“Sure!”
“My name’s Caroline.”
“My name is Eleanor.”
They started trying to see how far they could spray the water. I took a photo and emailed it to Jamie: “Eno has a new friend. V cute!” (Send an email and a photo.)
His message came back just a few seconds later. “What’s going on? More pictures please.”
If I’d reacted to Jamie’s desire to go into the office by saying, “It’s Saturday! Don’t go into the office,” I would have just made it harder for him to go into the office, and he would have gone anyway. I know him. And if I’d said, “If you go into the office now, I get to work for a few hours tomorrow afternoon,” I would have behaved like the scolding scorekeeper I was trying not to be. Instead of having a pleasant interaction, we would’ve had an annoyed exchange. By deciding how I wanted to behave, I could shape the atmosphere of my marriage.
It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.
November
PARENTHOOD
Pay Attention
It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
—Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography
- Underreact to a problem
- Enter into the interests of others
- Go on Wednesday adventures
- Give warm greetings and farewells
When people are asked what they want for their children, the most common answer is “I want them to be happy.”
Happy children are happier, obviously. Happy children also tend to have friendlier relationships with other children, score higher on tests of creativity, and, as adults, have higher work satisfaction and more social ties, and are less likely to develop emotional problems. (Surprisingly, however, one University of Cambridge study found that adults who had been happy children were more likely to get divorced; researchers haven’t quite figured out why.)
I’d heard the saying “You’re only as happy as your least happy child.” The happiness of my children matters enormously to my happiness; I want so much for them to be happy. But although I fervently want to make Eliza and Eleanor be happy, I can’t. They have to figure out their happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, family members have a huge effect on each other’s happiness, and I wanted to be as good an influence as I could be.
Eliza, at eleven years old, was cheerful, enthusiastic, and creative. She’d taught herself to read by age three (to the astonishment of Jamie and me) and had been reading constantly ever since. She also loved music and movies, and I think she liked having a five-year-old sister who gave her an excuse to play multiple games of Uno, too. She spent hours taking photos and making videos, mostly of herself. She was particularly interested in anything related to advertising and would often construct campaigns for imaginary products, right down to the ad copy. Eliza was exceptionally even-tempered, and, in fact, I’d learned over the years to respond swiftly to any complaint from her, because often she put up with a disagreeable situation longer than I would’ve wanted. She was just starting to be embarrassed by Jamie and me.
At five years old, Eleanor easily jumped for joy, and she easily cried from frustration. Gregarious and curious, she talked to children she didn’t know and entered easily into adult conversations. She was on the brink of being able to read, a step that I knew would give her tremendous pleasure; she constantly asked for someone to read to her, and she listened to audiobooks every morning and night. Perhaps as a result, she expressed herself unusually clearly for a five-year-old—especially when she was displeased about something—and had a vast, if occasionally unreliable, vocabulary. She loved to draw and never forgot to add artful circles to represent people’s knees and elbows—her signature detail. She had a limitless capacity to play by herself, and would chatter and run through the apartment on invisible business by the hour. She worked hard to keep up with the interests of her big sister. Despite their six-year age difference, the two actually played together fairly often.
It still took me by surprise, sometimes, to realize that these two girls were my children. Was I really a mother? It seemed too huge to grasp. I’d be brushing Eliza’s thick, brown hair or gazing into Eleanor’s blue eyes, and I’d think—holy cow, these are my daughters.
As I thought about ways to cultivate a loving atmosphere at home, I reflected on my own childhood. One important element: My parents had never permitted unkind teasing in the form of mockery, name-calling, or put-downs—even when done in a joking way. At the time, I’d protested the repression of my sarcastic remarks, which I believed very witty, but looking back, I realize that this policy made for a very happy atmosphere. Teasing, as it happens, has more negative weight than many people assume. In his fascinating book Self-Insight, David Dunning points out that teasers often don’t understand how their teasing is perceived. Although the teaser believes he or she is conveying a spirit of warmth and playfulness, to the one being teased, the teasing seems more annoying and mean-spirited.
