The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (31 page)

Joan’s not in the kid’s room when she reacts to the grade, she is in a meeting, and this is exactly where she needs to be, both physically and emotionally. Her job is to do a great job at work, and then come home and be a great parent. But you can’t always parent from work and you can’t always work from home—at least not effectively. Joan needs to realize that her job is to help Olivia and not be distracted by her own problems. The optimal condition: Stay focused at work, and it will be easier to be focused when you are home. You will both be the better for it.

The final thought for the kid’s room: You’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to get frustrated. Your children are going to yell and scream and stomp their feet, and sometimes you’ll feel like doing it also. The only thing that matters is that you never stop loving them, and that you let them know you do, in every scenario. It’s not that you will always be pleasant (or even get through an entire day without a fight, it sometimes seems). It’s that you love them and support their efforts to grow into the best version of themselves. After you love them and tell them so, get out of the way. They will be fine, and so will you.

Expectations and Other Emotional Heirlooms

L
et’s go up to the attic, where you store your heirlooms, or what
we think of as your emotional DNA. Your personality (and your happiness) is informed by who you are related to, living and dead. The stories of their lives passed down from one generation to the next keep certain traits alive.

Your job in this space is to both accept and reject this legacy, as you choose, but that job gets complicated, because every new storyteller brings a twist to the tale and a new interpretation of the truth. “Grandma was a nut who lived with twenty-seven cats” or “Great-uncle Bob was a war hero who kept the Germans from sinking his ship”—the stories are often full of embellishments that would make a Hollywood scriptwriter blush. The teller isn’t just telling you what you want to know; they are telling you what they
want
you to know.

For instance, my friend Jim tells his daughter about a moment in his childhood he will never forget. His grandmother was dying of cancer and she walked him down into the basement and opened up boxes of precious china she had kept since her wedding day. Instead of telling him how important these plates were to her, she said, “I want you to always remember me and never forget that I cared more about you than any other thing in the world. Things don’t matter, people do.” And then she threw a plate against a wall and shattered it.

She handed him a plate, and together they broke every one of those plates. “I was only four, but I will never forget my Nana and how unbelievably modern and strong she was,” Jim tells his little girl. Later, Jim’s wife
tells the story with a different spin. “I have her jewelry, and let me tell you, Nana liked beautiful things, but she hated those plates because they reminded her of the bastard she married. Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about that woman. She was a shopaholic.”

That other version of Nana doesn’t change anything for Jim and his daughter, who both treasure a legacy of a strong and willful woman who wanted to make sure her grandson never forgot her. And he never did.

Think about it: What traits did your family pass to you through its stories, legends, and wild exaggerations? This is an easy question for me to answer: I’m tough like my grandfather, who was a great businessman and drove a hard bargain. He always told me to put my best foot forward, and I remind myself to do that by literally stepping into any important meeting with my right foot. (Did I mention there is also a slight strain of OCD in my family?) But I’m also a connector, who likes to chat it up with people just like my dad—aka, the Mayor—who sends hundreds of Christmas cards to everyone he’s ever met, or worked with, or for all I know, shared a long flight with! I like to be creative and intuitively smart like Mom, the artist, or sporty and strong and outdoorsy like all the women in my family. And of course I tell my kids all about these “strengths” that they have inherited, as surely as the heart disease that runs through the family tree.

The attic is also a place of high expectations. When you ascend into that arid, magical space, it often smells of wood and is hot and a little awe-inspiring, since there could be ghosts up there, and certainly there are ghosts in your imagination, the ones who want to influence your actions today. You bring these spirits back downstairs into the rest of your house, since you don’t want to disappoint all the people you love who aren’t even there: your ancestors. For some people, the expectation that they will be a success—or a disappointment—is a huge source of stress. These expectations range from who you marry to where you live and how you educate your kids. Not all the ancestors who are influencing your decisions are dead, but some of the most powerful voices are those from beyond. Let’s first hear about one woman’s money woes, since they come straight out of her attic.

