Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

“I’d argue that thoroughly weighing an action makes choosing to take it even more rewarding.”

That was one of the strangest things about motherhood. You could love your baby to pieces, be thankful every day for his ten tiny toes and his piercing wail and his all-consuming existence, and yet still mourn the life you’d had before.

You had to be all joy, all gratitude. But she missed Sundays alone in her apartment, listening to music. She missed cherishing a cup of coffee, sipping it slowly all the way down to its dregs. She missed going out like this with a friend, letting the night take her where it wanted. All this had disappeared, and she’d never gotten the chance to properly grieve.

but because they weren’t primed from birth like women were, told that they could be anything they wanted to be while handicapped at every turn by invisible forces, told that they were more than just their looks while also culturally programmed to believe that their value was tied to their desirability. Men aged into silver foxes while women aged into obsolescence. And when you added in children, oh, that was when everything really went to shit. Because even though fathers stamped children with their last names, the world didn’t ask as much of them. No one really expected fathers to consider giving up their careers to put their children first, to stop managing a company and start managing a household. Women had to grapple with a choice that men never did while remaining uncomplaining and generous so that they didn’t nag their husbands straight into the arms of less complicated lovers. And now moms weren’t even allowed to acknowledge how much work it all was anymore. Modern women of privilege had to claim that their manic exercise routines were about strength, not a body ideal; that their beauty regimens were all natural, designed for emotional balance and skin health, rather than for looking nubile for as long as possible.

But a woman could be charming, immensely intelligent, ambitious, strong, and head-turningly gorgeous, and if she screwed up her parenting, the world deemed her a piece of shit.

Maybe, over the course of even the best marriages, you acquired a collection of secrets that you walled off in a little section of your heart where your partner would never be allowed to go. And you did everything you could to keep the walled-off section small, to keep the secrets from slipping out of it and pervading all that was good and open and free in the rest of your heart, and you just made it work.

The truth is just that sometimes you think you’re a good person, and then little by little, you justify your way into being a bad one.”

that women didn’t have to be perfect to be worthy.