True, some skillful people use teasing to help people feel closer to one another, to praise, or to broach a difficult subject (Jamie is very good at using teasing to draw the sting out of a painful situation). More commonly, however, I see people wince at teasing comments, or I hear teasers excuse rude remarks by claiming they’re “just joking.” But the test of whether I’m being funny is if someone else finds me funny; the test of whether my teasing is friendly is whether the teased person finds it friendly.
I once overheard a loving mother say, “Hey, Messy, are you planning to drag a brush through that rat’s nest on your head?” She clearly thought this was a playful way to tell her daughter to brush her hair, but I would’ve been very surprised and hurt if my mother or father ever spoke to me that way. I wanted my home to have an affectionate spirit, and teasing wasn’t going to play a big role. Fortunately, because I dislike that kind of talk, I’d squelched it already.
To help me be the lighthearted, loving mother I aspired to be—which, I knew, would help Eliza and Eleanor feel lighthearted and loving—I devised four resolutions. The first two resolutions, “Underreact to a problem” and “Enter into the interests of others,” would remind me to stay calm and engaged. Because I loved the time I spent alone early each morning with Eleanor, I resolved to “Go on Wednesday adventures” with Eliza to make sure I had a similar stretch of time with her. Because I knew that the way we acted toward one another would shape the way we felt about one another, for the first time, I planned to propose a resolution not just for me, but for all family members to follow: “Give warm greetings and farewells.”
As I worked on my happiness project, I kept running up against paradoxes, and I had a paradoxical hope for my daughters (very appropriate, given that Eliza delighted in paradoxes, like “This sentence is false” or the line on a sheet of my bank statement that read, “This page intentionally left blank”). Just as I wanted to accept myself and yet expect more from myself, I wanted Eliza and Eleanor to dream big, to have a grand vision for themselves, but also to accept themselves and to take satisfaction in small things.
UNDERREACT TO A PROBLEM
Although we think we act because of the way we feel, we often feel because of the way we act. Accordingly, one of my personal commandments was to “Act the way I want to feel,” and I’d found this “fake it until you feel it” strategy to be almost eerily effective. If I want to feel less anxious, I act carefree. If I want to feel more energetic, I walk faster.
Along these lines, I adopted a resolution suggested by a reader who wrote from a research ship in Antarctica. Her team leader, she reported, had urged them to “Underreact to problems”: not to ignore or minimize problems, but just to underreact to them. And surely the problems in my apartment were more deserving of underreaction than the problems arising on a ship in the Antarctic.
By “underreacting to problems,” and acting in a serene and unflappable way, I’d help myself cultivate a calm attitude. I
associated the phlegmatic sensibility and comic understatement of “underreacting to a problem” with the British, as when Winston Churchill remarked in 1940, on the question of a possible invasion: “My technical advisers were of the opinion that the best method of dealing with a German invasion of the Island of Britain was to drown as many as possible on the way over and knock the others on the head as they crawled ashore.”
I immediately had an opportunity to test this resolution. I was still very anxious about driving, but I was driving, and one afternoon when I was driving with Eliza, I took a wrong turn and got lost somewhere in the Bronx. The street was crowded with traffic, pedestrians, and confusing street signs. A subway track overhead added to the general chaos of the scene. How was I going to get us back? I felt a wave of panic surge over me. I felt utterly disoriented, and every minute I drove, we were farther and farther away from home.
“Are we lost?” Eliza asked.
I was reassured by her almost bored tone.
“Um, maybe a little bit,” I replied, distractedly. Underreact to this problem, I coached myself.
“Can I change the radio station?”
“No!” I answered. “Actually, turn it off! I need to think.”
“Want me to try to read the street signs for you?”
“Yes, that’s a great idea. Can you see them?”
