making yourself incredibly happy...or not

I wonder about all sorts of happiness. I wonder what brings me joy & what brings others bliss. I wonder what makes me happy now & what will make me happy tomorrow. I am sure that when I was younger, I knew happiness: pure light filled happiness that just fed my soul and grew my ego.

Now that I am older, I have certainly not put away my childish things but I understand better, from a constructive, adult-ish point of view, that there are layers of happiness out there.

Layers as lovely as an iced cake for your birthday & layers of joy from the rotting compost of sorrow, decomposing, nurturing and fertilizing a better tomorrow.

My children are mixed into those layers. The layers of icing on the cake and the composting pile in the backyard. They mix into my own happiness. They mix into my soul and shake all those clearly defined borders of who I am and where I am going.  I know for certain they have a list of what would make them happy.
It is long, especially when you
combine all three of their wills & desires together. However, it is not only long, but certain things are so material, that I am most certain that those goods will not be on their list in a tomorrow & didn't make it on their list in the yesteryear.

The happy of the parent & the happy of the child can be so very different, and the happiness of your child seeps into your pores and the worlds of want & desire & happiness collide in a chemistry that makes parenting all so filled with days of delights and nights of misery and wonder.

My middle knows three things, right now, in the today, that would make him happy. He is most certain the happiness would last forever if he could obtain these three things:
One is the ability to read. This middle boy of mine would most certainly banish his dyslexia so he could pick up any book and read with delight.
The Two on his list would be a lizard. He WANTs this so. He is an animal lover and wants to add to our menagerie.
The Three on his list would be a sister. He doesn't know why, he just wants one. & I have to tell you that the first and the last of these things are MOST certainly the hardest for me. they speak to my soul, they speak to my own dreams & desires.  I so wish he could read. More than anything. More than my own success and my own ability to be successful. I want him to triumph academically. I want him to be able to have language & poetry fly off the pages & into his soul.
Then there is this last one want of happiness...
This number 3 on his list, is actually always the whisper at the back of my own mind & I wonder how he reached out & read what was there. 
For me it is not an easy equation that would straightforward read sister for the boys would equal happiness. Or a daughter for me would equal happiness.  Truly for me, at the very end of the day, I am so ready to plunge forward into my own dreams and hopes and happiness now the boys are a bit older and in school full time, that having a fourth child is really the last thing on my list. 

And quite frankly, a lizard IS a whole lot easier.

But, somedays, some moments of time that there is such a tug at my heart to have a girl, to hold another infant in my arms, that really I wonder if this middle boy of mine knows my heart better than I do. I am certainly NOT saying I would have another baby just to make him happy, or me happy. Really I am not. Babies don't work that way. And I am so trying to make my creative space, this space, my photos and my words into my daughter, my own child born of creativity. Yet other days, I think, it would be just as well to have a girl in my arms than to be working on the writing or the being or the creating. It would smell as sweet and as lovely as any form of happiness I have written of. So I live in this unknown, most likely forever, the unknown of what it would have been like to have had a girl; and I live there because I know I have other dreams to craft as well.

But there are always layers. Layers of happiness & layers of joy in the compost. Nothing is written in stone. Things can be broken and mended anew. Now that I am grown, I see all those layers, blurred and unwritten and crumbled and straightforward. I wonder about all sorts of happiness; and how I know that in the end, how we live this happiness out is what remains our legacy. Because our dreams that stay in our soul will drift away with us when we pass, while the ones we have carved out for ourselves are the bits of our true self that remain behind, reminding others to go into their own layers of happiness & forge their own road into the wildness of their heart. xo