Excuse the silly grin on my face, but something amazing has happened to me in the past four weeks. I’ve stopped shouting at my children. I keep pinching myself to see if I’m dreaming or have somehow slipped into a parallel universe in which I rarely lose my temper. Each morning when my daughters wake me at dawn, spill their milk on my duvet, launch into the first of several dozen daily scraps, scatter cereal across the kitchen floor and refuse to put their clothes on, I hold my breath, waiting for a familiar heat to rise inside me and spill out. It doesn’t come.
This is a sea change, a seismic shift. Just a few weeks ago I was an old grump. Not so much with friends, or my husband, or strangers. These people I could get along with quite happily. But left alone with my daughters, aged 4 and 2, I was usually either miserable, bored or irritable.
Lily and Isabel have undoubtedly brought me a good deal of love and joy. They have also caused me a disproportionate amount of misery. Before reality arrived at the end of an umbilical cord, I assumed that I’d be one of those ever-smiling earth mothers. What a joke that turned out to be. I stopped breastfeeding Lily after four months because, frankly, I needed a drink. And I couldn’t wait to go back to work to feel normal again. Having two under- fives was even more harrowing. My demanding, unfathomable babies evolved into demanding, unfathomable small children, only with minds of their own and fast, functioning legs. In short, motherhood has not been the bed of roses I imagined. I work for half the week and spend the rest with my children, because I’d hate for them never to see me, but I have always found my days as a mum the harder ones. It’s why I’m obsessive about arranging get-togethers with other mothers and children: company is guaranteed to keep tempers at bay.
I’ve never suffered genuine postnatal depression, thought to affect 10 to 15 per cent of mothers: my bad moods have never been severe or prolonged enough to be a blot on my mental health. Besides, PND is generally over within 12 months, and I’ve been floundering for almost five years now.
It’s not just me, either. I’ve canvassed opinion among mums of all ages, backgrounds, and dispositions, and the majority agree that, sometimes, being alone with your kids is about as much fun as ingesting Play-Doh.
What have we got to be so miserable about? We all know someone who’s been on the treadmill of fertility treatment, so you’d think we might be more grateful for having children at all. And yet, with apologies to those in that truly unhappy situation, it has to be said that modern mums have a hard time of it. Yes, we have mod cons, CBeebies and involved husbands to ease our burden. But many of us have demanding jobs, and all of us have the pressures of modern life to contend with: from lovely homes to hot bodies, we strive to achieve in all areas — and for parents in particular, the bar is set neck-crickingly high. We must seek out the best schools for our children; serve them only homemade fare; acquire the psychological tactics to maintain discipline. All this and look good, too: being a mummy is no excuse for not being yummy. I’m not knocking these things: it’s great that mothers can also have meaningful careers, that healthy eating has been pushed up the agenda and that coveting handbags is a valid preoccupation. But they all add to the burden of expectation. As does our ever-vigilant press, always glad to expose poor parenting skills among celebrities.
Being a bad mother is the only thing more unforgivable than having cellulite, as many celebrities know to their cost.
And it’s not just the media that highlight our inadequacies. Other mums can be shameful show-offs, me included. Over the past few years I’ve bragged so much about how we had both of our children sleeping through at five months that it’s a miracle I haven’t been punched in the face by some poor cow with a nocturnal two-year-old and dark circles under her eyes.
No wonder we’re not as happy as we ought to be: we are probably feeling too guilty about our shortcomings. Fortunately, it looks as though the tide may be turning. In Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner has exposed the culture of insanity among obsessed American moms, and urged an end to it all.
In Britain, the no-nonsense babycare guru Gina Ford has come out in support of modern mums and the pressure they are under in her book, Good Mother, Bad Mother.
Of course, it may not all be about external pressures. In my case it’s a possibility that I just don’t have the right nature for childrearing: I’m irascible, and there’s nothing on earth that can push your anger buttons like a person who is half your size but twice as determined to win the battle.
Anyway, that was then, and this is now. I’ve just undergone an astonishing turnaround, and it’s apparently down to my participation in a social experiment launched by the online mothers’ community Netmums.com and backed by the happiness gurus behind the BBC series Making Slough Happy. It’s called Making Mums Happy, and that’s precisely its aim.
Siobhan Freegard, founder of Netmums, asked me if I wanted to write about it, but I was more keen on taking part. I was worried by then that my unhappiness was rubbing off on my kids; and was even thinking about getting professional help. But this was free, so I signed up on the basis that I had nothing to lose.
Even before this, making mums happy was Freegard’s objective in life. A former company director, she admits that she has struggled as a mother. “It’s taken me almost a decade not to feel overwhelmed,” she confesses. Freegard too blames the pressures of modern life, but also believes that, for many mums, lack of human contact is a key factor. When she and her friend Sally Russell launched Netmums in
2001 it was an attempt to overcome that problem by linking up mums around the country. It now has 175,000 members, 6,500 of whom also signed up for the Making Mums Happy project last month. “It obviously touched a nerve,” Freegard says. “It seems a lot of people are looking for a prescription for happiness.”
