On Being Happy

Thanks to my great friend Kristi, I learned about this book EVERY mom should read. 

The Ten Habits of Happy Mothers: Reclaiming Our Passion, Purpose, and Sanity by Dr. Meg Meeker. She is a Catholic Pediatrician and Mother.


I read the Introduction and was hooked:

As a Pediatrician of twenty-five years and a mother for twenty-six, I have listened to a whole lot of mothers. And I think that I have come to understand some fundamental truths about us. At least, some things that I think are true. First, we are a group that wants desperately to be good at what we do. We want to be good to our friends and husbands and we want to be great to our kids. We love intensely and we work hard. But we have a problem. In the past fifty years, we have been given an overwhelming number of opportunities. We can be whoever we want to be and our hard work will usually be rewarded. This is good. But in the midst of the onslaught of opportunity in our lives, we have become confused, and some of us have been a bit obsessed. We stress over  how well we are parenting and if we are taking full advantage of other opportunities. We wonder if we should work outside the home (of course, some of us don't wonder, because we have to). Others wonder whether we are working too much or too little. And there is so much more. We worry about whether our kids are giving enough opportunities, whether their friends like them, or whether they are being bullied at school or at day care. But mostly, we worry about what we can do for our kids in order to make their lives better. We do this because we really want to be good at mothering. We want to get it right, just as we want to get our jobs right.

       This need - to get parenting right - has become an obsession for many of us. It consumes our thinking, our energy, and our time. let me be clear: Striving to be a great mom is a  noble goal, and as a pediatrician, i applaud those who choose it. But that;s not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about a full blown obsession with getting mothering right. And it is taking many of us down.
Over twenty-five years I have seen us move from worrying about which school to send a daughter to to which band to hire for her high school graduation  party. I see mothers work two jobs in order to afford piano lessons for Susie and guitar lessons for Mike. I have watched mothers scream at teachers who gave their kids C o a paper when just a short time ago, we would have let that child rewrite his paper to get a better grade or told him to work harder on the next  paper. W are tired. we never feel that we're doing a good enough job at almost anything we do; not because we;re not good at things, but because we are trying to do too much, too well. We have become competitors. We have learned over the past twenty-five years to compete with ourselves. the problem is, none of us feels as though we're winning.

       In short, we've gone off the deep end. Don't take this personally; we're all in the same boat. Employed, at home, adoptive, biologic, wealthy, poor, young,and older mothers - we're all in this together. We have arrived at a similar place. So, we have a lot of company in one another. That's the good news.

       Here's the rest of the good news. We can make some simple changes that will bring us back from the edge (or pull us back on top of the cliff if we've fallen of completely) and brings some fun and sanity into our lives. We can love being moms again. We can sit. We can laugh with our kids. We can stop running around, acting like crazy people. We can love life and enjoy our wonderful kids. In the  following pages, you w ill find real mothers whose lives illustrate our collective plight, and you will find many mothers who have moved over to the positive side. They are getting this mothering thing right. No, they aren't better mothers, but they are enjoying being mothers more. This is not a book about being a better mother, because there are plenty of books on that. This is a book for you, and only you, to help you become a happier mother.

      Freeing ourselves from some of the craziness that we have adopted means changing some habits. This is hard, but we can do it because we are mothers and doing hard things is what we are good at. If we can endure pushing an eight-pound watermelon through an eight-inch opening we can do just about anything that we put our minds  to. Anything.



I'm almost done with it and I've really appreciated both it's practicality and the common sense wisdom it offers.

So if you aren't doing anything this Lent or if you are...take 10 minutes a day (in place of facebook or tv time ;) and start BEING happier!

oh..and she has also written several other great books such as: