Those who are parents will understand the following: Even before a child is born, many fears are felt.
There are the biggest fears: you want them to be born healthy, to be a good person, to be happy, to have the resources to give them a quality life, that nothing bad happens to them. But there are also fears for oneself, for losing some freedom, for putting projects aside, fear of the tiredness that everyone tells you about—in short, I could name many more.
My biggest fear regarding myself was a less tangible (and perhaps more selfish) one. For some years now, I have been studying topics like happiness: what it is, how it is achieved, how it is maintained. And I don’t mean the happiness of being at a party—that is more about being content—but the happiness that mixes many factors like well-being, peace of mind, the feeling that things are going to turn out well.
At least once a month I ask myself “Am I happy?” and, thanks to many factors, most of the time the answer is yes. But there was something that unsettled me. I remember since I was a child, my mom would also ask me “Are you happy?” and I would answer “Yes, and you?”, she would look at me and say “If you are happy, I am happy”.
Incredibly, that was the source of my fear. I thought “Well, but if my mom’s happiness depends on me being happy, then when I have a child, will my happiness depend on another person being happy?”. I didn’t like the idea of something so important depending on someone else; it was like saying “this person you don’t know is going to arrive and from now on will decide if you are sad, happy, angry, etc.”, terrible!
But well, I still took the plunge and now I have a one-year-old son and it has been the year with the most learning in my life. I have learned so many things, both about babies and about life in general and about happiness in particular. And continuing with this, I can say two things: Firstly, that I couldn’t imagine, nor even conceive, how much one loves and how much happiness a child brings you.
But the best part is that, secondly, I was right to think that now my happiness depends on another person. If my son asked me right now “Dad, are you happy?” I would also answer “If you are happy, I am happy”. If I knew my son wasn’t happy or for example when he gets sick, of course that also takes away my happiness, otherwise what kind of father would I be.
But there is something else there, something very important that I hadn’t seen before, and that is that now my child’s happiness is all I need to be happy myself. It is the minimum but it is also the maximum. If he is happy, I am too, regardless of whether I have a lot of work that day, back pain, if I haven’t reached a goal, etc. If I have that, the rest is a great bonus that, ironically, I enjoy even more than before.