Barbara spends plenty of time in her attic, since both of her parents are dead and she has to grapple with some big issues alone, wondering what they’d think of the new boyfriend, the apartment, the job, and her handling of her finances.

She just got through a tumultuous year—her savings were wiped out when a risky investment went bust. She lost her inheritance, everything she owned, and she is worried that she has let her parents down. “It wasn’t my fault,” she says, “since I was going on the recommendation of a friend, someone who knows money!” Only now does she realize that she should have taken responsibility for researching the investment. Only after it was gone did people tell her: “Everyone knows that those were high-risk derivatives, and besides, since when do you put all your eggs in one basket?”

She was feeling guilty about this until she was able to get her money back after a powerful lawyer threatened to bring a highly embarrassing and expensive lawsuit. Barbara fully recovered her principal, so there was a happy ending, but she endured many months of worry and hand-wringing and feeling guilty.

“I felt as if my dad was looking down on me with his arms crossed because he was upset, and shaking his head, like he did the time I scraped his car on a tree coming into our driveway. He just stood there on the porch and shook his head at me, like, What a dingbat…I know he’s proud of me, but that was the image that kept coming into my head…Daddy, upset and disappointed.

“Now that I got the money back the image has shifted to one of him smiling, laughing, and hugging me. He has his arms around me in my dreams, and I am cracking up and saying to him: ‘Whew, that was a close one! You taught me to be persistent but not piss anyone off, and look—I got the money back!’ So I know he’s proud of me!”

Before all this happened, Barbara had been very nonchalant about her bills. Worse than nonchalant, she was actually unwilling to put them on her desk or even look at them. When the mail arrived, she would drop the bills into a big basket by her front door and let them sit there for weeks without opening them. “I thought,
Out of sight, out of mind
.” She didn’t want to even look at her bank balance.

“I thought,
These are unpleasant things, and I just want to come home from work and have a nice evening, listen to music, relax, and cook and watch TV
.” She eventually puts all her bills in an envelope and takes them to her office, where she feels more in control and the bills seem less threatening, and more payable, since it’s where she gets paid. Her home has to be free of all financial stress.

Catherine wants to tell Barbara to get to her emotional office, take control, and not let bills and bank statements scare her. Even if she isn’t making the day-to-day investment decisions, she is deciding whom to give that responsibility to, and judging character is as important as picking a stock. Her financial future depends on her taking full responsibility for her fiduciary decisions, including whom she allows into the vault.

Barbara transferred her parental feelings onto her broker, who could not be trusted, as it turned out. Even if he’d been trustworthy, a totally hands-off approach isn’t warranted, since no broker could be expected to watch out for her the way Barbara’s father had all those years.

Transference happens in all relationships, when you meet someone and ascribe to them a trait you recognize in another person, usually someone you care about or are familiar with (a father, brother, etc.). In this case Barbara fell victim to her own desire to trust, and see her father, in this broker. It wasn’t to be. She has to understand that she was a participant in this drama, since she enacted a pattern from her past, allowing herself to
play the role of daughter and putting her broker in the paternal role. It was a fantasy scenario and it all came crushing down when the markets teetered and fell.

The pearl here is that you are in charge of your life. That means you need to be comfortable managing your own financial future. This case reminds us that we are all responsible for ourselves, financially and otherwise. You can choose to trust others, but ultimately only you are in charge. Be comfortable being the boss…of you.

Maria’s parents came to California from Vietnam separately, met in a Vietnamese church in their new state, and got married. They clung to their national heritage and passed it on to their children. They also ran a very strict home. “My mother was paranoid as her baseline,” Maria says. “This was coming from a woman who’d been through a war and lost lots of family and friends.”

Maria’s parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed—to be perfect students and get into a great college. Maria met that goal when she got accepted to UCLA, which she jokingly calls University of Caucasians Lost among Asians. “I wanted to major in nursing, but UCLA didn’t let freshmen do that and my mom begged me to go there anyway and go pre-med, so that’s what I did.”

