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Bloggers Hollee Schwartz Temple at TheNewPerfect.com and Meagan Francis at TheHappiestMom have just published new books on happiness. Katherine Stone, who writes about women’s emotional health at Postpartum Progress and ParentDish, sat down to talk to them about life’s holy grail.
Katherine: First let me say I’m so excited to see two female bloggers I respect coming out with books. Congratulations! It’s interesting to me that both of your books -- The Happiest Mom and Good Enough Is the New Perfect, co-authored by Becky Beaupre Gillespie -- as well as others like Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, are focused on the concept of happiness. Why is this topic suddenly so popular?
Meagan: I feel like we're coming out of an era of extreme cynicism and sarcasm -- it has even permeated children’s entertainment. I've been writing about motherhood for many years and slowly my writing was affected by that trend: more and more, being "real" about motherhood seemed to equal being sharp, cynical, and overall, pretty negative.
I love sarcastic humor as much as any self-respecting child of the 80s, but after a while it started to feel exhausting being so cutting all the time. I honestly got kind of sick of myself. I felt like all my stories about motherhood featured me screwing up in some way ("guess I better start saving for therapy!"), or being irritated with my kids, or lamenting how hard it is to be a mom. Well of course all that is real, but it's not the whole story. I started my blog TheHappiestMom.com in order to elevate the conversation about motherhood a little. I wanted to go beyond venting and griping and inspire myself and others to try a little harder, to be a little happier. The overwhelmingly positive response I got told me, "this needs to be a book!"
I think we all want to be happy, and we all want to enjoy our lives and love our kids. Being "real" about motherhood (and life) is fantastic but in order to be really real we have to show both sides. I think blogs and books like ours are an attempt to bring things back to center by showing the other side -- you can be happy, and you should try, even if you look a little less cool in the process.
Hollee: In our case, we knew women were very interested in happiness and work/life fit. For a long time, work/life issues were considered to be private, family issues that weren’t to be discussed in public. With last year’s White House Forum (when Michelle Obama admitted that someone with her privileges struggled with work/life issues), something lifted. It became OK to talk about this.
We struggled, too, with the idea that people would think we were whiny complainers if we wrote a book about mothers and happiness. We realize that we have many advantages, and we certainly appreciate the great inheritance that our Baby Boomer mothers left to us. But that doesn’t mean we should be silenced! This matters, deeply, to us. The majority of women we interviewed for our book said that work/life issues were the most pressing in their lives. So that’s why it’s become so hot.
Katherine: Happiness is hard to define, since it looks so different based on each person. Why should we try to seek happiness in the first place? Is it something we can truly achieve?
Hollee: I think of seeking happiness as a process, not a goal. I’m pretty sure that given the demands of my professional and personal lives, I’m not going to be living in a state of spa-like bliss all of the time. That being said, I know there are steps I can take to feel happier each day, and I think that is a worthy goal. It means that I’m enjoying my life, and I’m showing my children the example of a thoughtful, invested parent.
Little things help me with that. I snuggle with my boys and I take time to practice piano with them. I do as much yoga as I can, because it really relaxes me. I like to create rituals, like our family dinners, because they make me happy!
Meagan: Like Hollee, I see happiness as more of a process than an end goal. I also think a lot of us mistake what true
