Have I learned nothing from my work on the Happiness Project? A bad morning...

I’ve done everything wrong today.

“Sing in the morning?” Hardly. It’s not even noon yet, and I’ve already yelled, screamed, hissed, snapped, and said things like, “Can’t you please just do ONE THING I ask you to do?” and “Get out of my way!”

My only excuse is that the Little Girl woke up in misery. The minute I picked her up, she started to make the universal sign for “ear infection”—pathetically batting the air next to her head, trying to wave away the pain.

Listening to your own baby crying in pain is agonizing. This is obviously advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, but my nerves were shot after the first few minutes.

I had an hour and a half of singing, rocking, and walking around the house before the doctor’s office opened at 8:30. Mercifully, the doctor was willing to squeeze us in right away. As predicted, the Little Girl has a double ear infection—poor thing, she’s never had one before.

I couldn’t have handled the situation with less serenity or good manners. I was reasonably polite in the doctor’s office, but I snapped at the pharmacist, at the taxi driver, and at the poor sweet Big Girl who was trying hard to be helpful.

I think my work on the Happiness Project actually made me behave worse. In the past, I wouldn’t have been so conscious of how atrociously I was behaving. Realizing what a bad job I was doing made me feel guilty and inadequate—which in turn made me act even crabbier.

But now the Little Girl is asleep, having had her Tylenol (she threw up the first batch), her prescription is waiting in the fridge, the Big Girl is visiting her grandmother, and I’m promising myself to do better later.
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This month, I've been reading of lots of memoirs by people dealing with catastrophe--most often, illness. On the Internet, I stumbled across no more mashed potatoes, a blog by a woman who is dealing with chronic illness, in her case from TMJ disorder. A lot of very helpful material there.

Comments

[Dean Fuhrman]

It has been said that a sign of mastery is your ability to recover. You cannot avoid the events and sometimes you cannot cease being human and handling things with less skill than you'd wish for, but if you recognize those things and move back to the center, I think you've got it. And it sounds like you have done that.

Best of luck to you as you work through these things.

[Larry P]

Gretchen,

See Commandment #2. Let it go. Any parent knows the feeling of helplessness when a child is in pain. You do everything you can do, and it's still not enough. In the end, you just have to let go of the guilt. Stay stong. Your child needs you now more than ever.

Hope she is feeling better really soon.

Larry P

PS: What happened to that section you were gonna set up where we could post our own quotes on happiness?

[sugarplum]

a loved one's pain is always painful and frustrating, more so than your own pain.
but i think your awareness of the problem is the first step towards maybe handling things better in the future...
hope she feels better soon.

[Jason Yip]

I'm wondering if this is an indication to redirect some focus outward instead of inward.

[Laura]

Awareness is the first step to change. You wrote, "In the past, I wouldn’t have been so conscious of how atrociously I was behaving." Chances are that you didn't behave differently, just that you're now aware of it. That guilt will nudge you into making changes, if you don't let it overwhelm you. There's a reason people say that ignorance is bliss...

I hope your daughter is feeling better soon.

[angelfeet]

I had a similarly disastrous day yesterday and hugely regreted how I behaved in the early part of the day. Awareness can be such a curse, but at the same time is a blessing that helps us grow. I hang on to one of my favourite presuppositions in Neuro-Linguistic Programming : "There is no failure, only feedback". The feedback is "that didn't work, how can I do it better", rather than beating myself up. I don't always remember that in the heat of the moment but it has helped me often, and has changed my outlook in so many areas.

Hope your little one is healing quickly.

[Gretchen Rubin]

Thanks so much for everyone's good wishes for the Little Girl. She's doing much better now, phew, and so am I. You're right, "let it go" and "learn from it" are two positive ways to tackle the less-than-admirable handling of the situation.

About people posting their favorite quotes on happiness--I realized that there's not enough ROOM in the margin columns and not sure of how to do it anyway...but I suggest -- and I'll note this in my post tomorrow -- that as a substitute, people post their favorites on Saturday, along with my favorite for the week. That way, it will be easy to find a trove of great selections.