A lot of people have been telling me that I “seem happy” these days. They can hear it in my voice, see it in my eyes, feel it in the energy I project. I don’t really know what I’m doing differently. Despite all the effort I put into seeming happy for so long, apparently, I wasn’t fooling anyone.
It’s not that my marriage was a 16-year slog of misery. There were certainly happy moments, sometimes happy days, sometimes happy months. But my happiness never felt like mine.
They say a mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child. For much of my marriage, that child was my husband.
It was startling, when I became a wife and mother, to realize that my happiness no longer mattered. Maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe it sort of mattered, but it was assumed I could achieve it through osmosis. That as long as everyone else was happy, my own happiness was assured.
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