ll find the second
bedroom, also known as the kid’s room. The perfect scenario here involves a beautiful room, sunlight streaming in, with a freshly bathed eight-year-old reading quietly on her bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. Nearby, an easel holds the painting she was just working on.

This cherub plays soccer but also does ballet; she enjoys music and math; she is not a “pleaser” but a natural leader among her peers. She has quirks that distinguish her as a creative and stimulating individual. She loves her parents and her little brother, and is polite to everyone she encounters. And she always makes her bed without being told.

Now for the reality: The room is dark because the windows have been covered with
High School Musical
posters, there’s a half-eaten bagel under the bed and stinky soccer socks balled up next to her desk. The cherub, sprawled on the floor, is leaning so close to her computer that she appears to be moving the cursor with her nose. She doesn’t look up when you enter the room and never seems to do anything you ask, at least not the first time. Or the third. You feel like everything is a struggle with her, but you love her more than life itself and she loves you too, even though it doesn’t always feel that way. Especially when she yells, “I hate you!”

The Messiest Room in the House

We all know there is no room more complicated for a mother than the kid’s room, where you constantly grade yourself and almost always find
yourself lacking in most ways. (
Not spending enough time with the kids?
Check.
Not being patient enough with them?
Check again.) And even when you do manage to get everything in the emotional kid’s room clean and tidy, there is always going to be another “mess” arriving within the hour. And that’s okay, because if you aren’t having issues here, you probably aren’t having a real, engaged relationship with your child. Here, a mess is just part of life.

One key question in the child’s room is: Whose perspective are you seeing this from—yours or your child’s? You may be doing a great job, even when your child is screaming and throwing a temper tantrum. But if the kid is happy and you’re miserable, then you have a problem. As a parent, self-doubt or frustration is a daily occurrence. What shouldn’t be? Mom’s misery.

So in the kid’s room you have to figure out what works for you, as well as your child. As Dr. Spock once said: A happy mother is a happy baby. It’s not selfish to try to be a contented parent. There are some serious things to feel guilty about, like neglecting or abusing your child, but short of that, most of us are doing the best we can, and Catherine reminds all of us that being a “good-enough mother” is actually better for you and your kids than trying to be a perfect mother. “Good-enough mother” means being attuned to your child, yet leaving them room to grow, according to D. W. Winnicott, who coined the phrase. Being less than perfect may actually turn out better in the end for both of you.

This lesson is hard won even for the mental health professionals. Catherine describes a typical moment when she and her youngest daughter, Phoebe, square off over issues of control. When Phoebe gets tired, it’s late, and she’s not in the mood for anything but falling into bed, the fights are classic “hands-on-hips” throw-downs, and it’s not pretty, and certainly not something you’d expect to find in a shrink’s house. But believe it or not, Phoebe, mature seven-year-old that she is, can also be furious, grit her teeth, and say, “Mom, I am so mad at you right now, I could scream. But you know I still love you.” Even an evolved second grader can understand that fighting is part of loving each other.

Me? A favorite line is: “The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of
love is indifference.” I tell it to my teenage son all the time. So when I put a curfew on Julian and he doesn’t like it and tells me, “The other kids my age don’t have curfews,” by now it’s such a familiar exchange that I just say, “The opposite of love is…” and he says, “I know I know, indifference.” And then he smiles, and we begin to negotiate. Midnight? he asks. Eleven, I counter, and then, in unison, we say, “Eleven-thirty!” Done!

It’s okay to fight; what matters is how you fight. The conflict is part of the love. In fact, you may never stop having conflicts with your kids, and that’s a good thing. You will make mistakes, perhaps every mistake in the book. You will lose your temper and you will raise your voice. So will they. But through it all, your job is to keep loving them. And make sure they know that you do.

At a recent baseball game, Emily’s daughter Grace turned to a little girl on her own team and told her she was a bad hitter. Emily wasn’t exactly watching the game because she was busy chatting with friends and keeping track of her other two kids. But Mark, her husband, and the coach, who is a friend and also a child psychologist, both talked to Grace and handled it. When Mark told Emily about it later, he finished with, “It’s over. We’ve addressed it.”

“He knew I wouldn’t be able to let this go,” Emily says. “I have a tendency to overreact in these situations, so I did everything in my power to restrain myself. I went up to Grace after the game and I said calmly, ‘I heard
what happened, can you tell me why you did that?’ She told me she was sorry, that it ‘just came out of my mouth.’ I almost asked her if she had Tourette’s syndrome, but I didn’t.

“The next time she did something I didn’t like, I realized I was still furious at her and yelled, ‘Don’t think I forgot that nasty thing you said to Kristin!’ I wasn’t proud of it. I knew that Mark had dealt with that incident, but I have a hard time not getting involved. I think I’m a control freak.”

What room is Emily in? And is she in the wrong room? Of course the answer is yes. This isn’t a parenting issue, since Emily knew that Grace had been appropriately parented on the spot not only by her father but also by the coach.

Catherine suggests that Emily has to step back and ask herself why she is so enraged. Often when an original upset isn’t fully expressed (or worked through), it can come roaring back over something that doesn’t merit a strong response. Freud calls this “the return of the repressed,” and in the self-help circles, it’s the “hysterical is historical” lesson: Whenever there is hysteria—any overreaction—it is likely rooted in the past. Emily’s over-reactions are based on her recent (and unexpressed) anger with her daughter, as well as an experience from her own childhood.

“Seeing Grace be mean to a friend is a reflection of me. I definitely said those kinds of things when I was a kid, even as early as the first grade. There was one girl in my class, Rachel. I remember her as if it were yesterday. I made fun of her for not being able to read when I could. I even remember her last name, and I recently Googled her to find out what happened to her, and she didn’t show up anywhere. She’s gone. It’s like she’s dead. Not even Google can find her.”

