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Is Happiness Allowed?
The long process of understanding the family I grew up was supposed to make me a better parent, better grandparent, better friend. I hope it has.
But it’s also made me less willing to trust first impressions. Both my mother and my father found pain over time with the results of their choices — something that probably would have led to divorce, if Mom hadn’t suddenly died at the relatively young age of 53.
It’s possible to embrace this kind of mistrust and stop trusting life itself. Good things that happen may have problems embedded in them. Too much sunshine leads to dry soil and wildfire. Want some rain? Here, try out a flood.
And the evening news, with its pressure to be either wildly ecstatic or very scary, adds to all that. A person could even decide that (gulp) it’s unwise to ever be happy. Dumb, even.
This summer, trying to figure out “widowhood” and a new home, I decided I couldn’t afford to keep that negative belief about happiness. I guess I’d rather take a risk of sometimes getting burned. Sorting it out all over again, here’s what I figured out:
