Stumbling On Parenthood

I was driving in my car today, and I heard a piece on the radio by Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. He wrote a book called “Stumbling on Happiness”, and one of his claims is that people who have children are less happy than people who don’t have children. Their happiness is especially low when the kids are in diapers, and again when they hit adolescence, but it increases when the children leave the house.

Throughout the day I kept wondering if this were true for me. I was running errands with daughter F. People came up to her and said hi, and “How cute!”, and she grinned and waved “bye, bye” and was generally charming. At the end of our errands we shared an ice cream. She kept wanting more, pointing to it and saying “Dat!” She laughed when I shivered and said it was “C-c-c-c-c-old.” I certainly felt happy.

When we got home I saw husband J.’s car in the driveway and had a moment of fear: why is he home? Is he sick? Was he laid off? No, he was fine. He’d come home early to bring me flowers for our anniversary (13th), and help clean the house for a dinner guest.

Is my marriage unhappy? It doesn’t feel so.

Later we had dinner, and son H. was well-behaved, and even tried some shrimp (which he called pasta, and seemed to like). We had a good visit with our friend, whom we hadn’t seen in years. It was a lovely evening. “That Dr. Gilbert,” I thought, “is wrong.”

Then H. woke up at 4:30 this morning and refused to go back to sleep. A lot of autistic kids need less sleep than their typical peers; this is true of H. Our current sleep routine is the result of years of trial and error, and despite our best efforts there are often times when he gets up God-awful early and is up for the day. H. functions just fine on these days, while I wander in a fog, dry-mouthed and feeling hungover.

My life is richer with kids than it was without. It is also far more difficult. I constantly worry about the future (especially H.’s future). I get less sleep, less time with friends (last night’s dinner was a rarity), less time to read and write and do things that I used to enjoy in relative abundance. Our lives, to a great extent, rotate around the kids. And that’s exhausting.

Parenthood is like life. And life, as Woody Allen says, is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.