Happiness as a state

Kayleigh Knight - 16 Dec 17

I’m writing this as I sit on the stairs outside my, on the cusp of being 1 year olds room, waiting for her to go to sleep. I’m trying, and failing, to be super nanny. She wants to hold my hand while she drifts off.

Today was a mixture of good and bad. We did the Christmas food shop. Spent £180 on wine and cheese. We had a coffee and some breakfast out together. We laughed about a few things. It was quite pleasant as shopping excursions go. Ivy was even happy to be bribed in the trolley with a spin my light up wand thing.

And then we got home, argued about money and having none. And discussed again about how it might be easier if I moved out with the kids, as he’d have more. And how, if I stayed, we might be able to budget better in the new year. Same old.

The money convo happens every month. And it always rounds up with the same question. Well, why did we move in together in the first place? Do you still love me? Do you even want to be together? Are we together for the kids? Are we happy?

It strikes me that, as a species, by nature, we are not designed to be happy all the time. As in order to be happy all the time, we would have to be satisfied all the time. And consequently, we would never evolve. It doesn’t make good evolutionary sense to have a species who never want more, or who never go looking for more. It wasn’t satisfied people that discovered the world was round. It wasn’t satisfied scientists who made pioneering medical leaps that further ensure our survival, like immunisations, or cancer treatments. They weren’t satisfied. They can’t have always been happy.

I’m guilty of often thinking I’m striving for happy. That, when we get that farm, we’ll be happy. When ivy sleeps through, I’ll be happy, I’ll be rested and so I’ll be happy. When the kids are both at school, and I can have some life back, I’ll be happy. But will I really? Will any of those things make me entirely fulfilled and truly happy? Or will there still be sadness? Will there then be something new that could make me even happier than happy.

I’ll be happy when ivy sleeps through. But a part of me will probably miss that moment of lying her back down with her bottle in the dark quiet of the night. It will be nice when they are both at school. I’ll have more time. But I’ll miss the baby days, I’ll miss my toddler, and all the things that are great about who she is today. Even though those things might make me happy, they are still tinged with other emotions.

This time of year, around Christmas, I find the pressure to be happy overwhelming. The pressure to produce perfection. The beautifully turned out children in pictures in front of perfectly adorned trees. The immaculate houses and tables with Christmas dinner. The pressure to look like a 2.4 family, who are happy and perfect. Like something out of a magazine. Unfortunately, life just isn’t like that.

In fact, Christmas is a really stressful time. It’s fraught with visitors, the buying of presents, the days are so busy, trying to be everything to everyone. The idea that anyone can be permanently happy, or even should be, is dangerous.

So our Christmas will be a mix. I’ll be appreciating my beautiful, amazing, crazy family, who are all descending on us for Christmas dinner, whilst I’m probably sweating and trying to rid the house of ripped up wrapping paper and look presentable to open the front door to guests. I will be shouting at people to not make a mess, and I’ll be getting shitty at my other half for not helping. A mixture of happy, and perhaps sad, and tired, and emotional. But all of that is ok. Because I’m human.

Happy isn’t a place we are going. It’s a state of mind. A Lichert scale, a sliding, fluid thing, sometimes we are more happy than sad and sometimes more happy than sad. And were we to be exclusively one or the other, we’d be certifiably insane. Am i truly happy? Probably not. But I’m ok with that.

Kayleigh Knight

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