one follows another
What I want most is for myself and all of the people I have ever loved is happiness.
Having the life of another person tied to my own in some way creates ripples and echoes and collisions that have to be sorted out. Depending on the people, sometimes this is easy. Most of the time it is not.
When it comes to my daughter, it’s the most difficult of all. Because I am, in every possible way, responsible for every aspect of everything when it comes to her. In addition to her physical safety and health, her happiness becomes a requirement. One that I must fulfill.
The very second I begin to contemplate the thought of happiness in someone else those thoughts become exponentially complicated. Having those same considerations for my daughter turns everything upside down. In the most direct sense, her happiness is my own. When I see the light in my daughter’s eyes I am filled with indescribable joy. When she is hurting — physically, and, more so, emotionally — I feel the deepest, truest sadness I’ve ever felt. Considering this and that my ability to think clearly in order to see to her happiness is made stronger by being happy myself, I find myself in a circle of logic and thought that makes me dizzy.
When she was younger it was easier, because she had no wants or desires beyond the basic needs of human beings. And, perhaps, when she’s older it’ll be easier still. But at this age, her desires are strong, and her communication is very limited.
She doesn’t even really understand the meaning of the word “happy”. She can say the word, sure. Hell, she can even sign it. It wouldn’t take but a few days of effort to have her able to say it in 3 or 4 other languages. But, her understanding of happy equates to, basically, “not sad”. And her understanding of sad equates to either crying, or using a sad, creaky, sobby tone of voice. All the indicators we have for happiness — laughter, smiles, etc — are very easily created in her with hardly any effort at all — peek-a-boo is a still a favorite, as is holding up almost anything to your eye and saying “I SEE YOU!”, even if there isn’t a hole in the object for which to see through. Finally, there’s always the thought process “would I be happy doing what she’s doing?”, but that leads nowhere. All evidence points to her finding extreme joy pushing an empty wastebasket around the kitchen floor and my best research has found her filled with profound comfort at the feeling of cold coins in between each of her fingers. Clearly, comparing the two of us is not the way to go.
Ultimately, I want her to find happiness more quickly and more often than I did both growing up and even now. Ideally, she’d find that happiness from within herself, and from within places, events, and activities that are easily found and repeated. And, in the best case, she’d start finding it right now.
That’s all I get — a description of a destination and not even a hint regarding the journey. Somehow I’m supposed to figure this all out even when her physical requirements are sometimes in direct opposition to my own immediate happiness. Somehow, I’m supposed to help her learn to find happiness even when I haven’t quite figured it out for myself.
The curse of love is that the dependencies of happiness become immensely complicated, even with only one connection. The more unconditional that love is, the more required that happiness is.
The beginning of the answer, I think, is to simplify and reduce the problem. The less tangents there are to collide, the less of a mess we’ll make when we do so. That’s step one.