Chronicling Joy Amidst the Struggle

Because it’s not all bad

In my last post, I bemoaned the arrival of the holidays. I have not been looking forward to two weeks without childcare. I knew we would go through a series of deadly colds, and I was not wrong. I knew there would be a lot of tantrums, tears, and fights. Again, I was not wrong, but…I also have to admit that I am actually enjoying myself.

It’s true that I was up half the night last night dealing with my daughter’s double ear infection. It’s also true that, somehow, we still had a really great Christmas morning.

Motherhood is perhaps best-defined by its extremes. The highs are so high and the lows are so low. Before becoming a mother, a typical Saturday was pretty even-keeled, emotionally-speaking. Now, in my motherhood era, it’s more likely that I will have cried, screamed and laughed my head off all by the end of a single day.

I don’t know if it’s cultural or biological, but as a species, we definitely tend to focus on the bad stuff. It’s become almost taboo these days to say that you enjoy motherhood. People might even think you’re a Trad Wife or a Republican (gasp!). Just about every book on motherhood that’s been written since the pandemic - Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose, Touched Out by Amanda Montei, Matrescence by Lucy Jones - insists very heavily on the pain and struggle, to the point that I had trouble finishing them. Substack is even worse. I made a strategic decision not to check my email over the holidays because I realized I was drinking from a firehouse of controversial and enraged content designed to grab my attention more than offer up any kind of useful information or solace. It’s not that these books and newsletters aren’t important or worthy. We do have major problems to address in this country. Motherhood in America is completely unsustainable. The physical and emotional pain that women go through in order to bring new life into this world is no joke. And yet…It’s also beautiful, isn’t it?

I think the reasons why we shy away from sharing joy as mothers are numerous and complex. One valid concern is that by talking about the good times you are somehow guilt-tripping or pathologizing the moms who are not enjoying themselves (and there’s a lot of us at any given moment). There has been a major movement recently to normalize the struggle. Misery loves company, as they say. Another reason is that we believe that if we articulate the joys of motherhood it will somehow prevent us from being good activists and creating change. If we’re having fun then we must not need help, right? Wrong.

The last reason I see is that we simply forget to look for it. Joy, compared with suffering, feels banal and unimportant. All you have to do is read the Sunday papers to see this phenomenon in action. We are programmed to place more importance on threats and suffering. The hunger crisis in Darfur certainly feels like it is more deserving of our collective attention (even if we are powerless to do anything about it) than the Santa surfer who managed to do a full 360 without losing his beard or hat. But all of this focus on death and struggle is exhausting. When we put our focus on the suffering and the fighting and the pain, that becomes the reality we live in. I find that the same is true, to some extent, in the home. It’s easier at the end of the day to look back and feel wracked with guilt over that one moment we lost our patience than it is to recall all of the sweet and intimate moments that bookended it.

Lately I have been thinking that it’s not fair that the Instagram Trad Wives are the only ones who are allowed to say they are having fun (and let’s be honest, their version of a good time often feels manufactured and fake, designed more to push products and an aspirational lifestyle than to help people connect with their positive emotions). I am hungry for a real-world version of maternal joy that I feel we have culturally lost touch with as of late. There are books on motherhood that insist on joy and humor, but most were written decades ago. I love Anne Lammot’s Operating Instructions. I am also re-reading Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson’s 1950s memoir about raising four kids in rural New England. It is so funny and real and manages to give equal weight to joy, struggle, and humor. I find it so comforting to connect with voices like that: voices that acknowledge how universal the struggles and joys of motherhood are across time and space.

And so, in that spirit, I have decided to start chronicling small moments of joy in the life of my family, because there are so many, and when I focus on them, I realize that I truly, honestly love being a mom. My hope is that you’ll see yourself reflected in some of these, and maybe shift your own focus a bit if you need to.

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My three-year-old daughter has recently discovered the magic of knock-knock jokes. My son brought one home from school that goes like this:

“Knock knock.”

“Who's there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

“Interruption cow wh- “

“Mooooooo!”

My daughter was inspired. In the days since she first heard that first one she has been honing her own arsenal. She’s got a formula that goes likes this:

“Knock knock.”

“Who's there?”

“Ketchup.”

“Ketchup who?”

“Let me in!”

This winning recipe can be repeated with just about any household item: mustard, hot dog, coffee, plate, fork, rubber duck, you name it! As someone who has always had a strange affinity for absurd humor, I find this absolutely hilarious. She was on a roll last night during dinner and my husband and I were both in stitches. My son joined in with his own line-up, mostly involving farts and fecal matter in some form (another brand of humor that I have always found irresistible, which is probably why my son’s teacher keeps mentioning he needs to reign it in) and we went on like that for an hour. It was the most fun I’ve had in weeks.

…

Another lovely moment happened just before the holiday break as I was driving my son to the doctor’s office to get his ear infection checked out (he then diligently passed it on to my daughter who has still not gotten over it). The poor buddy was really suffering, but about half way to our appointment the Tylenol must have kicked in because he perked up all of a sudden and asked if we could listen to Christmas songs on the radio. I tuned in. They were playing some sappy rendition of White Christmas and he was a little bummed by their selection. “Mom,” he said, “Can you play that Police Navidad one?” I burst out laughing. “I would, hon, but I’m driving right now and I don’t want to distract myself by connecting the bluetooth to my phone. Is it okay if we just listen to whatever is on the radio for now?” He agreed reluctantly, but then low and behold, what do you think came on next? Police Navidad. And so we sang at the top of our lungs all the way to the South City Kaiser Permanente facility, “I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEEEEEAAAART!”

…

A couple of nights ago my five-year-old son asked if, as a bedtime story, I would tell him about “where life came from.” Yikes. We have a routine where I lie down with both of my kids in bed and tell stories in the dark until they fall asleep. My son was asking me for our creation story, I realized. I thought about feeding him the old Adam-and-Eve nonsense because I am lazy and it felt a lot easier than explaining how a bunch of organic matter coalesced in a deep-sea volcanic vent to form the first single-celled organism. But then I remembered how I am really not on board with the woman coming from man’s rib stuff, so I took a deep breath and started, “Once upon a time, about 4 billion years ago…” He was patient and interested and asked lots of relevant questions. “Mommy, what’s a hydrothermal vent? What’s a single-celled organism? But when did the dinosaurs come?” We did a fast-forward version to keep it interesting and made it to the pterodactyls before he fell asleep, and he listened happily the whole time, snuggled against me, drumming his fingers gently on my arm the way he used to do when he was only a year old and we’d watch Miyazaki movies on the couch together after dinner.

…

Yesterday morning we went out for overpriced treats at the local coffee shop and they were playing “Diamonds” by Rihanna. My son thought it would be funny to replace the word “Diamond” with the word “Diaper.” The new version goes like this:

“Shine bright like a Diaper! Shine bright like a Diaper! You’re beautiful like a Diaper in the sky!”

It’s best if you sing it loudly in public places.

After we finished our treats we walked from the coffee shop down to the beach. It had been stormy for the last few days and the waves were huge. There were these mountains of white water crashing onto the beach. We kept a healthy distance. The waves were so powerful that they were sending this layer of mist into the air and the sun was shining through it and giving everything this kind of soft, magical property. There was a flock of gulls on the shore and at one point a particularly large wave startled them and they all flew into the sky at once, into that hazy late-afternoon light filtering through the mist, and I had one of those moments where I was just stunned into stillness by the shocking beauty of our natural world.

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There are a few things I’ve learned from focusing on joy over the holidays. One is that, despite what our American constitution would have you believe, you can’t chase down happiness with a sawed-off shotgun and will it into submission. On the contrary, it tends to sneak up on you when you least expect it. In my life as a mom, whenever I try to plan for joy and fun, I find it often ends in tears (usually my own) but when I accept life for whatever it brings in the moment, there is usually far more joy than I had expected to find. We just have to focus our attention on it when it appears. Joy is like a gift that life offers to us that we can only enjoy if we first acknowledge and accept it, and when our lives are packed with business, we often forget to open the packet even as it's being handed to us. (I apologize for the corny Christmas metaphor. It must be all of the nonalcoholic eggnog going to my head).

The other thing I have learned is that motherhood is mostly fun, as long as you don’t have anything else to do, and you have help. Most of my frustrations in parenting arise from the fact that I am trying to parent and clean the house, or cook dinner, or write a Substack article, or get the kids out the door for school, alone. When it’s just the four of us, relaxing and playing, it’s not all that hard. I’m not saying there aren’t moments of frustration, but it feels manageable. I resist this messaging when I see it on social media - the idea that what we need is not so much a break from our kids, but a break from everything else - but it’s not entirely wrong. I think the missing ingredient is that it has to be done in the company of at least one other attentive adult. Parenting children alone is hell, but when my husband is also off for the week and we can share not only the physical work of caregiving but the emotional labor, it tips the balance from mostly struggle to mostly fun. And that, after all, is how this newsletter got started in the first place: as a means of reminding people that for 99% of human history we did this together in a community of 25 or 30 people, with 5 adults to every child, and boy, wouldn’t that make the whole thing a lot more joyful?