There is something special about having children. Suddenly, life acquires a weight it may not have had before. Someone appears for whom you are ready to rearrange your priorities, change your habits, and rethink your ideas about the future. Someone whose existence makes your own existence seem more meaningful.
Children give life meaning. This is one of the most repeated claims about parenthood and probably one of the truest.
Except there is one detail we do not talk about enough: sometimes meaning becomes too much.
So much that it begins to weigh you down.
Because being someone’s parent is not only love, inspiration, and endless tenderness. It is also constant responsibility, anxiety, lack of sleep, guilt, doubts, and the feeling that you are never doing enough. Even when you are doing everything you can. Sometimes even when you have nothing more left to give.
And this is where a strange paradox appears: the thing that gives our lives meaning can simultaneously make them unbearable.
Perhaps because we tend to turn meaning into an obligation. If we have children, we must be good parents. If we are good parents, we must provide a happy childhood. If we want a happy childhood, we must make the right decisions, be patient, mindful, emotionally available, consistent, and never too tired.
In other words, we are expected to be almost infallible human beings.
But in reality, we are much more prosaic creatures. We wake up, eat, work, worry, produce waste, get angry over stupid things, are petty at times, selfish at others, and often confused. In biological and everyday terms, we are something like extremely complex matter-processing machines that have, in the meantime, developed the ambition to discover the meaning of the Universe.
And perhaps this is precisely where the human comedy lies.
We are simultaneously magnificent in our ability to love and ridiculous in our everyday behavior. We can cry with happiness over our child’s first words and lose our temper five minutes later over a spilled glass of water. This does not necessarily make us bad parents. It makes us human.
The problem begins when we decide that happiness is the mandatory result of a properly organized life.
Popular psychology often offers us precisely this kind of construction. Find yourself. Step outside your comfort zone. Accept your past. Love unconditionally. Set boundaries. Live in the present. Be grateful. Let go of toxic people. Choose happiness.
It sounds wonderful. Almost as wonderful as an advertisement for a product that promises to solve all your problems, as long as you use it according to the instructions.
Except there is no universal recipe for happiness. And the reason is not simply that people are different. The reason is that we have not even reached an agreement on what exactly we call happiness.
For one person, it is the peace of a predictable life. For another – the freedom to take risks. For a third – family, closeness, and a sense of belonging. For a fourth – the opportunity to be alone, with no one demanding anything from them.
Sometimes happiness is an achievement. Sometimes it is the absence of pain. Sometimes it is a brief moment when no one is crying, the phone is not ringing, and you have time to drink your coffee while it is still hot.
And who has the right to explain to someone else that their understanding of happiness is wrong?
Perhaps we should be more careful with ready-made psychological answers. Not because all of them are useless, but because they are too often offered without an understanding of the specific problem.
Prescribing medicine without making a diagnosis is, at the very least, questionable practice. Recommending the same recipe for happiness to everyone without knowing what hurts them is the psychological equivalent of self-medicating with empty platitudes.
A person exhausted by excessive responsibility does not necessarily need another goal. Someone suffocating under other people’s expectations does not need advice to be more disciplined. A parent who feels guilty for sometimes simply dreaming of being alone does not need yet another lecture on unconditional love.
Sometimes what they need is for someone to tell them that they have the right to be tired. That love does not eliminate the need for personal space. That meaning is not obliged to be inspiring all the time.
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding in the modern idea of happiness is that we view it as a state that must be maintained constantly. As if life were a system we were obliged to set up correctly so that it could function without problems.
But life is not a well-written instruction manual.
It is a collection of contradictions, coincidences, biological limitations, personal choices, and circumstances over which we have almost no control. We can love our children and simultaneously feel trapped by our responsibilities. We can be grateful for our lives and dislike parts of them. We can have everything we once wanted and still feel dissatisfied.
These states are not mutually exclusive.
Perhaps maturity begins precisely there – in the ability to bear the contradiction without immediately trying to cure it with positive affirmations.
To accept that not every difficult experience contains a valuable lesson. That not every crisis is an opportunity for personal growth. That sometimes a bad day is simply a bad day, and sometimes life is hard not because we have failed to understand its correct philosophy, but because it really is hard.
And yet we carry on.
Not because we have discovered the universal meaning. Not because we have mastered the art of happiness. But because amid all this everyday absurdity, exhaustion, anxiety, and imperfection, there are moments that need no explanation.
A hug. A conversation. Children’s laughter from the next room. The feeling that someone loves you without your having to constantly prove that you deserve it.
Perhaps meaning is not something we have to carry as an unbearable responsibility. Perhaps sometimes it is enough simply to notice it.
And to allow ourselves to be ordinary people. Not happiness machines, not infallible parents, not people constantly striving for self-improvement.
Simply people who love, make mistakes, grow tired, start again, and from time to time manage to feel at ease in their own, rather imperfect skin.