Beyond Happiness

"Are you okay? You seem sad."

"Is everything alright? I can't remember the last time I saw you happy."

"I just want you to be happy."

"Nothing seems to make you happy."

"Everything I do is to make you happy."

Make me happy. Happy. What the fuck does that mean anyway?

In Old English, happy means lucky. Favored by chance. Prosperous. In the flow of goodness.

All of my needs and most of my wants are met. Shouldn't I be happy. Shouldn't I be grateful? Shouldn't I smile more? Be a bit more breezy and full of mirth?

"I think it's Trump. He hangs over us like an orange cloud." My nine year old speculating on why Mamba (his name fore me) isn't happy. That's not it, but his orange cloud surely doesn't help.

"Just give her some space, women are unpredicable," offers my exasperated husband.

I want to be happy just as much as they want me to be happy, but I refuse to perform happiness for them to make our lives more comfortable. The first 40 years of my life were devoted to the art of performing emotions and now I want to learn to be in real relationships with the people in my life. Not just comfortable ones. In fact, I actively mistrust folks who prioritize performative comfort.

In between the aisles of begonias and banana trees, an elder woman approaches me at the plant nursery. "I need you to do something for me. I'm 81 years old. I live half the year in Florida. I just came home and you know what I found? A yard full of weeds. You think my kids came and weeded for me?" she laughs a caustic, bitter, resentful, mirthless laugh. "I need you to show me where the perennials are. What can I plant, ONCE, that I don't have to weed?"

Now it's my turn to laugh. She wants to buy weed paper and perennials and plant once and be done forever. I'm guessing she's been the kind of gardener who plants annuals and tears everything out every year to start again. Petunias and geraniums and begonias and those little fiery tufted plants, what are they called?

Now she is done with the work of planting and the tearing out, and she wants a final solution.

Isn't that what Hitler called his psycopathic genocide?

I gently tell my new friend that there will always be weeds and there will always be work. That weed paper, beyond being an ecological nightmare, will still get holes and grow weeds. I guide her to the "treadwell" section where stonecrops and creeping phloxes promise to fill in large areas of the garden to suppress the "undesirables." I suggest some azaleas, blooming just for her when she returns from Florida! and maybe a few peonies or rhododendrons.

I walk away thinking about how she arrived at this moment. Angry. Cynical. Ready to unload her unmet needs on a defensless fellow gardener in the local nursery.

I texted my friend when I got in the car. "Does my face just scream that I am soft and gentle and here to receive your grievances?"

Yes, yes it does. This was my default setting. Utter sweetness. Gentle compliance. I will do whatever I can to make your life easier, to help you feel seen and loved and cared for. And maybe my friend in the local nursery did the same thing for most of her life? And no one ever learned how to give to her? To care for Mom, for Grandma? And now she's in need of help, and doesn't know how to ask for it, and sinks into bitterness and exasperated disbelief. After all I've done for them....

This is the dark underbelly of my unhappiness. My estrogen is flagging. The hormone that lubricated my sweet persona and kept my gaze consistently focused on service to others. That energized my relational productivity. Without estrogen's steady soprano melody harmonizing the symphony of my hormones, deeper notes have become louder. Testosterone and follicle stimulating hormone add a more menacing undercurrent to the score. Leuteinizing hormone adds a sort of shrieking uptempo mania. But not the fun kind.

Or maybe it isn't my "sweet face" that drew in the elder gardener? Maybe it was my bronze skin from being in the sun, and my cart full of native perennials that drew her? Maybe, could it be? Maybe, she recognizned that I carry myself as a mature and skilled plant person through the aisles of the nursery that I know like the back of my hand? Maybe I can put down my sweet "girl next door" martyrdom complex and claim the maturity and mastery that I exude as I move through my world?

Maybe this shift is the whole fucking point of menopause.

Maybe it's not my job to pay for comfort with perfomative happiness anymore.

Maybe it's my job to be skillful, to claim mastery over my life, and to walk through my life like someone who owns the place. Because I do. This life is mine, I have curated it and cultivated it and designed it and now, goddamnit, I am going to inhabit it. And just because I don't want to hear "Flint and Steel! Chicken Jockey!" one more fucking time, or I don't find utter bliss in letting the dogs out and doing the laundry and putting the dishes away, doesn't mean I'm not "happy." It just means I'm not bubbly. I'm not exuberant and effervescent and making sure everyone around me knows they are safe with me because I'm constantly fawning and demonsrating my glee over the privilege of their gaze.

I am trading my happiness for agency. My effervescence for empowerment. My sweet fawning for truth telling. And the folks (mostly the men) in my life just want to fix me. Just want to "make me happy" again, and return me to the version of Mamba/Sweetheart that is smooth soprano ease. I don't know how to tell them she is dead, or dying. That she existed as a constellation of fertility hormones and social conditioning, both of which have rotted off my perimenopausal body like last year's rose hips.

The funny thing is, I'm more like them now. Focused on my own interests. Enjoying space and time to myself. Losing myself for hours in creative projects that bring me pleasure. Clear and direct about what I'm thinking and what I want. Assertive. What's good for the goose....

I may not ooze "happiness," but I woke up this morning with the phrase "grounded defiance" floating in my mind. That, to me, is a trade worth making.