Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded.
by Elizabeth Mitchell
December 21, 2006
I pick my daughter up from school feeling Christmas-morning excited. I've brought along a juice for her refreshment like a '50s housewife with martini in hand for the hard-working husband. She beams and runs to me for a hug and kiss. The symphonic anthem swells. We chit-chat about our day. I open the car door. She scrambles past her seat into the middle of the car. "Okay, sweetie, please climb into your seat."
"No."
That's funny. "Come on. We have to go. Other people are waiting."
"No." The cellist lays down her instrument and goes out for a smoke.
"What's the matter? Do you need to go to the bathroom?"
"No."
"Come on." I reach for her. "I'll help you."
And then comes the blood-curdling scream, the limp body.
"No, no, no." Kick. Kick. Kick. She knows I won't water-board her. I can't walk away on a busy street ripped by speeding cars. Reason has failed. We don't have time to enter a Buddhist trance of non-Being. If the happiness equation is Experience divided by Expectation, the slow-motion reunion in a field of daisies has been detonated into a billion singed petals. I grab her and wrestle her into her car seat. She screams. She wails. We drive off. Parenthood is like a prolonged colonoscopy. In a good way.
"This stinks," I say to myself, the martini sippy-cup sloshing in the cup-holder beside me.
Part of our surprise at precious moments like these stem from the fact we can't remember ever having been the limp-bodied toddler. We remember ourselves as being independent, fairly reasonable. Conveniently for all of us, our parents have largely forgotten too. It was just too long ago.
Researchers once tracked down the authors of panic-stricken letters to Dr. Spock well after the fact. When they put pen to paper, the mothers were beside themselves with horror and frustration. Years later, the women had no memory of those feelings.
"There was also some study I read," Tara McKelvey, a mother of three, says, "When people go on vacation, the brothers and sisters cry, they scream like alley cats, and then you get to Yellowstone and you ask them about the trip and they can't remember the fights. But when you're in that moment, it's the most horrible thing. Maybe just the intensity of the experience is what you remember, rather than the fact that you were furious. It's like being in the army."
And perhaps yet another study by Nobel Prize-winning Kahneman might be helpful in clarifying why people remember parenthood so fondly. In "Memories of Colonoscopy: A Randomized Trial," Kahneman and his colleagues monitored outpatients undergoing colonoscopies without anesthetic. All patients were asked to rate their pain at sixty-second intervals. In addition to the procedure itself, half of the patients endured an uncomfortable period of four minutes to an hour when the instrument was simply left in the rectum. While both sets of patients experienced equally high levels of pain during the procedure, those who experienced the dull discomfort at the end described their experience as less unpleasant overall than those whose procedure abruptly ended at the high point of pain. The memory of an event appears to be an average of the high point of sensation coupled with the feeling at the end of the event. Equate that with parents at the end of their stint who are enjoying the pleasures of the birds out of the nest while still maintaining a relationship with the birds. They don't focus on the pain of tantrums and teen-hood. Which means that parenthood is like a prolonged colonoscopy. In a good way.
©2006 Elizabeth Mitchell and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Elizabeth Mitchell, former executive editor of George and features editor of Spin, is the author of Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing and W.: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty. |
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