When I was
20, a middle-aged neighbour confided in me that the happiest time of her
life had been when she was bringing up her family, but that she now
felt rather lonely and sad.
Hearing
this, I was taken aback: I had always assumed the journey towards
happiness to be a one-way street, an upwards trajectory.
It
had simply not occurred to me that you could find happiness, then lose
it again. With youthful optimism, I believed that, as I grew up, felt
more sure of myself and began living the life I wanted, I would go on
getting happier.
Maddy in happier times with her husband Michael and the child they tried so hard to conceive, Ruairi
Looking
back now, from the age of 56, I see, of course, that life is far more
complex than that: a continual ebb and flow of all kinds of experiences
and emotional states.
We
tend to regard happiness as a destination — a blessed state of
permanently raised spirits that we can reach and then hold on to. In my
experience, it is more like an occasional reprieve: somewhere we alight
for a while on our way to somewhere else on the journey.
And
yet happiness is still something we think that can be ‘achieved’ or
quantified — as in a recent study of female happiness, which concluded
that most women feel happiest in their mid-20s, but become less so in
the following decade, due to the pressures of work and childcare.
My
life, as I imagine is the case with so many others, has not followed
such a neat narrative. Each decade — each year, even — has had its
mixture of light and shade, its peaks and troughs, and a whole range of
experiences in between.
The
mistake, I think, is to believe you can avoid unhappiness. Or to see
experiencing it as some existential failure. How would you know when you
were happy if you hadn’t felt the opposite?
Maddy says her 50s have been a decade of personal fulfilment despite the loss of her husband
Just
as in the Chinese yin-yang diagram — a circle divided into dark and
light, symbolising the balance of opposing forces — we need the complete
spectrum of feelings for our lives to be whole. The light half of the
circle is defined by its dark edges — and, if you look closely, even in
the dark half, there is still a spot of light.
I
know from my experience of losing my husband, Michael, ten years ago to
a brain haemorrhage at the age of 50, how the sheer intensity of a
painful experience can contain within it a kind of special gift.
I
remember walking through the park the first spring after he died. Tears
filled my eyes as I realised that he would never see another spring.
But
just then I caught sight of a tiny, yellow narcissus with delicate
petals that flowers every year, perilously close to the footpath. I felt
suddenly overjoyed at the sight of this little flower, surging into
life with such indomitable spirit.
For me, this is a metaphor for all of life — right at the heart of pain can also be where you find joy.
When
asked recently what I thought were the best and worst days of my life, I
replied that, in a strange way, they were one and the same: the day of
my husband’s death.
There
was absolutely nothing happy about it — and I certainly didn’t believe
so at the time — but, although utterly devastated, I also felt
intensely, vibrantly alive. It was as though I suddenly understood the
truth about life and death, love and loss, happiness and sorrow, for the
first time.
I
didn’t get a particularly good start in the happiness stakes. My
mother, who died a few years ago, was a desperately unhappy woman, who
suffered from bouts of suicidal depression throughout my childhood and
adolescence.
From
the outside, we probably looked like a typical middle-class, Surrey
family, with a comfortable lifestyle, rather than the seething morass of
dark emotions I experienced growing up there. I was an anxious, overly
conscientious child, who could rarely relax into playfulness.
After
leaving home, I went all-out to seek a happier life elsewhere. I lived
in Paris for a while, then, after university, travelled the world with a
backpack: visiting India and China, then working my way across America
and Canada. It was a time of enormous freedom and adventure, with few
responsibilities, yet tinged with yearning and confusion.
Maddy with Ruairi, aged 6. Maddy had
an ectopic pregnancy when she started trying to conceive with husband
Michael which led to her losing her fallopian tubes. After years of
fertility treatment she gave birth
Maddy Paxman with Ruairi today. She says being a mother has made her happier than she had ever been
In
your 20s, there still seems everything to play for — life is just
opening up ahead of you, and you are eager to grasp it and make it your
own. But I didn’t quite know who I was, or where I wanted to be. Then,
while living in Chicago in my mid-20s, I met the poet Michael Donaghy,
the man who would become my life partner and later husband. He was
playing the tin whistle in an Irish band on the street corner, and I
knew, as soon as I looked at him, that we would have a history together.
