inquiring parent

Allowing Happiness

I’ve written before about how children are a mirror of what we don’t notice in ourselves, and about my surprise the first time I heard LB use expressions I only later noticed in myself. You’d think by now I’d have learned that if I see something in them it’s going to be lurking somewhere within this being I call myself.  Sometimes, truth be told, there are times when I haven’t wanted to see it, and other times just as in a hall of mirrors, the reflection is distorted. It pays to look beneath the obvious.

A few months ago we went on a family outing to a large furniture store (you know the one, it’s all over the world). The plan was to buy a lamp for LB’s room to replace a broken one. As we walked round she saw other things she wanted: a set of pastry cutters, some ornaments and a plant. Mostly I said yes, occasionally no.

We then went to a large outlet warehouse, where LB got a new tee-shirt, but not some jackets she also wanted. Lolo asked for an alarm clock, and got it. We went to a pet shop for hamster food. LB wanted a frilled neck lizard. We said no.

All the way home LB raged. We were horrible parents. It wasn’t fair. She’d wanted one all her life, and we never let her have it. It would never happen. It just wasn’t fair.

I felt annoyed. Couldn’t she feel grateful for what she had got instead of focusing on what she hadn’t? Yes, I remembered my blog post on gratitude, and knew that no, in that moment she couldn’t be grateful if she wasn’t. Yet still I longed to stem the seemingly endless wanting that I could see no way to satisfy. (Yes, I was trying to control her experience.) Actually she said she was grateful for what she’d got AND angry that we would never let her have the lizard. Later she said she didn’t really want any of the “other rubbish”, she only wanted the one thing she hadn’t got.

I tried to explain we did take her feelings into account. (Okay, really what I was trying to do was to get her to see it my way and to defend my decision – now, what is it Katie says about defence being the first act of war?) We had the debate about whether there’s room in our house for a another pet. That led nowhere except to me briefly wondering how on earth I’d managed to make such a mess of parenting that my child appeared to be a bottomless pit of wanting. I told LB that if I believed that giving her this lizard would make her truly happy I might have considered it, if it had been possible. (And yes, it crossed my mind that I wasn’t 100% honest, because of course it would be possible, just not very convenient. Our house already feels cramped to me, without a lizard that needs a large heated tank!) I said that I suspected she would feel pleased for a while but that the wanting would soon come back.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t satisfy her, and I felt frustrated at the apparent gulf between us. We began to bridge that gulf when I recognised that we both wanted for her to feel happy, we just had differing perspectives on how that could be achieved.

Then I noticed that she was not allowing herself to be happy unless she got this lizard, and it occurred to me that if she wasn’t allowing herself to be happy unless the various conditions were met, she’d learned to do that from someone. She certainly was capable of allowing herself to be happy as a baby!

Happiness comes naturally when our minds are still

So where to did I not allow myself to be happy? Not long before, on a Sedona Method weekend course, I had noticed a belief that I couldn’t be happy if others weren’t. And by others I did mean everyone in the entire world. No pressure there then! Nearer home I had not been allowing myself to be happy until LB was well  (she’d been repeatedly ill for months.) And I need to make my mother happy first, the cats, the hamster, that sad looking person I saw on the bus…

Okay, so can I just start with me? Can I allow myself to feel the joy of sitting here typing, smiling at my own silly sense of humour?

Feeling miserable and guilty because others are unhappy doesn’t help them one bit, and yet there is such a tendency to think it’s selfish to be happy if others aren’t. I’ve begun to think of it this way: am I more likely to be of service to someone else if I am caught up in worry and fear or if I am peaceful? Being happy doesn’t stop me caring about another’s feelings, it just frees me to understand them better. Since the lizard incident there have been a couple more of these desperate wantings of LB’s, and I realised they occur just before she begins to recover from an illness. Lately it’s been easier to sit with her and not feel I have to do anything other than be there and allow the feelings to come and go. Lately too there are moments when joy simply erupts within me for no apparent reason.

Where do you withhold happiness from yourself? What needs to be fixed before you can allow yourself to feel bliss? Could you allow yourself to be happy even if your loved ones aren’t? Could you allow yourself to feel happy just because?