Whenever I have to buy something expensive, I have to overcome a slight internal resistance – even though I know that we need it, and that we can afford it, and that it’s not worth buying a cheaper alternative, because you get what you pay for (most of the time).

Spending money is a little bit easier when it feels like a long-term investment, like a bicycle, or winter boots, or a computer. Even then, though, it takes a bit of an effort. The hardest for me is to buy things that seem frivolous, that I like but don’t really need. One winter scarf is perfectly enough, so even if I see another really pretty one, it’s unlikely that I will buy it.

Or fruit. There is a part of my brain that insists on telling me that apples for 19.90 SEK/kg are perfectly good fruit, though slightly boring, and there is no need to splurge on grapes for 49.90.

Lately, though, I have begun to train myself to ignore that part of the brain. If there’s one thing in my everyday life that I really enjoy, it is simple, fresh, good-quality food. Often when I look back at my day and think about the highlights, it’s the freshly baked bread, or the cereal with fresh strawberries, that comes to mind.

And it’s not like we cannot afford it. For various reasons, we do not spend money on a car, or eating out, or alcohol and cigarettes, or movies and such. We run a not insignificant surplus every month.

So now, when I feel like eating the season’s first Swedish strawberries, 60% more expensive than the Belgian ones, I just do it. (I’ve nothing against Belgians, but their strawberries are a poor substitute for the real thing.) When the veggie stand down at Spånga Square has in-season Pakistani mangoes at exorbitant prices, I barely hesitate. (They keep a few of them in a small box right next to the cashier, with a hand-written sign describing them as “the best fruit in the world”.)

I love having a garden. I love our garden. Even though I don’t spend much time there every day (because our evenings tend to be busy, and because we have no evening sun in the garden), I love having it nearby and around me.

I love being surrounded by greenery rather than houses, cars or people. Looking out through the kitchen window during breakfast and seeing green grass, trees and blooming lilacs. Being met by growing things when leaving the house in the morning, and when coming home in the evening.

I love the quiet. Which is not a direct effect of having a garden, really, but a neighbourhood with gardens mean less dense housing, which in turn means more quiet.

I love the air and the smells. I like to end my day by walking out onto the balcony when brushing my teeth and just inhaling the garden. Just a few moments’ exposure makes a big difference.

Well, now both the projects and next actions have been captured, and I have them all under control. The flip side is that I now know exactly how much stuff there is that I should be doing instead of spending time in front of the computer. The lists are shockingly long. My list of next actions, which I’ve previously mostly managed to fit onto Post-Its on one A4 page, now cover the best part of three pages.

The flip side of that, in turn, is that I feel challenged. There is nothing like a bit of pressure to get me moving. Time to get those lists down to size again!

Observations:

• I need to feel comfortable with the content and the presentation materials, but once I have that, and a rough idea of what I want to say about each point, further preparation is not useful to me. Some people rehearse and memorize individual phrases they intend to use. I sometimes try that, thinking of good ways of expressing things, but when I’m standing there on the stage that all disappears, flies right out of my brain, and I end up improvising anyway.
• Surprisingly many people deliver presentations without thinking through what they want to achieve. What is the purpose? What should the audience know or think or want or do after hearing your presentation? How does each page work towards that aim?
• You don’t need to be a leading-edge expert in order to deliver a useful talk. You just need to know more than your audience, and know your limitations.

• Take down the wall between the kitchen and the living room
• Clean up my desk and get rid of the many (but admittedly relatively tidy) piles of papers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, letters etc on it
• Do a proper GTD review, emptying my head of all the things I know I need to do and getting it all down on paper
• Unpack some more boxes from our move
• Sew a skirt for Ingrid
• Decide what kind of laptop to buy
• Do my UK tax return for last year

Despite Ingrid’s continuing illness (it now looks to be something flu-like) I got off to a good start today:

• Finished a curtain I have been working on for the last 10 days or so
• Got rid of one pile of paper from my desk by typing in all my expenses for the last month or so
• Processed (named, rotated and sorted into folders) all my photos from the last month or so

Let’s hope I don’t run out of energy before I’m done.

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers

and

In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

There’s also an essay at Babble.com, which has as its starting point Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. The essay features this chart which also seems to say that married people without children are happier than those with children:

Stumbling on Happiness also mentions a study trying to ascertain which activities women enjoy most, and reporting that “taking care of children” is rated lower than grocery shopping, sleeping, or socializing.

