Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of being a parent exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided. (There’s that line in Raiders of the Lost Ark that Sallah and Indiana Jones utter in unison: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”) As we muddle our way through the
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