When she started at UCLA, she rebelled against the expectations of her parents and dated all the wrong men and did drugs, joining the “rave”
scene, doing Ecstasy, and crowd surfing into the wee hours. She ended up on academic probation.

“I finally calmed down and got my act together when I realized I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. It’s as if I finally realized no one cared how self-destructive I was being but me. After one particularly bad night I knew I had to stop. I realized I was literally killing myself. That’s when I thought:
My ancestry isn’t my destiny, but neither is the opposite true. My destiny is not running away from my ancestry
. I had to find a healthy medium. I had to start to grow up and own my future.”

Catherine says Maria was reacting by acting out in all the worst ways: drinking, drugs, and blowing her academic future. It took a series of extreme and scary nights for her to begin to realize she was stuck in a teenage stage of rebellion. Serendipitously, around the same time she discovered a new potential direction to funnel her energies into, one that would take her away from her family.

“I saw an ad in the school paper that I could join an accelerated nursing program at Columbia, and I signed on.” Her parents tried to stop her from moving three thousand miles away, but once she qualified for the program (by raising her grades) they were happy that her life seemed to have a renewed purpose. She left for New York City and finally gained some hard-won independence the right way, not by being self-destructive but by getting on the career path
she
wanted to take.

“A lot of the kids I grew up with hid what was really going on in their lives from their parents, who either didn’t want to know or were in denial, since all they cared about were their kids doing well in school and getting ahead. As long as you got good grades you could do anything else. To my parents, good grades equaled happiness.”

Maria had to define happiness for herself, and that meant talking to her mother about how unhappy her mother’s marriage was and how they only stayed together for the sake of the kids. Maria’s father had an injury that prevented him from working, so her mom brought home the paycheck and her father got more and more miserable and more and more difficult to live with. “Roles changed, she became the breadwinner after
he got injured,” Maria says, “and now we also know more English than he does, so there’s very little he can contribute other than to be a jerk and act like the boss of everyone when in fact he has lost all his power in the family. Dad gets depressed and mean, and my brother and I bond together against him.

“One day my father asked for my brother’s report card and Johnny said, ‘I showed it to you, you just don’t remember. Maybe you’re going crazy.’ And my father flipped, lit a cigarette, held it over his arm, and said, ‘When you lie to me, you hurt me emotionally like this. I’m going to show you how much you hurt me.’ And then he burned himself. I’ll never forget it.”

The emotional damage is still spreading through the family. Maria refuses to date a Vietnamese man. “I know my parents want me to marry and give them grandchildren. Of course they only want Vietnamese grandchildren. Last Thanksgiving my father turned to me and said, ‘Okay, it’s time now. You have to bring home someone and get married.’ He never wanted me to date or have a boyfriend and now decided I have to get married. I turned to my brother and laughed.

“My mother will be honest with me about how unlikely it is that I’ll find a Vietnamese man who is decent and smart and not going to be a chauvinist. All she wants for me is a good man who is smart and capable of providing for my family. But even that is enormous pressure, because it’s like she already has a résumé in mind for this future husband, and I haven’t found him yet.”

Maria has to find a way to please herself and her parents. She was in the attic, but she should have been in the bedroom—her own, not the one from her childhood.

Catherine sees this kind of thing all the time—women who are still trying to please their parents, grandparents, and a whole family tree of relatives through their dating choices, even by marrying the wrong guy to make their family happy.

Is Maria happy? She says yes. “I love my life in New York, I love my job. And I’m excited and optimistic about meeting someone new. Someone really cool.”

So she has most of her house together, the office and the living room
and all the rest of it. But her bedroom is big, and its walls touch the attic, and the family room. Maria’s process, it turns out, is that she is still pinging off parents and grandparents, and everyone’s expectations for her. She can please her parents and herself, so long as she is authentic in her own life. The pearl: If
you’re
happy, your parents should be happy too.