The initial angle for both stories is that parents lie to others (perhaps because it isn’t socially acceptable to say that you were happier before you had children) and maybe even delude themselves:

“Perhaps parents find it psychologically advantageous to talk themselves into thinking this is a great thing,” theorizes Oswald, who has two daughters. “It would be psychologically difficult to come to the view early in life, I’ve made a huge mistake having these children. I imagine that humans are good at the flexibility of thought that stops them from taking that view.”

I don’t find that explanation very convincing. If parenting consistently made us unhappy, then we’d have died out long ago. So there must be more to this.

Firstly, this might be a new phenomenon, as Newsweek recognises: changes to family and work patterns may have made parenting a lot more stressful than it used to be. We don’t live with our extended families, we are stressed and hurried. (Perhaps even more so in the US, where these studies have been performed?) And our expectations have changed as well: rather than having kids so they can help you on the farm and one day inherit it, people now expect parenting to be a fulfilling experience, a way to realise themselves. And indeed people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children. Perhaps they have indeed concluded that children aren’t worth the bother, the money, or the loss of freedom.

Another explanation is that the studies may have asked the wrong questions. Parents may not enjoy “taking care of children” but that doesn’t mean their children don’t make them happy. You wouldn’t conclude that beautiful clothes don’t make women happy because women don’t enjoy “taking care of clothes”, to pick a random example.

But even more importantly, I think the studies have looked at the wrong measure of happiness. Average happiness is not how we judge our lives, and not what we remember afterwards.

“How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?” Gilbert asks. “It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn’t all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn’t what we’re trying for. As human beings, it’s not our aim. It shouldn’t be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average.

This is what a childless / child-free adult’s happiness levels might look like over some arbitrary time period unmarked by any major life events:

And this is what they might look like for a parent:

The little ups and downs of normal life have been replaced by a rollercoaster. The lack of flexibility and freedom and time have dragged down the average, and there are more troughs than before. Those are the troughs of teething, sleepless nights, and tantrums, and later on “I hate you mummy!” and so on. But you also get more peaks, of the kind that make your heart melt and that you wish you could remember forever: the early morning snuggle, the happy child running to greet you with a hug.

Finally, long-term happiness is different from short-term satisfaction. Satisfaction is about the balance between feeling good and feeling bad. But for durable happiness, something more is needed. I myself think of it as growth. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite bloggers, has a slightly different angle and describes it as feeling right: “to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right”.

Parenting makes you grow as a person. It’s corny but it’s true. You learn things about yourself, and you change, and you become a more mature person. You aren’t fully adult until you have taken care of someone else.

Links:
Newsweek: True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy
Babble.com: Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
The Happiness Project: Do your children make you happy?
Momaroo: Do Kids Make You Happy?
Walrus Magazine: Parenting makes you miserable. Discuss.
National Post: Do our kids make us happy? Answer: It depends what you mean by ‘happy’.

I pass some random person in the street, and for a brief moment I know it’s someone familiar – and it’s always someone who couldn’t possibly be there, because I know they’re in another country. Then my brain catches up and I see that there’s barely even a likeness. But for that fleeting moment there is such a strong connection that I cannot think about anything else, and when it’s gone, there’s always a sense of loss.

A few times this summer I “saw” colleagues from London. I remember several similar occurrences from when I first moved to Sweden 16 years ago. It says something about the strength of the sensation: even now I can remember where I was walking (outside my high school) when I “saw” one of them.

Interestingly I have never “seen” the people I used to see most often, or the people I missed most, but acquaintances whom I hadn’t even thought much about before moving.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

When I was out with Ingrid in a sling and we met other parents doing the same, we’d always smile at each other. Sort of like a secret handshake. Now I still smile at such parents whenever I see them, even though they don’t notice me.

Somehow I had been expecting that becoming a mother would change me. That I would feel different, that I would feel like I was a different person. Perhaps not overnight… but surely a year would be enough time for any changes to take effect?

But I still don’t feel any different. I don’t feel that my role in life is to be a mother. I don’t primarily identify myself as a mom. My life has changed, of course, in the sense that I spend my time differently, have a different set of priorities, etc. But I myself have not. I am my old self but with new things in my life – not a new self.

Did becoming a parent change you?

But it does mean that I don’t get much else done in the evenings, because by the time I’ve put Ingrid to bed, had dinner, and worked two hours, it’s about 10 o’clock.

Blogging frequency in particular has suffered. Work is not the only reason, of course. The other part of the equation is that I have gotten into a habit of blogging late in the evening. I think I need to change that, because this way there is too much chance that it just doesn’t happen at all. I may not be able to work while I am constantly interrupted, but I should be able to write a blog post piece by piece.

(There’s no real point to this post. Just wanted to tell you.)

