Resentment, Joy, and Why Moms Don't Believe They're Allowed Either

0:00Always a good time to rediscover the sense that your life, before you were useful to anyone, you were already good. Mm-hmm. Inside. Good inside. Good inside. Just reading all the branding.

0:21I did not ask her to add that. I just want my kid to be happy. Of course we do. We want our kids to feel light. We want them to feel loved. We want them to move about the world with ease and confidence. But at the same time, maybe optimizing for our kids being happy is a little bit out of our control or has a cost to us or isn't actually good for them long term, which doesn't mean we want our kids to be unhappy. But in today's conversation with Kate Bowler. I talk about happiness and joy, and I can tell you it gave me a totally different perspective on my days with my kid. I mean, I end most days thinking about how the day went, and I know I'm going to be asking myself different questions to assess my day because of this conversation, and I have a feeling it's going to do that for you as well.

1:15Kate is a professor at Duke University. She's the author of so many amazing books, and she's honestly just a deep thinker who translates her thoughts into very practical, manageable ways to go about your life differently today. I know you're going to love this conversation. I think it's also going to lead to new thoughts and new associations and a new way of seeing your day. All right, here's where I want to start. You are only as happy as your unhappiest child. True? Not true? I think people think it's true and it it shouldn't be hmm I've not that you want to like look into the eyes of your child and be like I'm thrilled sorry having a bad time is it the worst not for me but I think this endless calibration of our own emotional worlds to the unhappiness of our children has like got to stop yeah where okay so you're saying I'm so attentive to and perceptive of my kids emotional state, which probably I think I've noticed is more and more common, right?

2:25Because there's maybe, maybe an overcorrection, but I think it comes from a good place of feeling like nobody looked at my emotional state when I was growing up, right? And no one cared in the 80s. No one cared. No. And so I'm not going to do that. No. But now I'm so attentive. And you're saying, because your language was around kind of that being the barometer. Now, my mood like I don't even know what my mood is until I've kind of assessed my kids right and I think it starts with moms in particular believing that happiness is ultimately the goal like and I know we really share this deep in abiding hatred but happiness has hatred of happiness hatred of quote us Kate and Dr.

3:10Becky hate happiness is that she hates it I hate it I hate it agreed yeah i think well because happiness has such a distinct psychological profile it's supposed to feel like ease and if you think about happiness as ease and then suddenly it's women's job to guarantee ease it's wild when you think about all the things that would have to fall under that list for that to be true. Do you, do you want a snack? No, my, is the temperature okay? Do you want a snack? Like it would take a thousand details to put everyone in your life at ease. Okay. We're going to come back to the first thing I said, but now I'm onto a second thing.

3:54So I'm just going to follow my thought, which is, I just want my kids to be happy, but that swap is really powerful because it changes that sentence for me. I just want things to be easy for my kid. like and then like oh i have a little more dissonance that is that do i really want that yeah right yeah i i think you're right i think we start with saying i just want them to be happy i care so much about their happiness but when you think about it like i want my kid to feel relaxed all the time i want my kid to feel only comfort and no distress i don't want my child to experience the gamut of human emotion and ever be uncomfortable, then I think we start to realize how many things we would have to do to fill in a gap that maybe we should not be filling.

4:47Oh my goodness. I mean, yeah, it feels less enticing as soon as I replace it with ease, but maybe because I know if my kid only experiences ease and comfort in their early years when their body is being wired up for the rest of their life, then they're locked into a version of life where they should always be comfortable and that ease even in adulthood maybe even locked into a version of life where anything even a little bit hard feels this hard just because their bodies kind of experience like well what what what is this I never I've never I've never had this before but also nothing even about childhood is always comfortable and easy so the other part of that that doesn't feel good to me is my brain goes to oh is that my job then to morph and to get ahead of something and to take away and to exit.

5:34And that, it makes me think about how exhausting it can be as a mom in modern day parenting, but maybe some of it is this, this is how I'm operating all the time. I think we feel like plugged into everyone else's nervous system. And that feels, well, for a lot of people, like very tight and anxious and kind of, and of worried and noticey and if that's it's sort of so then it creates two very distinct roles the mom is the professional happiness manager and the child as the as the bubble wrapped precious darling yeah who is whose job it is to feel this to receive love as comfort hmm well another question for you you said is happiness is is that is that the correct understanding of happiness or do we misunderstand it yeah happiness well it'll it'll make you feel relaxed but happiness is um i think our culture thinks it's just positive feeling but it's really many things that are going your way at once that will cause you to feel like you can settle in And so for me, it would be this delicious beverage, a conversation with a friend I love.

