Happiness versus contentment

Today, I am going to write about happiness versus contentment. I think society often wants to look upon mothers and see a maternal joy and happiness. When they don't see it, they often find the mother lacking. On the flip side, if they see a happy mother, they assume that there is something fundamentally wrong with the mother.

First I have to give you a little background on our little family. My husband and I have been together for 20 years. We have weathered 2 deployments, and we have 3 boisterous boys, and 3 vivacious girls.

Our eldest daughter was born in 2001, she is a bookworm that is blossoming into womanhood.

Our second daughter was born in 2005 (right after our first deployment). She is a child that, on the surface, is very quiet and girly. Underneath that exterior is a spicy meatball of fun.

Our eldest son was born in 2007. He is all boy, all the time. There is also a kindness of heart, and sensitivity of spirit, that is awe inspiring in him.

Our youngest daughter was born in 2009 during our second deployment. She is sweet, and wise beyond her years. We constantly have to remind people that she is much younger than she seems.

Our second son Taz has had a rough road health-wise since being born a month early in 2012. He has dysphagia with frank aspiration before the swallow. He also has RAD, but it is unknown if this is related to his dysphagia or if it is related to lung damage from his fight with RSV at 5 weeks of age. He ended being the reason for my first ambulance ride. The paramedics were freaked out, which freaked me out too. He was intubated for about a week. It is believed that this life threatening illness at such an early age triggered his celiac disease. Taz hasn't grown out of his dysphagia, and at this point the question isn't when he will grow out of his dysphagia, it is if he will outgrow his dysphagia. At one year of age, he was barely 12 pounds. He is on prescription formula to help him maintain his current 25 lbs of toddler.

Our youngest son was born just 14 months after Taz in 2013. He is a massive lunk of love, and best friends with Taz. They play, fight, and cuddle all day.


Our life has been full of more downs than ups lately. The struggle to keep Taz healthy is constant. We have bags packed for a trip to the ER (and possible admission) all the time.

I have my days of feeling depressed, but in general I am fairly happy. Society often tells us that we should always be happy, that we should find our bliss and pursue it. I've tried to chase happiness, I ended up more depressed because I could never really achieve happiness. If I tried to be happy while Taz is screaming in pain, because he is so dehydrated after playing at the park-I couldn't be happy. In that moment I am in maternal agony. In that moment, I feel the crushing weight of the health conditions of my child, and I feel completely and utterly helpless.

Instead I strive for contentment. In searching to be content, I can focus on the positives of the situation in retrospect; Taz had good fluid intake, but he didn't have good salt intake. So if we keep him well salted on hot and busy days, we can avoid the leg cramps from dehydration that caused him so much pain. There is absolutely nothing that I can be happy about in the situation. I can't be happy that our 2 year old was experiencing leg cramps from dehydration. If I tried to be happy, I would become increasingly depressed.

Our youngest daughter was born during my husband's last deployment. I was a single mother of 4 children (3 age 4 and under) for months before my husband returned. When he returned, he faced the many demons of deployment. The price that those that serve is much higher than the time that they spend overseas. That price is shared by the family in some form or another, no matter how hard the man returning tries not to share it. I would actually posit that by trying to shoulder it themselves, they make the burden heavier for everyone. That is a topic to explore later, not right now. I fully expected to have postpartum depression after our daughter was born. I really thought that I would become depressed, and non-functional after she was born. I very nearly decided to take anti-depressants for PPD because I thought that because I should be depressed, that I must be depressed. Instead of sadness, I felt so happy that it scared me. I honestly wondered if my happiness was really masked depression. I had no real reason to be happy; I was a single mother and my husband was in a war zone.

In retrospect, I believe I was happy because I lived in the moment and tried to look at every challenge from the future. My house was an absolute disaster. Our eldest son was constantly misbehaving by dumping this or that all over the floor, or tracking butter thru the house. He behaved like a 2 year old boy that missed his dad. I realized that I could crack the whip for the whole deployment, or I could take that moment and realize it didn't ultimately matter. That butter tracked across the carpet would be a funny story in retrospect (I was on the phone with my husband overseas when he did it). I decided to take pictures, and have the kids clean up afterward.

I could have raged to have everything in perfect order. I am positive that our kids would have fallen in line, and the external would have been orderly and nice. My life would have been smooth on the surface, and my interior life would have been fitful and disturbed. The world would have seen the perfect exterior, and I could keep the imperfect interior as my own little secret. Instead, I had shredded paper all over my house for months; but I had kids that were happy even though they missed their dad, and I found a happiness in motherhood that I didn't know was possible.

Life is full of ups and downs. We don't always have a guarantee of smooth sailing on the horizon. I don't know if our lives will ever be calm and easy. I have learned that seeking happiness isn't the goal. Happiness is fleeting and conditional. You can't really be happy when everything is falling down around you. You can find contentment in the moments between the chaos, or moments during the chaos.

For some people, the highs and lows of mood have nothing to do with life circumstances, and everything to do with their personal body chemistry. I don't discount that mood disorders exist. That isn't what I speak about when I say that contentment rather than happiness should be the goal. The truth is that sometimes we are depressed because we have very valid reasons for being depressed. If we can have valid reasons for being joyous, we can certainly have reasons for being depressed. If we have valid reasons for being depressed, acknowledging those reasons can help us travel thru the depression and look for the little flowers of contentment along the path.

I'm not perfect. I get depressed, I have days when everything is very hard. The days that I have to calm the very valid fears of big brother/sisters for their little brother are heartrending. I wish that I could lie and push all those fears away. I wish that I could say that when Taz is "x" age, he can go swimming and camping and play like a normal child. I can't say anything even close to that, because we honestly don't know. But I can be content in the moments that we have now. In finding those moments of contentment, I have found a happiness that I never imagined possible.