The Thermostat of Happiness

I’ve recently read the book Bluebird by Ariel Gore. I’ve been a fan of Gore since her Hip Mama days because we are so much alike. Like me, Gore is a punk rock lesbian in her mid-30s who raised her daughter to adulthood as a single mom supporting herself with her own underpaid writing without ever compromising her commitment to herself as an artist before starting all over again with a second pregnancy in middle age. Ok. So Gore is nothing like me on the outside. But her written voice resonates with the same timbre as my own inner monologue, and I have always felt that in person we would be wax philosophical in coffee shops. So I was very excited when I saw that she had a new nonfiction book about happiness. The book is well researched and the analysis is strong, but so heavily self-referential that it doesn’t read at all like an academic work. Rather, it feels more like one of the aforementioned coffee shop conversations. And as I expected, it gave me a lot to think about.

Gore makes much of the historical pressure for women to set the emotional tone in their families. Naturally, that tone should be cheerful, even it requires suppression of one’s true feelings. She and I were both struck by a comment by Harriet Beecher Stowe to the effect that a happy wife is the sunshine center of her family circle, and her positive love is more important than an orderly clean house. An orderly house, of course, being pretty darn important. Beecher Stowe asserts that mothers are the emotional thermostats for their families. Or she would have, if she had any concept of central heating.

All that smarmy sunshiney center business is pretty retchworthy. But the trick is, it’s also pretty much true. You can argue that emotional tone is a collaborative effort, that any member of a family can change the emotional tone of the whole. But in a sense, that’s nitpicking. Thought experiment: Imagine a family (of any structure) in which the primary caregiver is full of genuine joy and satisfaction in the care they give. Now, try to imagine that family dysfunctional. Now imagine the opposite- miserable primary, happy family. It doesn’t really work.

It seems the bumper sticker sages are wise. If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Yet study after study (read the book, I won’t repeat citations here) show that women consistently prioritize their own happiness below that of the rest of their family. Which raises two Big Questions: How do we get mama to happy? Why do we keep working downstream of the issue and trying to meet everyone else’s needs first?

Good questions.