… I did nothing useful. Oh, actually, I did go to town to have a look at some Macs, and concluded that I want a MacBook Pro after all: the 13 inch screen of a MacBook felt too small. I’m sure it’s just framing – given three choices, 13/15/17, the extremes feel extreme and the middle feels kind of just right. But knowing that doesn’t change the fact that this is what I felt.

Due to favourable calendaric alignment (lots of holidays falling on weekdays) I’ve got two and a half weeks of vacation time this Christmas and new year, for the cost of only 6 vacation days. My ambitious plan for these weeks is to do all the stuff that has piled up and not gotten done over the last few months. I hope to:

• 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.

Do children make us happy? The question has been raised in a few articles. There was a Newsweek article earlier this year, reporting on a study of whether having children makes people happy. The study reported that

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’.

Sometimes I see people who aren’t there, instead of the people who are.

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.

I recall posting some time ago about how becoming a parent hasn’t really changed me. I have to modify that statement a bit. I have changed. I have developed patience.

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.

I’m a big fan of babywearing and I’m a bit sad that I’m not slinging Ingrid any more. (Some time this spring she decided she didn’t like it any more.) But I still get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see another baby sitting in a pretty woven wrap or a cuddly stretchy one or a comfortable ergonomic carrier.

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.

We’ve been watching Firefly on DVD. Yesterday we saw Jaynestown. One of the side stories in this episode was about how Inara was hired by the local magistrate to “make a man” out of his 26-year-old son. Inara did what Inara does, and that was that. Afterwards, though, the son was wondering why he didn’t feel any different – didn’t feel any more like a man. I’ve been feeling the same about motherhood.

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?

We had our Christmas lunch at work today. Here’s what the rest of the team ate:

It’s interesting. After 15 years as a vegetarian I couldn’t even see that pig as food. It didn’t look edible or smell edible at all. Not disgusting either, just not food.

Working from home on Fridays is getting harder and harder. I just cannot get much done during the day while Ingrid is gently and politely requesting my attention every 10 minutes. I make sure to keep up with email etc, but that’s about it. The bulk of the work gets done during evenings. I’ve got four evenings and eight hours of work, so I have been doing about two hours of work every evening. Which is fine, and I do get a lot done – those eight hours are the most productive ones I have all week. It is quiet, nothing and nobody interrupts me, and I can concentrate fully.

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.

One of my pet peeves is food crumbs. I cannot stand them. I can deal with dust bunnies on the floor, dirty windows, cat hair, food stains on baby clothes, or a mess of toys all across the floor. But there is something that just makes food crumbs inherently disgusting to me. Food remains on the table, food crumbs on the floor or in the kitchen sink, and badly washed dishes – they just make me cringe and want to clean up, no matter whether it’s in my own home or someone else’s. I’ve visited one household where the kitchen table was so dirty that I had to make an effort to sit and eat there. (Luckily that happened a few years ago and I have no reason to believe I will ever be invited there again.)

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