6:55You're welcome for both. A gorgeous setup. Like things are, you feel yourself like it, in that way, happiness is much more like math than other things. It's small, incremental, tiny things that really on the whole, if you look at it, happiness is what luck feels like. Huh. Yeah. That makes me think about happenstance, though. Like, is it not fully in my control? Exactly. Just a lot of things happen to line up. I didn't know that's where it came from. It comes from the Norse word hap as in happenstance. So happiness. Yeah. Happiness is what happens to us. But wait, then I'm thinking I just want my kid to be happy is I just want to create a life for my kid where everything happens to line up for them.

7:40Yes. Forever. Don't. Forever, though. Eesh. But okay, your newest book, and tell me about this, isn't titled Happiness Anyways. Happiness, right? It's not. So what do we miss on? Is there happiness, joy? Those are different. I thought that happiness and joy were the same thing until I looked into happiness as this ease, this set of things going your way, a whole world built of small circumstances. And as someone who has had really long stretches in my life where I couldn't line things up, I spent a lot of my 30s with a stage four cancer diagnosis. Like I've had long seasons where happiness was not always available.

8:26And so I just kind of went looking like, well, if it can't always be happiness, is there some other beautiful thing that we can really like still promise each other? Yeah. Even when times get tough. And it turns out that joy is, is like a really beautiful, unusual thing. Like if happiness is relaxed, joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling. It'll make, it's like it startles you awake. So there's nothing relaxing about joy. In fact, some of the historical descriptions of it, I really liked the C.S. Lewis one. It was so funny. he said, you know, it's joy when you feel like you've been stabbed with longing.

9:07And I was like, stabbed, it's a little excessive, but like, it makes you feel like it's out of nowhere. You couldn't have predicted it because it'll feel like two things. It'll feel like a surprise of temporary wholeness. So it's not like that slow math of happiness where everything's adding up. If you get a moment of joy, it's like in that one moment, you will suddenly say, even if nothing is okay right now it is deeply okay i'm thinking about myself in this chair like oh happy like that's happiness and joy makes me it's activating like i want to get out of the chair and go do something or be some effervescence bubbly thing yeah that's right because it'll feel like your soul is saying yes and what it says yes to is like it is good it's my life is good It's good to be alive.

10:02So walk me through a situation with each of these kind of operating principles. I just want my kid to be happy and I just want my kid to experience joy. Yeah. Would those lead to different frameworks, perspectives, ways of interviewing? I just want my kid to be happy would require like a full orchestra of circumstances where they're singing a whole song around this child's experience. So I just want my child to be happy. you would have to try to smooth the sharp edges of every circumstance. Joy doesn't require a lot of things to go right for it to still come your way. I was very surprised to learn that joy doesn't just hit your dopamine and your reward system.

10:50It engages your stress system, which means that while you can't be happy and sad at the same time, You can be joyful and sad, which is a very neat trick. And I think what it feels like is you can have, say, a child who has maybe a more complicated life. They're not always experiencing school as a wonderful place. Maybe friends are great one day, bad the next. Maybe they get worried. you can have a child who really knows that life is not always going their way and truly believe that they have an enormous capacity for joy and that no matter what they're going through joy can still find them okay i'm two different things are pinging in my brain tell me this is fair if my job as a parent is to kind of keep my kid happy i feel like i'm in the category of needing to change conditions.

11:45Very. Yeah, that's right. With joy, I don't need to change conditions. I, I think that's a perfect description of like the control that isn't required to still know that your kid can be a deeply joyful kid. Yeah. And there are a couple because I mean, joy is, is a bit tricky because it is, because it's a surprise. It's usually something you can't orchestrate because you can't surprise yourself. Surprise. Have you tried? I know. It's like, yeah, it's like, it's like trying to take all your own arm. You're like, this is boring. It does. It is something that happens to you, but you can be, you can like create a capacity for joy.

12:29And what's funny is kids have this unbelievable capacity. Like their compass will lead them there. if we can try to set up a couple. Yeah. I think like, I mean, in that case, there are maybe a couple of preconditions, but it's mostly following what they already do. Tell me about that. What kind of what we can learn from kids about joy? Well, if the first one would be like, everyone says like, well, you have to stay in the moment. Well, what's nice about kids is like, they can't not stay in the moment anyway. Like no one has to be like guys come back to the now come back to the now i'm gonna start saying that i want to see what my eight-year-old does that's right he's always in the now is why he doesn't want to leave he doesn't want to you know anything exactly i live in the anxious middle future where something might happen every kid has this wonderful like oh oh they'd be like drawing things and they're like just constantly making a world where they are.

