Thirteen months ago, I wrote this post called: Chocolate, Chocolate, chocolate. . .But Is There More? You can read it if you want. It is linked.
I wrote it at a Wegmans grocery store café seating area on the Saturday of Thanksgiving Weekend as I was taking some time to myself while my husband was at home with the boys.
It reads a little sad. If you want to know the backstory, it was written after spending two consecutive dinners with my husband family. The first dinner was Thanksgiving, and it was celebrated with extended family, in my husband’s grandmother’s currently unoccupied house. We all understood that it might be my mother-in-law’s last Thanksgiving, but we sat in our assigned seats away from our respective partners and it was nice to socialize while our children’s older cousins entertained them. The dinner was catered by Wegmans and though my husband and I agreed it was a little bit of a difficult time in our lives, given the circumstances, we both agreed that we also had a good time socializing with our dinner partners. I remember bonding with Uncle Jack over our shared interest in music and musical instruments.
The second dinner in the series, one night later, on Black Friday, was also held in the same house. This time, a smaller crowd was in attendance, just my household, my husband’s sister’s family, and his parents were in attendance. This dinner was supposed to be a celebration of my father-in-law’s retirement, forced though it was, since his company had a major explosion and had to close 6 months prior. [You can read about the explosion here, it really was something, luckily nobody was injured or died].
That dinner was infused with a melancholy atmosphere as we all noticed that my mother-in-law, who was living in a nursing home at the time, was having trouble sitting in a chair and seemed to be doing poorly. Additionally, my father-in-law was in treatment for cancer at the time and it seemed hard to come up with conversation topics that didn’t focus on the present state of things. I tried to remember trivia questions to ask them as sort of a challenge and ended up looking up past material from my monthly live trivia nights at the library.
We all agreed that is was nice to have this time together though. The grandparents loved having toddler man’s attention all to themselves. Mr. Man loved playing with his older cousins two nights in a row.
I wrote Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate… after reading an e-mail from a relative in attendance on Thanksgiving. It had been sent to me and my husband and his sister and her husband that very morning.
It began, “This might well be the hardest year of your life. . . .” It was an ominous sentence and tells you pretty much everything you need to know about what it was about. It hinted at possible outcomes for coming year and provided support and reminded us that we should lean on each other.
I was already feeling a somewhat badly about the dinner the previous night when I read the e-mail. I knew the e-mail was intended to recognize the situation at hand and provide comfort. Recognizing the situation at hand was appreciated by me. I had a wonderful mother, but she could have worked as for the CIA with the protection afforded hard information. So appreciated the candor.
Even still, sometimes it is hard to hear someone else spell out the situation at hand. And at that moment, the situation felt like it wasn’t going improve anytime soon.
So, when I wrote Chocolate, Chocolate Chocolate. . . it was immediately after reading this e-mail and Googling Midlife Crises, because that is what I thought was going on for me.
This is when I learned about the Happiness Graph, which can be seen below. The part of the graph where the line gets low between the ages of 35-60 is called The Trough of Unhappiness.
According to a group of researchers, life satisfaction takes a dip when people are in their 30’s and 40’s and starts to make upward progress again after the age of 48 with people in their 70’s and 80’s reaching levels of happiness not seen since their teens. If you are interested in learning more, a journalist, Jonathan Rauch wrote a book about it called The Happiness Curve.
When I first read about this research, last year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, it bummed me out.
At the time I thought, “I am only 40. I had 7 more years to go before reaching rock bottom. What the heck was I supposed to do?”
It was an unsettling feeling to feel that my in-laws weren’t in great shape and my own mother had only died the year before and I might have to go through several more years of this before finally reaching peak unhappiness at age 47.
I was bummed out thinking about the Happiness Curve and I thought about it for perhaps a month or two.
But luckily, I forgot about the Happiness Curve. This is blog post to tell you that the inevitable did happen, but we are still standing
Life did get hard in 2020. Covid happened. Life got locked down. People I knew got it. I learned of people who passed away from it. Both of my in-laws did pass away, from non-Covid related illnesses.
But also, good things happened. Mr. Man learned how to ride a two wheeled bicycle. Toddler Nugget got better at communicating with us. After many years, we finished paying off our student loans. I got hired to work at a Community College part-time, which is something that I had been interested in doing since graduating from library school. I got the opportunity to write and lead a weekly trivia game for an audience around 50 people. I wrote hundreds of questions. I have had hundreds of logins for my trivia games. We went swimming and biking more than we ever did in previous years. Mr. Katie bought a ebike that he loves to ride. Mr. Katie learned how to make sourdough and we both learned how to make pizza crust. Mr. Man learned how to write his name. Toddler Nugget can climb up and down his changing table on his own.
Though there was plenty of rough stuff in 2020, things happened that I could never have predicted a year ago. I reconnected with friends who I haven’t communicated with in years. I started using the Marco Polo app and have frequent video “shares” with family members. Mr. Katie now has monthly virtual happy hours with his college friends. My sisters and I text more than ever. I have started using social media in what feels to me like a healthier way where I do more sharing of photos and participating in other people’s lives instead of just being the social media lurker that I was.
Additionally, I feel like I can imagine possibilities for the future that I would never have imagined a year ago. I am excited about the popup camper that we want to buy this coming spring. My imagination is more awake. Also Mr. Katie and I started doing Noom this fall and we are both down 20 lbs.
2020 was hard, but in a sense, I also feel oddly reborn.
So to the Happiness Curve, I say believe in it, if it helps you, but it doesn’t really serve me, so I am going to forget about it.
Here’s to 2021!
What are you looking forward to in the future?