I stopped following daily news years ago. The vast majority of news stories are superficial, irrelevant to my life, and filled with negativity. I don’t buy newspapers, don’t watch the news on TV, and most days don’t open a news site either. (I keep up with the big stuff by reading The Economist to make sure I’m not completely ignorant of what is going on in the world.)

My news avoidance has become more pronounced over the past year. Firstly, of course, I have less spare time. But now I also find myself actively avoiding the news, because so much of the headline news is about bad things happening to people.

Some kind of wiring deep in the brain must change when you become a mother. I find it almost impossible to read/see news or books or movies about children being harmed or dying. Getting sick, run over, mugged… The closer the children are in age to Ingrid, the more the stories affect me. I feel tears coming up, and a sense of vicarious grief / panic / distress. I have to turn another page or walk away. If I don’t, I can all to easily imagine what it might feel like to have that happen to my child. And I cannot face that. I stop myself the moment I feel my thoughts going in that direction, because if I continue, I will be overwhelmed.

I’m a year older than I was last year, which is of course true for all days… but today the digits rolled over and my new age starts with a 3. That actually makes me feel a bit old. My mental age, the age I think of myself as, has been “mid-20s” for quite a long time now. So inside I’m not aging by a year but by over 5 years, overnight. That’s a bit of a shock.

Another statistic: there will be (or has been) a point some time this summer, I don’t know the exact date, when I will have spent half of my life living outside of Estonia. 15 years in Estonia, 9 in Sweden, 6 in the UK. Hmm, I just noticed: if I wanted to continue the series, I should move to a new country this summer and stay there for 3 years.

Two things help me make sure I get enough food. One is to ALWAYS have food at hand. If getting food means interrupting whatever interesting and important thing that I’m doing to take the lift down to the cafeteria and queue to get a muffin and then get back up, well, that’s just too much work and won’t happen. But if all I need to do is to open a drawer, the equation changes. Of course this only works if I actually want to eat whatever I have at hand, so there must be choice, which is why I have a well-stocked snacks drawer at work. There’s always at least two kinds of cereal bars, and one or two kinds of dried fruit, and I usually bring fresh fruit or yoghurt with me every morning.

The other is to remind myself to eat. I actually have reminders in Outlook at work that simply say “Eat”. One at 11, one at 13 for lunch, and one at 16. My colleagues have been laughing at me for years about these (different colleagues over different years) but it really works. I call this my food and sleep clock, or in Swedish mat- och sovklocka. (The food and sleep clock was invented by Skalman, a green turtle in a Swedish children’s comic. He listens to his a bit more slavishly than I do, though. I don’t fall asleep in the middle of the day.)

The thing is, I just don’t get the point of swearing. To me, swearing is an expression of impotent, inarticulate anger. I am not angry very often; if I am angry I’d rather do something about the cause than swear about it; and if I want to express my anger then I usually have something more specific to say about the cause than call it a f***ing f***er.

I keep wondering why other people swear. What satisfaction does it give them? In my experience swearing doesn’t even defuse the feeling or the situation, it just winds people up more.

It’s been three weeks since I read a book of fiction. Whenever this happens, whenever more than just a few days pass between books, I start to forget how good it feels to read. Starting on the next book, even choosing a book to read, begins to seem not worth the effort. I have to remind myself that I like reading, and tell myself to just read a teensy little bit. Once I do that, the joy comes flooding back and I keep reading the book and finish it and pick up the next one and the next. And then I am baffled as to how I could possibly have forgotten that warm feeling.

The same happens with working out. It is so easy to think about what a bother it would be to find my clothes… and to pack… and to go to the gym or sports club… and how tired I will be afterwards… and forget just how good the activity itself makes me feel. But I know from experience that once I am there, I always enjoy the activity. Whenever I have forced myself to go despite this lazy reluctance, I have never regretted it. I have never ever come home afterwards, thinking “I was right about that… I should just have stayed home.”

Even with activities I really enjoy, like reading books or doing yoga, that first step can be really hard. I have to consciously fight the inertia. The initial effort almost manages to outweigh the more distant pleasure. (The discount rate for that pleasure must be massive!)

The one thing that helps most is habit and scheduling. It is a lot easier to go to the yoga class when it is a fixture in my calendar. It is a lot easier to cycle to work when I have done it daily for… five years? or is it six?

Another trick that works is taking a tiny first step. Pick up a book and open it, without committing to actually read it. Just look at the first page. Once I get that far, the momentum is usually enough to carry me along.

Yesterday I finally picked up a book again and I finished it today. I’m now going to start on the next one straight away so I don’t waste another three weeks without books!