13:31And what's so beautiful about it is it's that kind of person, if joy is a surprise, that kind of person is much easier to surprise. Their head isn't in their phone. They're not totally stuck on a story of how it's going to be like that kind of person is open to like being visited by something lovely. So I think their quality of presence is and I I do that for myself I try really when when I'm like I don't know I'm I'm I'm humming about something I'm really too worried I really try just to look at the look on my kid's face because there's just like a there's just his giant froggy eyes there's just an awareness of where he is that makes me that like brings me back to myself so I think we can like definitely follow their lead in that way.

14:23The second thing that is so amazing about kids is you kind of have to believe in joy for it to find you because you have to be able to quiet those voices of, of doubt or despair about the world or about your life that says nothing will ever get better. And if you, if you follow the lead of your kid, they will very likely believe already that the world is full of treasures for them to find. And I know that because my in-laws gave my son a metal detector, just a walking nightmare. Yeah. A beep, beep, beep walking. Yep. So it is full of literal treasures for him but when I watch him ruin my backyard with debris what I'm learning from him every time is like he'll take a little bottle tab you know like the end of a aluminum can yeah and I'll be like can we just throw this out and he'll be like Dr.

15:26Pepper the best drink of the day is it hoarding maybe but in there is the like aliveness it's his answer the question is it good to be alive yeah and if i look at all the little evidence in his life his answer is yes yeah and i think having that kind of ability to be delighted is something that we lose pretty quickly as adults. How do we lose it? I mean, who has time? There's a lot of that for joy to do what you're going to ask me to love my life. I was planning on just living it. Thank you. Yeah. Some of it is that some of it is. And I think, I think it kind of almost made me sad when I was doing this joy research, realizing how many particularly women and moms don't believe that joy is for them.

16:24They really don't. Like they would do anything to make their kids experience a beautiful moment. Yeah. They're going to run around screaming about core memories until they die. They're going to buy expensive concert tickets a million miles away for an artist they don't like. Let's be honest. Very basic. To be in a Ramada Inn with three other people's children. It's like, it's really true. Anything for other people. Yeah. But if you ask them, what lights you up? What brings you delight? It will, nothing will come to mind. And that's because it's been a long time since we even just wondered if that was something we should expect from our a day, a week, a year of life.

17:15Yeah. Aren't we just like treating life like a project we're trying to get done instead of wondering, like, but is it good for me just to feel this alive?

17:40and there's something about your description of joy versus happiness though that makes me feel more hopeful about getting that feeling back because you're saying it doesn't have to be so holistic you don't have to do stuff that lights you up all the time don't worry people right but no it does feel like oh it's just to have that all the time feels intimidating. And I wonder if that's where the selfish things. Oh, so my life, even with all my kids, is just about me. And, you know, that's not even what you're saying. You're talking about the capacity to have moments, to be surprised by moments, to have a magnet for something that lights you up, that activates you, not in the anxious way we all get activated, but in a that feels good, I feel alive way.

18:20Because, I mean, our desire to make it into horrible homework that we're already feeling at is very strong. Yeah. That's our optimized culture. Yeah. But I mean, that's, I think that's the, that's probably the last and most important thing kids teach us about joy is like you, a child will, will not optimize. Like if you've ever seen them put shoes away, you know, like they can't, they won't. I was gonna say, when have you seen them put shoes away? What are you doing right in your house? If you try to watch them for 45 minutes. And I, it is this thing that we have in us now in our culture where we have metrics we're measuring ourselves up against and failing.

19:02And I was looking for my aura ring when I was doing that. I was like, we are, we're trying to make ourselves into homework every day of our lives. But joy is not homework. And you can fully let go of the idea that you have to find joy because it will find you. You just have to truly believe that you just living is a beautiful thing. You're just aliveness and eyes on the world is already enough. But hey, now that we're thinking about it, aren't there some things, some particular color blue, some way your kid laughs, that like you just you want to like cherish in a way that opens up more and more and more space in your tired heart that I would love for moms.

19:54And do you feel like no one can prescribe you how to get that like your barometer of that feeling is the only thing what gives someone else joy is not necessarily going to be the same thing for someone else. When I look back at some of the worst moments of my life, like in the hospital, getting a diagnosis that I thought I was not going to live through that Christmas to the summer, like the end of everything I loved, I still had bizarre, beautiful moments of joy. And like, I would have told you that that's impossible. That's like, I'm not that good of a person. I can't engineer that. And I, you know, I am.

