THE END OF THE BOOK, NOT THE JOURNEY

A not-so-surprising thing happened while I wrote this book: I got happier. Not just a little happier, either. I’ve just been reading The Year of Living Danishly, in which the writer asks all kinds of Danish people to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten and is repeatedly surprised by the consistency (nines and tens, every one). With my feet still firmly on American soil, I’d say I went from a six or seven to a nine, or maybe even a ten, even without Denmark’s characteristic elevation of cozy happiness to a national art form. I can imagine a few things that could happen that would make me feel happier, but I can’t think of anything more I could do. There are still things I could do better, more consistently, so maybe a nine. But a nine is good. A nine is great. At nine, I spend far less time feeling grumpy, frustrated, and annoyed, and far more at sort of a pleasant equilibrium. I notice when things are going well. I let a lot of small things go.

Of course, that was the goal, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little surprised. I thought I was pretty happy to begin with. I knew we had some problem spots, but I didn’t expect the changes I was making to have such power.

There were other things happening that probably helped push my happiness along. My children got older, and while bigger kids do have bigger problems, they also generate far fewer sippy cups and are more pleasant on long car rides. I took a leave from my day job to work on the book, and while my schedule has always been flexible, that space made it easier to accept the natural spikes in a family schedule, like the periods when everyone needs a checkup and a dentist visit and a trip to the eye doctor, the viruses that keep kids home from school one at a time for days and then weeks on end, and the increased demand for parent participation in school and activities that always appears around the holidays or when school draws to a close.

I don’t discount those things, but the changes I made to my own life, and to the stories I told myself about what was happening and the ways I approached it, really made a difference. A few stand out as downright life changing.

What do I do differently? For starters, I let the good times be the good times. I revel in the ordinary. I remember that this is the life and the family we chose and that here we are, having what we wanted. In the introduction, I quoted Michel de Montaigne: “My life has been full of misfortunes, most of which never happened.” I don’t dwell on those imaginary catastrophes anymore, or project my worries out into a distant future where my children, aged forty and beyond, are still fighting over who gets the seat next to the door on the passenger side of the car. (Ask me why that’s more desirable. Go ahead, ask me. I have no idea.) I keep things in perspective when it comes to worries about the larger world. Just a few generations ago, my life would have been so much more difficult on a daily level. Consider all we’ve gained—combustion engines, antibiotics, electricity, doctors who wash their hands before childbirth. We are still a society and a world with challenges and inequalities, but we can appreciate all we have without disregarding what we can still achieve. I want to be happy, and the wanting turns out to go a long way.

Alongside those big thoughts are small daily actions. The phrase If you see something, don’t always say something has been a magic bullet for me when it comes to both daily discipline and the mundane brotherly and sisterly bickering that forms the soundtrack to so much of our family life. Like the young teacher I described in the homework chapter, who thought she was expected to assign something every night, some part of me still felt that my role in successfully raising these children to adulthood was to correct them every time they did wrong. In a completely positive and constructive way, of course. If they screwed up, in ways big or small, I needed to immediately teach them what was right.

This was exhausting, ineffective, and largely impossible. Even assuming I saw every transgression, attempting to respond to them all left me certain that any quality my words held was getting buried in the sheer quantity. It is sometimes useful to stop your children and say, “Wait a minute, how do you think that makes your brother feel?” Do it every time they squabble, though, and you become a nattering cliché, perkily oozing the same pleas to “use your words” and “talk about what you’re really feeling” while your children carry on exactly as before.

Faced with a choice between letting them become background noise or becoming background noise myself, I realized that I had to let more things go. Their bickering often signified nothing beyond a generalized disgruntlement that they were taking out on one another, or a route to a decision among competing interests regarding things like what to watch on television or who sat in which seat in the car. Theirs was a loud, acrimonious road, to be sure, but they could take it, or, if their battle was bringing me down, I could tell them to stop it. All of them, that is. I did not need to single out the one who was being unreasonable or the one who was being bossy. I did not need to care. For me, with these kids, at these ages, the right thing to do 90 percent of the time was just tune it out.