Aren’t they just. Happiness used to be nothing more than a feeling that came and went. Now it is a skill to be acquired. Levels of it can be measured, charted and compared. And pursuit of it is not an aim but a science. Richard Reeves, one of the Making Slough Happy team, is a leading light in the happiness industry. He’s no pop psychologist, but a credible academic and writer, whose book Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work called for an overhaul of modern working life. And he’s “tremendously excited” about what he sees as this flourishing new science.
“Happiness is a serious subject, and people are starting to see it as such. Some might say it’s all obvious, that it’s nothing we don’t know. But what’s different is that we can start to prove it, measure it. We can identify what the ingredients of happiness are,” he says.
During the Slough project, Reeves and his colleagues set about cheering up 50 volunteers from the Berkshire town with a series of exercises based on a list of “happiness principles”: ten basic rules of thumb for achieving happiness. The Netmums project is based on the same set of ideals and, to be honest, I was doubtful. But the results in Slough were impressive, with those who took part registering a 33 per cent increase in happiness at the end.
“There’s no doubt it can work,” says Reeves, a father of three. “The principles are based on scientific research. We’re not saying that if you do this you will be happy, but that, on average, research has shown that people who do it tend to be happier, so why not give it a try?”
He agrees that parents are under increasing pressure. “The necessary sacrifices of being a good parent come as a shock,” he says. “Parents will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they can have it all, when in fact they can’t.”
It’s no newsflash to say that happy parents will have happier children. So do we owe it to our children to cheer up? “Attending to your own happiness is as important as attending to your finances, their education, or decorating the nursery,” says Reeves. “In the end, the happy parent is the better parent.”
So how did it work? Every day for a fortnight all participants were sent tasks via e-mail. Each task is based on one of the happiness principles. So, on Day 1, for example, they were: 1) Start a happiness diary, and list ten things that you like about yourself. (Principle: count your blessings). 2) Do something nice instead of watching television (Principle: cut TV viewing by half). 3) Have a good laugh (A principle in itself). 4) Make friends with a senior citizen (Principle: smile at a stranger) and 5) Give yourself a home pedicure (Principle: treat yourself).
Five further principles were introduced on Days 2 and 3: Keep in touch with your friends, Get some exercise, Do something nice for someone, Look after something you’ve planted, and Spend quality time with a partner or close pal. Little of it, you’ll notice, involves children: the aim is to make mums happy in themselves.
Swept up in the spirit, I gamely carried out the tasks as best I could. A lot of them weren’t particularly revelatory: picking up stray litter in the street is a habit of mine, and I rarely pass a Big Issue seller without coughing up the required cover price. I’m pretty active, what with my weekly dance class and occasional jog. And I laugh like a drain at the merest sniff of something funny. I’m also quite vain, so pedicures and bikini waxes are lifelong commitments already.
But even when a task required nothing new of me, knowing that it was among my happiness challenges for the day and could be ticked off as completed felt good. And there was other stuff I’d never put much effort into before that proved heartwarming with practice: chatting to old folk, conversing with checkout staff, getting down on my knees to listen properly to Lily warbling rather than fobbing her off with a “lovely, darling” and re-burying my nose in the paper. I also managed to kick a habit of tuning in to re-runs of Friends every night on E4: watching something I’d already seen simply because I was too tired to do anything more useful always did make me feel a bit sullied. Now I barely switch on at all.
I gave up on the planting when my basil shrivelled, and was too embarrassed to suggest that my husband and I sit down to ruminate on the 10 things we appreciate about each other. We often chat now, though, where we used to watch sitcom repeats. If I’ve found any of the principles really valuable, corny as it sounds it’s the bit about counting your blessings. My happiness diary is now filled with reasons to be cheerful, and apart from my marriage, friends, supportive mother and enviable work/life balance, the most obvious reason of all is my adorable children.
The amazing conclusion to all this is that I’m a much happier person. I haven’t thrown a wobbly or felt stressed by my children in four weeks, and for me that’s astonishing. Initially I took a happiness test in which I scored 42. Four weeks later my score had risen to 76. Even if I was in a particularly bad mood the first time and overexcited the second, that represents a serious boost. Overall the experiment was positive, with an average happiness rise of 10 per cent.
I’m still not sure how much this lift in spirit had to do with the daily tasks. I mean, just how much inner peace can be achieved by picking up someone else’s old crisp packet? It’s possible that my own agenda was at work: the timing was ripe, and I’d been looking to change anyway. Perhaps I was swept up in the general optimism of it all. Maybe the sunshine played a part. And I’m reluctant to evangelise, because I don’t know how permanent this shift in me is. But the fact is, it appears to have worked.
Give it a try. Stick those happiness principles on your fridge — you can find them on www.netmums.com. You've every chance of success. It is, after all, merely the appliance of science.