20:35Are you thinking about one now? There was just like, I felt so. When you're that sick, nothing can be OK, right? Anything anyone says just isn't that true. Like, of course, it will be horrible. Of course, it will be painful. Like the story is, well, nothing will ever be good again. And but then for a moment, like I felt deeply. whole like loved loved by other people loved by god just like loved it was like but it was like a little it was like a gift and it came from outside myself i couldn't have made it up and then i felt and i think this is the piece that i just think is so like important right now is I felt carried by it because it like gives us strength to, to feel whole.

21:33And so if you're going through a horrible time, like I know it feels like we always have to crawl back out of the hole, crawl our way back to happiness, but like just knowing that like something as beautiful and temperate as joy can come find you in the dark and somehow convince a terrified and scared person that like their life is still somehow deeply meaningful and beautiful. Like I'm, I'm so grateful. I can know that we can all have that. And like kids can have that. We can have that at any stage of our life. And I just, I know despair feels very loud for people, especially when they're tired and they just wish like, no, no, just let me take care of everyone's needs.

22:18and then we're going to be okay. And if it can't be like that, maybe we can renew a belief that the best parts of life are not going to skip you and go find somebody else with better luck and more money. They can still pick you out of a lineup and convince you that your life is beautiful. Are there things that block our potential for joy, even if there aren't things that give us joy? Yeah. I think huge joy blockers are one is, is, is our, is our deep resentments. And I would love it if women felt very comfortable talking about their resentments. Yeah. Because, I mean, it took me halfway through a book about joy to be like, am I very resentful?

23:09Were you? Yes. About the amount of happiness I've created for other people. Yeah. I'm pretty pissed off. How much happiness have I created? Your language was interesting that you didn't say how much joy. So you're saying, am I a kind of condition creator for so many other people that it's blocked my ability to experience joy? That's the perfect way to put it. That is exactly how I felt. And I had I did not realize that I was there was that much sort of just calcified frustration, especially because I had dug my way out of a tough situation and then tried to make it not just good for other people, easy for other people.

23:55What do you mean? I mean, every, I'll say this lovingly, every man in my life will never go without a snack. You know, I had to call myself on it the other day when I realized I was opening chip bags for men on airplanes if they looked like my dad. I was like, no, ma 'am. Hold on. This is old. This is very old. My therapist would tell me to pause here. This is going straight to therapy. Hold on a second. This stranger looked so happy. I looked so surprised. I was like, man, there's something wrong with me. The amount of comfort that I'm very comfortable creating for the people around me is just so ingrained.

24:35I'm so wired into everybody else's hopes and needs. You're good at it. So good at it. Let's make it a compliment. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I will die of empathy. I will die this way. Yeah. Yeah, but very practically, how do you unwind that? Or if it's in the name of trying to preserve conditions for joy to reach you? Yeah. What's like a decision point? Like what, I feel like someone's listening, like, stop opening chip bags. Is that what Kate, is that what I should do? Is that the thing? Yes, definitely that. But also what I did was I made a list of my resentments. I made it with my best friend.

25:15We thought it was hilarious, but it was actually quite deep because it is like when you when you can hear the stories that you're telling this is we started to create like rules for how to create this list and one is just write down everything don't don't write down any moment that changed you scarred you you wish it could be another way don't make it pretty don't make a lesson no name names someone didn't hurt you in general it was linda yeah and this is just for you yeah sorry any lindas out there but you've been named a lot okay write it down don't make it pretty just name the thing because in an effort to spare our imagined listener we usually won't say what it cost us and if we want to get to a place of like i think emotional openness first maybe at least know that at some point you count the cost and I when I would kind of miss out on stories I'd call my best friend and she'd be like let's not forget the number four so I made a big fat list I found in looking at it that I could tell almost immediately that there were things that I needed a little I that I wanted to figure out a way through so that it wasn't quite so painful anymore a lot of this stuff you can't change like Like I was very badly misdiagnosed and treated poorly in the medical system.

26:44So there's a bunch of stories like that. I'm thinking about someone listening who thinks I was I never received a cancer diagnosis. Does that. Is that is that the level it has to be to count? So what counts for this list? Can you be really practical there? And problems don't have to be super problemy to be really important in the way that it changed your life. I think especially when it comes to like, does this count? If you find yourself repeating that story more than once or twice, it is very likely that there's something unhealed about that that is likely to make it difficult for you to believe that good and lovely things are still going to come your way.