My daughters came home from school recently squabbling, as they often do. One called the other a “wimp,” the other retaliated with a barrage of intentional annoying behavior that culminated in her walking around her sister in circles, singing a tuneless song while her sister tried to read. Once, I would have interfered, stopped first the name-calling, then the intentional annoyance (which was annoying me, too). I didn’t. I picked up my laptop and walked away without comment, without even much of a second thought. There were no real explosions—there wasn’t much arguing, even. Both name-caller and singer got bored, and less than half an hour later they were baking a cake. The transition from school back to family provokes something like this almost every day. It’s a pattern, not a problem. If I don’t get involved, it ebbs away naturally. If I do, the drama can stretch well into the evening.

I tried to stop seeing every disciplinary infraction, too. This is trickier. It takes vast quantities of repetition to persuade children to hang up coats, to go to bed on time, or to consider the feelings of others when entering elevators or holding a conversation in a public place. Certain things recur nearly constantly. Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run. If I don’t say anything, they often don’t see anything.

Still, sometimes I just let them run. I don’t scold the kid who ran into the person exiting the elevator. I let them have the crazy loud argument in the grocery store. Not everything is worth calling out.

I’ve found that each one of my kids goes through periods of being more difficult, which means it’s often just one of the four constantly getting the admonitions while the others are standing around looking innocent and polishing their halos. That mantle passes from kid to kid, but while it might all even out, I don’t like the feeling of picking on this one or that one all day long. The constant corrections can really take a toll on our relationship at what is often a challenging time already. That’s when I want to choose my battles, and if that means I don’t look like the greatest parent of all time as my child hangs off the front of the grocery cart, that’s okay. I’m a happier one.

I said in the introduction that happier parents move from greater involvement with younger children toward cultivating independence as kids get older. My children are, for the most part, at or entering that “older” part of the spectrum, and that changes my job description. Nearly always, I need to teach them how to do something and then leave them to do it, even if that means homework doesn’t get done, laundry turns pink, or insufficient practice leads to not making the cut at some activity or another.

Sometimes it’s hard to let go of that tight control, especially when not all of my parenting peers are on the same page (although many are). Because it’s more natural for Americans to worry that we’re not doing enough than that we’re doing too much in nearly everything we do, when I realize I’ve stepped back in areas where others have stepped up, I question myself. (Those happy Danish, incidentally, are much more likely to chide one another for everything from overwork to overdressing to, yes, overparenting. They’ve got a solid societal expectation that everyone should do less.)

I’m raising future adults, not perfect children, and that looks different. Embracing that narrative has made me happier about those seeming failures. It takes time to learn to be good at being a grown-up. Personally, I’m still working on it. My kids have lots of space to improve, and we’re all much better off if I’m not trying to micromanage their every move.

I’ve also increased my happiness dramatically with a very mundane change: I sleep more. I’ve been writing about healthy sleep for children and teenagers for years, but in writing the chapter on mornings, I finally sold myself on the idea of healthy sleep for me. I set aside my belief in myself as a genetically programmed night owl, took my own advice, and counted backward from the time on the alarm to the time I’d need to go to bed to get eight hours of sleep. Then I did it. First for one week, and then another, and then another.

I felt the difference immediately. Although it still isn’t easy for me to get up at 6:20, and I never became someone who sings in the mornings, I gained more in patience and resilience and the ability to respond instead of react from that one simple change than from anything else I tried. I even, grudgingly, accepted the research that says that we’re better off sticking to essentially the same sleep routine on the weekends. I go to bed at close to the same time every night, although I allow myself some morning slack. Sometimes I get nine or ten hours of sleep. Sometimes I need nine or ten hours of sleep.

The person I am when I have had enough sleep is more pleasant for everyone to be around, including me, as well as more productive. That version of me is also more able to tolerate sibling battles and discipline challenges, and respond in the moment in the way I will wish I had responded later. She doesn’t worry as much about what other people think, she’s generally more optimistic, and she doesn’t have nearly as many voices in her head constantly berating her for failures and things left undone. I like her much better.

I try to be happy, I let more things go, I get more sleep—together, all of those things, along with other changes I’ve made as I wrote have meant a big shift in my overall state of mind. The phrase “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” definitely applies in our house. I’m capable of a black cloud of gloom and fury that is almost immediately contagious (a friend who does the same once called that his superpower). Just as that cloud spreads, nearly everything else I’m feeling spreads, too. Even small shifts in my mood move my children. If I am rushed, they are rushed; if I am anxious, they are anxious. And if I am happy, everyone is happier.

