The piece is called "How to Be a Happier Mom" but there is plenty here for fathers as well.
It seems like everyone I know is busy creating or obtaining new units of embodied human capital. My impression from a year of parenting is that it is very easy to get caught up in crazy notions regarding social norms around parenting. There is a sort of an upper middle class cult of the child that demands complete and utter submission of your life to the child's. Actually trying to do this leads, not at all surprisingly, only to misery.
Thus, this article's seemingly trivial advice: recognize and accept that sometimes kids are a pain in the behind, get enough sleep, do things for yourself, and so on, seems obvious but in fact given the dead weight of social norms, these things can be remarkably hard to do at all, let alone to do without constant guilt and worry. I think, though, that they are very much worth doing. In my view, a happy parent is the best parent, and happy parents are parents that still have lives separate from their children - not just work lives but lives with room for friends and movies and plays (and fooling around) as well.
Whew.
8 years ago