27:30And so fair to say, if you're wondering if it counts, just experiment. Experiment with it counting. Write it down. yeah okay i think that's right take yourself seriously i don't think women believe themselves that's right so write it down and then just see do you believe that it cost you because if it did it did i mean i just want to pause on that for a second i always think the most confidence building words you can ever say to a kid are just i believe you that that is what confidence is it's believing your own experience right and um i i don't think we were born not believing not believing ourselves but it was snatched you know that's good yeah i feel like at the end of the day if i think to myself because i happy were my kids happy yeah um i'm oriented toward kind of the negative toward the no because any moment of like not happiness becomes proof that oh I guess I wasn't happy and I feel like the opposite of joy where like oh was there because joy is momentary anyway were there moments of joy like oh yes yes yes it's so much easier to get to the affirmative yeah about joy than it is about happiness I totally agree and I think it's also then such a relief to know that like it wasn't that big of a deal I didn't have to do very much for it to happen.

28:53Yeah, exactly. I wasn't a better person. I'm fine for the record. Not great. Joy still happens to me all the time. Yeah. And, you know, like I was on this little trip with my family this weekend and it was, it was hot. There were a lot of non-orchestrated moments of family togetherness I didn't enjoy. Yeah. But, um, I started doing this ridiculous thing where I look over at my husband and a historical site and I realized he doesn't know where we are. He doesn't know your world's biggest pistachio. Well, also like we're at Versailles and he's like, who's Napoleon? And then I'm like, my desire to make fun of him is so strong.

29:33But instead what I started to do is buy the like four kids who's Napoleon book at the gift shop. And what we do is we just do dramatic readings. And now we're all in on the joke. Cause now I'm like, dude, I don't even really know that much about Versailles. Wherever we are, I don't even know. So we were at the Alamo this weekend and we realized that none of us had any clue why that was important. I'm so sorry. I'm from Canada. It just was not a part of our educational process. So at dinner, we were doing a dramatic reading of what is the Alamo. And we just like, it's just endless riffing and dumb jokes on jokes.

30:07And my husband took a picture and it's just like me being ridiculous. But my son, the way he's looking at me in the picture, he is like busting up and i know that that was like a little snapshot of a dusty unplanned didn't go perfectly vacation where what is the alamo ended up being like a genuine experience of joy yeah so it can be small and dumb and unplanned but what a gift to know it's small and dumb and unplanned yeah i'm just thinking it's such a more hopeful question i just think about the parents listening who we do, we end our day in bed and we kind of review our day. And I think about, oh, my kid's still going through this peer issue and maybe their body's changing or they're still hitting on the playground, whatever it is.

30:53And the presence of something hard kind of becomes proof to me that I messed it up, that I failed, that my kid's not really happy. Maybe that I'm not really happy. But if I could think back and instead it's asking myself a different question, just were there moments of joy today? Like there always are, and they're always in the messy situations. They're always in the ridiculous. They're when the milk spilled and, you know, you were cleaning up and something funny happened. Or I remember one time, you know, this dry pasta and I can't remember which my kids just threw it. And all of a sudden, like, oh, I guess we're having a pasta fight.

31:26And I say dry because with marinara sauce, it wouldn't have been as, it wouldn't have been as funny in our house, but it was so joyful. That couldn't have lasted forever. We, you know, like, yeah, that's right. In that day. And I don't remember the exact day. I'm sure my kids fought and I'm sure one of my kids got a bad grade on a test i'm sure there were unhappy moments but if at the end of the day i'm asking myself or was there a moment of joy and can i live in that for a moment yeah it just feels so much more hopeful i think i think that thought exercise is so useful to be like it can be that they'll there doesn't have to be a perfect day to be a joyful day yes and then the companion thought exercise, and this is just for every now and then, is to remember a really, really difficult time.

32:14And then ask yourself, was there a moment where you felt the light kind of break through? Because then the next time you feel your life bottoming out, I always find I get this very scrambly, scared feeling like I'm going down. And you can feel it when the bottom's dropping out on your life. But part of the panic, I hope, will somehow be slightly calmed by the knowledge that like wherever you go, joy will find you. Wherever you go, joy will find you. Kate, what is wrong with saying everything happens for a reason? Well, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things that's very comforting to say, except that we don't usually know most of the reasons for why awful things happen.