Happiness: The American Dream

Tuesday, November 18, 2008, by Leigh Anne & Sherra

We have designated Tuesday as a day where we will have different women share “Moments & Memories” in their lives.

We plan to feature women from all walks of lives – it may be in the form of an interview or as a guest writer. The column on Tuesday will be centered around our word of the month. We’d love to feature you as a guest writer. Qualifications: No experience necessary…just be willing to share a great moment or memory with other women. Send us an email and we’ll schedule a date. Our guest writers do not necessarily have to have a website or a blog as we want iLashGirls to be a place where every woman has a voice!

Sherra says…

A big welcome to our guest writer Julie Martin. I met Julie eight years ago when we were both homeschooling our children. Our children became friends and our daughters played basketball together for several years. We’ve since stopped homeschooling but have continued to keep in touch across many miles because the Martin family has made two major moves across the country.

These moves have been made right smack in the middle of her kids’ high school years and watching Julie maintain a positive attitude led me to ask her to share her perspective on our word this month… Happiness. This could be titled “How to Maintain Your Own Happiness While Moving with Teenagers” which is no easy feat!

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Julie is a wife, mother and teacher. Currently living in California, she has three teenagers. One college student and two high school students keep her very busy.

Favorite color:
green

Favorite fall food:
spiced cider

Pet peeve:
(only one?) Motorcyclists who ride on the line between the cars rather than in the lane with the cars.

Something no one knows AND that I’m willing to share:
I named my oldest child for a tragic character in a Woodie Allen movie (vs. for the Biblical heroine of the same name).

One word to describe you:
faithful

Motto:
Begin each day as if it were on purpose.
Mary Anne Radmacher

What are the top three things that are most important to you — the things you love to do and you are passionate about?

faith in God
commitment to enduring love
living with significance and without fear

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Happiness

Providence. Fate. Karma. Good fortune. Call it what you will, it actually visited my house last week.

My role in this house, besides keeping the icebox full and the house minimally clean, is to edit any type of printed material produced here. Office memos, school essays, newsletter submissions—seldom do any of these depart without first having filtered through my red pen clutching hands. Last week, three things converged at the optimum moment: my editorial position, an Honors English essay on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and an invitation to write for this website.

The essay was titled The Pursuit of Happiness. What a wonderful opportunity to steal…er, borrow thoughts from my insightful daughter. What, did she conclude, was happiness?

According to the five female characters in the novel it was five different things.

Katie saw happiness as winning Mr. Right.
Evy knew it was riches and “the good life.”
Sissy felt it would be a baby of her own.
Francie, the granddaughter, thought it would be an education.
And Mary, the matriarch, saw it as the opportunity for her daughters to have a better life than the one she had lived.

All of these sound, to some extent, like our American Dream. We want to marry the right man, have wonderful children, live with abundance (if not riches), give our children a good education, and pray that they have it better than we did.

What could possibly be wrong with this scenario? The problem lies not with the Dream, but with mistaking the Dream for happiness. This is an issue that I can personally attest to because I walked away from The American Dream.

Twenty-seven years ago I married Mr. Right. He worked hard and had reached a respectable level within a powerful international company. We had three beautiful, respectful teenagers who attended a private school in a desirable Atlanta suburb. As the son of a steel mill security guard and the daughter of a power company lineman, we were in a position to offer our children more than we had received from our loving blue-collar families.

And then we did the unthinkable.

After much prayer and consideration, we moved.

New company, new state, new life—with three high school-aged children. Happiness was not a word that applied to this situation. To make matters worse, mere months after the move the economy began to show signs of decline. My husband’s job did not look secure. After only a year in our new state we headed further west with our remaining two high schoolers in tow (our oldest is now attending college back East).

Not only did happiness not apply, it wasn’t even listed in the dictionary in our household.

When you have had “the Dream,” why would you walk away from it? Perhaps it was the knowledge that the Dream was actually just a substitute for happiness. We had everything, yet we felt there was something more out there.

What I have come to discover is that the “something more” was actually with us all along, but we had been too involved with the Dream to realize it. In our new state, new job, new life, happiness became very simple things—

A night when no one cried themselves to sleep.
A day when we were all able to eat at the same table without an argument erupting.
The sweetgum tree in the park across the street changing from summer green to every shade imaginable, wearing them all at the same time.

Those things were with us before, but we didn’t see them as happiness. Happiness was getting exactly what you wanted for Christmas, and that type of “happiness” lasted about as long as the new toy—maybe an entire afternoon. Soon a new model of that beloved toy would come out and yours would be obsolete and you just couldn’t be happy until you were able to purchase that new model. Then you would be happy.

True happiness is easy for the very young and the very old. They see the beauty in the moment without the disruptions of life getting in the way and distorting their focus.

Those of us in the middle years can recapture that magic if we are willing to let go of the things that we thought that we wanted to lay hold of the things which we already have. Which leaves a longer-lasting feeling of satisfaction: receiving a gift you had wanted or watching someone open the gift you have given them, the one that widens their eyes and drops their jaw and elicits cries of, “It’s just what I wanted! How did you know?”

Happiness is found in the day-to-day ordinary moments and events that we often overlook in search of those bigger things to satisfy. We are promised the benefits of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, but true happiness does not need to be pursued.

True happiness is found in the things that circumstances cannot steal.