Wait, I thought with longing, I can call Jamie. I had no idea what he’d be able to do. I just wanted to hear his voice.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” he said, when I explained what had happened. “Just remember, you’re a very good driver. Don’t get rattled. You sound pretty calm, are you feeling calm?”
“I’m actually okay.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Umm, not really.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I really can’t help. Ask someone how to get to the Triborough Bridge, that’s where you need to go.”
“Right, right, the bridge!” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Exactly. Wish us luck.”
Eliza and I plowed on. Admittedly, I didn’t underreact as well as I might have, but I didn’t lose my head, either. I tried to talk to Eliza in a casual voice. I took deep breaths. I stopped a woman on the sidewalk to ask for directions to the Triborough Bridge. I drove a few blocks, then stopped again to ask a guy at a gas station. Once I became calmer, the problem of being lost seemed less frightening, and we made it home.
I also found that underreacting to little household accidents made them less irritating, because after all, they were only as annoying as I allowed them to be. When Eliza raced into the kitchen to say, “I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see that it was there, I tried to clean it up myself, and it’s not as bad as it was, but, well, a bottle of purple nail polish spilled on my carpet. It fell off a shelf and the top was off,” I didn’t leap to my feet to yell, “Why was a bottle of nail polish sitting open on a shelf?” or “You’re eleven years old! Don’t you know how careful you need to be with nail polish?” or “Why do we even own purple nail polish?”
Instead, I calmly went to her room, told her to look for stain removal suggestions on the Internet, looked at the stain, and then spent a few minutes scrubbing it with nail polish remover. “Keep working on it,” I told her, and handed her the washcloth. “The stain doesn’t look too bad.” She looked relieved that she wasn’t in trouble, and I’d spared myself a session of pointless anger. No use yelling over spilt nail polish.
One of the most effective ways to help myself underreact, I knew, was to joke around. Over and over I’d found that if I acted lighthearted, I’d feel more lighthearted. This was difficult, however, because when I felt irritated, my sense of humor deserted me.
One Sunday, after being fairly well behaved all day, the girls started tormenting each other. Each of them was using all the cunning she could muster to drive the other crazy.
“I’m so glad that I got a new pillow,” Eleanor observed sweetly. “I’m sorry you don’t get one, Eliza.”
“Well, I’m sorry you have to go to bed so early and don’t get to stay up and play with me,” Eliza answered with a tinkling laugh. Then the fighting started.
I was in an unusually cheerful mood, so instead of snapping at them to stop, I remembered my resolution and announced, “Okay, new rule! ‘No deliberate provocation.’ ”
They stopped yelling and stared at me. Eleanor, at least, looked intrigued. “What’s that? I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s when you say something on purpose to annoy someone.”
“I’m not doing that!” Eliza protested. “I’m just saying—”
“And we’ll have an abbreviation for it,” I interrupted her. “We’ll call it DP. No DP!”
The girls were so busy discussing DP, and what it was, and what should happen if someone was caught doing DP, that they stopped picking on each other. “That’s DP,” became shorthand in our house for a certain kind of exchange—and just using that funny language seemed to help them cut down on DP. (Although Eleanor sometimes accused Eliza of DP in a way that was DP itself.) I’m not sure if making a joke was more effective than getting angry, but it wasn’t less effective. Underreacting to a problem was a much nicer response than yelling, for them and for me.
In The Levity Effect, Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher argue that “levity” is a highly effective tool for helping people to work better; humor helps people pay attention, eases tensions, and enhances a feeling of connection.
When I first read this argument, I thought, Well, I can’t use levity, because even when I try to joke around, I rarely manage actually to be funny. But apparently that doesn’t matter. Showing levity is less about being funny and more about being able to have fun and see the humorous side of everyday situations—especially difficult situations.