We
fell in love and, when my visa expired and I had to return home, we
carried on our relationship between the two continents. For the first
two years, we were caught between the intense delirium of being in love
and the dreadful wrench of parting.
Eventually,
Michael moved to London to live with me, and we bought a small flat
together. At last I had a sense of home, one chosen and created by me,
with the man I loved. I was happy, for a time, although always slightly
afraid it would all go wrong and slip out of my grasp.
Maddy did question whether having a child was the best choice as she became exhausted
Then,
in my 30s, we started trying to have a baby. I had an ectopic
pregnancy, from which I almost died, and which led to me losing my
fallopian tubes; and, finally, after years of fertility treatment, in
vitro fertilisation, which to my great delight worked.
At
last, I had the baby I longed for — and I remember sitting in the
garden, with tiny Ruairi wrapped up in my arms, feeling happier than I’d
ever been.
But
anyone who has had a baby knows that the sleepless nights and the sheer
exhaustion of caring for another human being can take their toll, and
there were often moments when I wondered whether I had done the right
thing having him.
Being
a mother, though, has made me happier, and, at times, more wretched,
than anything else in my life. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The
decade after 40 has been described as ‘the age of grief’, when those
you love begin to be intimately affected by illness, bereavement and
other troubles. Perhaps it’s just that as you turn the corner of
mid-life, you stop feeling immortal. Life no longer seems full of
endless possibility, but short and, sometimes, very rough going.
It was when I was 46 that Michael died suddenly, and I was left to raise our eight-year-old son alone.
The
loss left me staggering under a profound sense of shock and grief,
which, ten years later, is still a part of who I am. But it also gave me
a sense of new possibilities; new directions I might take as an
individual, rather than as half of a couple.
My
50s have, so far, been a decade of considerable personal fulfilment. I
have written and published a book about my experience of grief. My son
has grown up to become a lovely young man.
As
a woman, I definitely have a sense of becoming less visible in society,
but, in a way, this means I can watch the world without being seen,
from a higher branch. The benefit of growing older is seeing life
through the wide-angle lens of wisdom and experience.
And I realise now that a lot of things that seemed so important don’t matter nearly as much as I thought they did.
Maddy feels that as a woman she had become less visible as she has grown older
We
have to understand our own temperament to be happy. My friend’s husband
has the most even disposition of anyone I know: he wakes up every
morning feeling exactly the same, steady as a rock.
Whereas
I, with my constantly changing moods, never quite know from one moment
to the next how I will feel. It has taken me years to forgive these dips
and surges of the spirit and understand them for what they are — just
part of who I am. And to realise that, like everything else in life,
they, too, will pass.
Adversity
has strengthened me as a person. I’ve got a good idea of my
capabilities, my needs, my vulnerabilities. I feel happiest now when I
have a sense of quiet acceptance of whatever is happening in the moment,
of being ‘in the flow’.
When
people who are dying are asked what they would have done differently,
almost everyone replies that they wish they had spent more time with the
people they loved.
Family,
friends, being needed, being loved — these are the things that bring us
satisfaction. Not heaps of money or a washboard stomach.
I’m
pretty sure, also, that if you asked whether they’d rather have had a
life blissfully free of troubles, or a full, rich experience of all that
life has to offer, most would opt for the latter.
It’s
hard, in a society where we are bombarded with images of other people’s
happiness, to remember these smiles are often just for the camera, or
trying to sell us something. We can feel ashamed of not living up to
such ridiculous ideals.
But
what if the pursuit of happiness means we don’t always recognise what
is already good and fulfilling in our lives? ‘Contentment is wealth,’ as
an old Irish saying goes.
Perhaps
it’s time to stop worrying about being happy, and, instead, allow
ourselves to feel whatever we feel, with acceptance and compassion and
understanding that, however good or bad, it won’t last.
Who knows — that might even make us happier, for a while.
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