It’s as if Emily thinks she ruined this poor girl’s life. Even though Rachel is probably fine and doesn’t even remember the incident, Emily is carrying around the ghost of her, so she isn’t
gone
. She is present in Emily’s household, an intruder from her guilty past.

Catherine says Emily clearly needs to deal with her feelings about Grace’s comment and work through them—with her husband or on her own, or
in a nice talk over a family dinner about the mean-spirited way some girls can be toward one another in school. In any case, repressing her feelings has clearly backfired. Grace isn’t blameless, but now she’s angry at Emily, and the two of them aren’t speaking. The kid’s room is a mess, due to problems elsewhere in the house, such as Emily’s basement and the family room, where her husband told her not to say anything.

Emily has to understand that she is not her daughter and vice versa. She is the mother now. The narcissistic tendency is always to think of our children as an extension or replication of ourselves (mini-me’s), especially if they look or act as we did as kids. But it’s a disservice to them, Catherine points out, because they need a parent who isn’t projecting her baggage onto them. Keep your problems to yourself, and make sure their problems are authentically their own (they will have a few, trust us), and the best way to navigate is to ask yourself: Whose problem is this? Is it mine? Is it hers? Am I conflating them? If it’s hers, am I acting appropriately? Or is some of my childhood polluting this situation? You need to see yourself honestly and reflect on whether you are being the parent or trying to “right” the wrongs of
your
past. If your screen memories are impairing your ability to parent objectively you need to do some work in the basement and put those memories in the right boxes, once and for all. Remember that looking backward is a good way to walk into a wall. Also, it’s not all about you. This time it’s about your child and her mistakes.

The pearl: Here in the kid’s room, you have to be the parent. You’ve already been the child.

As a mother of two (ages four and six) who works full-time in a bank, Shawn worries that because she isn’t around much on weekdays, her kids love her babysitter more than they love her. “When we were interviewing sitters, I thought I’d found the perfect person—Jasmine, who worked with the same family for ten years, but wasn’t able to relocate with them when they had to move out of state. I spoke to the mother of that family at length, and she was devastated about losing Jasmine, saying she’d been a blessing to their family!”

Initially, Shawn adored Jasmine as much as her kids did. So did everyone else, from grandparents to teachers to neighbors. “But then I started feeling like Jasmine was the greatest caretaker and I was the absentee mother. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my job and we need the money, but I hate feeling this way.

“Jasmine isn’t doing anything egregious, but sometimes I think she does enjoy her status with the kids a little too much. After a long weekend, I have heard her say, ‘What did your mother do to you? Did she feed you this weekend? You look so skinny.’ I know it’s meant in jest, but it’s like she is twisting the knife. Jasmine knows I like to be the one who gives them treats, and if I find out the kids had cookies during the day I get ridiculously upset. And now even that is backfiring since sometimes when I walk through the door after a long day at work, they run up to me and beg for candy. Then I berate myself and think:
Do they love me at all? Or am I just the candy mom?
”

On the flip side, Shawn knows that Jasmine is sensitive to her feelings, and often protects her from getting hurt. She tells the story of her oldest child’s first step: “Jasmine called me at work one day to tell me that Anna was about to start to walk. And when I got home that evening, she had Anna show me her first steps by wobbling toward me when I came through the door. I was touched. Look, I’m not an idiot—I know Anna took her real first steps earlier that day, but Jasmine knows how I get if I miss something big like this. As gross as it sounds, Jasmine saved the first time Anna successfully went to the bathroom on the potty. She knew that Anna would want to show me…and it was a great moment.”

Shawn is torn because she knows Jasmine is doing a great job, but she
can’t help feeling threatened; she even knows someone who fired their babysitter when the kids got “too attached.” Shawn says, “I’m not going to go that far, but I do want to stop being so preoccupied with how great Jasmine is and how terrible I am.”

Catherine points out that Shawn’s complex feelings of competition, jealousy, and guilt mixed up with appreciation and gratitude are common. Whether you choose to go to a job, or work because you have to, it can be complicated emotionally when you have to employ someone to be a caretaker in your family. It often raises questions like:
Am I a good enough mother? Why do my kids behave better for her than for me? They nap, eat, and bathe so easily for her, but give me such a hassle when I insist they do these everyday things.

Catherine reminds us that this is not an either/or situation—the kids can adore the babysitter,
and
love their mother. Shawn has to remember that more than two people (she and her husband) can love and be loved by their kids. Love is not limited, and having a responsible, caring, and adored “third parent” is a godsend. “I know Jasmine enables me to do my job outside the house. And I do really appreciate that she has the kids call me at work to tell me about important things in their days, or even just to say hello to Mommy.”

The most important thing for Shawn is to deal with her ambivalence, or any internal conflict she may have about working rather than being there every moment for her kids. If she doesn’t, she may displace these feelings onto her babysitter (or others) by getting upset over minor infractions. It’s Shawn’s responsibility to make peace with her current circumstances (or change what she can), instead of feeling guilt-ridden and then annoyed at her babysitter for simply being great at her job.

Kids pick up on those conflicted signals, whether it’s that you don’t want to work but have to, or that you don’t have to work, but want to. Either way, being honest about your feelings is healthier and paves the way for everyone to be happier. The key is for you to be comfortable with your decisions and know what your conflict is. You may be feeling anxious about the entire situation (the babysitter is a better mother) when in
fact it’s really just one thing (I make my kids love me with candy) that needs adjusting. Shawn thinks,
If I don’t give them candy, they won’t love me!
She can stop the candy flow, and they can be irritated about it, but they will get over it.