Life being what it was, I had plenty of opportunities to underreact—which, despite my resolution, I didn’t always manage successfully to do, with or without levity. Jamie promised he’d go to the sixth-grade meeting in my place, and I reminded him three times, but then he casually informed me, “Oh, I can’t go to that. I scheduled a breakfast.” Wednesday night, Eliza mentioned that she needed special, obscure supplies before she could start her big electricity project, due Monday. A computer glitch cost me two full days of work.
Now, on the spectrum of problems, these are very minor—in fact, they’re the kind of problems that emerge only when life is full of comforts and advantages, so, as the saying goes, they were good problems to have. Nevertheless, underreaction was a real challenge. I managed to underreact to the news about the meeting and even the electricity-project supplies, but I didn’t successfully manage to avoid a massive overreaction to the computer glitch.
ENTER INTO THE INTERESTS OF OTHERS
While in the midst of a Tolstoy phase—one that I resisted for a long time, but then, in true Tolstoyan fashion, succumbed to—I was struck by his description of the character Nabatov, the hero of Resurrection.
[H]e was industrious, observant, and clever at his work; he was also naturally self-controlled, polite without any effort, and attentive not only to the wishes but also to the opinions of others. His widowed mother, an illiterate, superstitious old peasant woman, was still living, and Nabatov helped her, and used to visit her when he was free. During the time he spent at home he entered into all the interests of his mother’s life, helped her in her work, [and] continued his intercourse with former playfellows.
The phrase that caught my attention is that Nabatov “entered into all the interests of his mother’s life.”
People getting along harmoniously—in a family, among friends, or in an office—make an effort to enter into the interests of one another’s lives. Presumably Nabatov wasn’t much interested in the things that interested his mother. I wasn’t much interested in how to add special effects to videos, which interested Eliza. Jamie wasn’t much interested in Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and I wasn’t much interested in locating the best hamburger in New Y
ork City. Not only that, but we’re also often tempted to be judgmental about other people’s interests. I wanted to chuck the collection of half-gnawed plastic pen tops that Jamie enjoys chewing on. Jamie wished I didn’t make such a fuss about taking photos.
“Entering into the interests of others” seemed especially important with Eliza and Eleanor. Children crave to be taken seriously. I remember one happy afternoon when I was in about third grade. My mother was driving me to the library, and I was enthusiastically describing some book. My mother said, “Don’t return it yet. If it’s that good, I want to read it before we take it back.” I was thrilled. My mother was going to read a book because I’d recommended it!
I wanted to enter into the interests of others, and yet remain true to myself. “I don’t care about football, so if I ask Jamie about the Jets, am I being fake?” I wondered. “Doesn’t happiness depend on being authentic? If I don’t naturally feel interested (or optimistic, or enthusiastic), should I pretend?”
On the one hand, continually faking interest in topics that bore me isn’t going to add much to my happiness. On the other hand, entering into other people’s interests is an important way to show respect and affection. I modified my resolution to “Enter into the interests of others (within reason),” and I discovered that I could usually find a way to take an honest interest. I watched an episode of SpongeBob for a few minutes, and asked a question about the story. I had a conversation with Eliza about the merits of the new shoes she was wearing.
I noticed, too, that my personal commandment to “Act the way I want to feel” worked its usual magic when I entered into the interests of others. Although I’m not much of a music lover, of any genre, Eliza and Eleanor love pop music, and when I took the time to listen to the songs, and ask “Who sings this?” I started to enjoy the music more.
I thought again about that line from Saint Thérèse: “It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.” In my life, day to day, one practical way to prove my love was to devote my time, attention, and convenience to the people I loved. Was I putting down my book to “Watch, watch, watch!” for the tenth time? Was I cheerfully agreeing to pick something up, drop something off, look something up, or reschedule some date? Was I swallowing my impulse to nag, to criticize, to complain, to point out mistakes? Not very often. I was still trying to shake the habit of keeping score: “I went to the drugstore for you, now you have to try to figure out why the printer isn’t working.”