And my being happier makes a big difference to the happiness of my entire family. One of my greatest challenges as a parent has been that my well of patience isn’t very deep, and while children excel at picking up on our emotions and mirroring them back to us, they don’t moderate their own behavior based on where we are on our personal emotional roller coasters. So often, when your day has been long, when it has just been one thing after another, when any external observer would agree that you’ve given enough, they demand more. They’re sick, they can’t sleep, their best friend just texted them something awful, they just can’t figure out a way to end this essay for English class. They need you now, and it isn’t optional. There’s no clocking out at the end of the day.

The less happy I am, the faster my well runs dry. When that happens, my reaction to a crisis tends to make me even more unhappy. Grudgingly, angrily, grumpily, sometimes nastily, I do only whatever is physically necessary. I go through the motions, holding without hugging and longing for my own bed.

When I’m happier, I’m far more able to drag the bottom of that well. I take the deep breath and open up, fully, to the problem and the child behind it, no matter how late, no matter how hard. I tell the child who has vomited grape juice onto the rug for the third time that it is okay and I mean it. I hold the child whose phone is pinging with anger and exclusion and I give her a safe and loving place to be even if she takes it all out on me.

I’m not perfect (far from it), but I’m so much more able to keep parenting as my best self than I once was. And as I found my way toward the generosity of spirit that feeds that ability, I found something that surprised me. Scraping the bottom of that well makes me happier, too. When I find it in me to give one more thing to one more child, I give something to myself, too. A moment that had me on the edge, about to snap or scream or yell or cry, becomes a moment to soak in the good. Happiness is cumulative. The more things that feel right, the more things that feel right.

I’m happier every time I pull that off, and I know I pull it off more often. Last night, at dinner, one of my children pulled a “conversation card” from the middle of the table (from a box of such cards meant to encourage family dinner conversations, which normally sits unused) and handed it to me. “You read it,” he said.

“What are your best and worst qualities?”

They shared theirs in characteristic ways. (“Sometimes I like to be annoying on purpose,” declared my youngest son, with a dimpled grin.) When it was my turn, I started with the bad, as one does. “I lose my temper really easily,” I said. “I don’t have much patience.”

“But you do!” said one. “You have lots of patience. You’re always doing things slowly and waiting for us.”

“And you mostly don’t yell,” said another. “Plus you make the best Rice Krispies treats because you’re patient. Most people burn the butter or the marshmallows.” An excellent use of patience.

Scraping the bottom of my well turns out to deepen it. Just like taking time to soak up the good makes us more able to see the good around us, the more often you locate that loving patience within yourself, the easier it gets to find. At the same time, so many of the things I learned from parents who had found happier ways to deal with things I found challenging meant I wasn’t dipping into my well as often, either. So maybe it’s deeper, or maybe there’s just more left in there. However it works, happiness is self-perpetuating. The happier I am as a parent, the easier it becomes to feel happy.

I still live in my house with my four amazing, glorious, delightful, stubborn, challenging, bickering children and my equally wonderful, but mostly not all the other things, husband. But it feels as if we have more room for one another somehow. I keep coming back to what Denise Pope said in the homework chapter, or Sally Sampson said in the food chapter, which amounted to much the same thing: when we’re not putting all our energy into getting our kids to eat or study or do anything else exactly the way we want them to, we can put it into a much more positive place. We can talk about other things, like birds and maple sap production and town politics. We can enjoy each other. We can be happy together.

That makes all the rest of it, from the mornings to the meals to the inevitable bursts of the hard kind of discipline, better.

I said in the introduction that I didn’t want to spend these years in a haze of resigned exhaustion, longing to be or do something else. For the most part, I don’t. That doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes exhausted, or that our weeks aren’t still peppered with those days when we zip madly from one place to another picking up, dropping off, and then figuring out who we’ve forgotten where.

That’s okay. I choose those days, just as I choose the slower ones where everyone basks in all the time in the world to do all things, and the other slower ones where they spend their time challenging one another to find new and inventive ways to announce that they’re bored.

This is what I wanted. I wish it would go on forever. It won’t.

But it is, right now, good.