ISO Joy

I'm a teeny, tiny bit obsessed with Brene Brown's work right now. My journey as a mother thus far is so perfectly summed up in her work on shame, perfectionism and discovering my vulnerability. (That probably sounds more dismal than it really is. But it's mostly because we have a visceral negative response to the word shame, says Brown.)

I generally despise parenting books and prescriptive ways to raise children. (See archives, winter and spring 2010, in which K reads a million books on infant and toddler sleep and then ceremoniously throws them all away, while slipping into exhaustion-induced insanity.) And Brown's books fall somewhere loosely between the self-help and parenting categories. Prescriptive they are not, but she does talk about how you think about your actions and feelings and what impact that has on the people around you. Like the very impressionable little people running around your house.

Becoming a mother made me want to be a better person in a way that no other event in my life has. Having a kid is like having a mirror that reflects your flaws and mistakes. What you do, what you say, your opinions, and your mannerisms are repeated and interpreted a million times a day, and suddenly, it's like seeing yourself as others must see you, except without the general filters of politeness and etiquette that masks most people's judgments and reactions.

I'm digressing a bit here. The part of this talk that struck me is when she discusses the idea of "joy becoming foreboding" . . . because I've noticed with a lot of women, that we have this fear that bad things are going to happen to those we love. This keeps us up at night. It interferes with our ability to enjoy simple pleasures. It makes us strive for safety and security and perfection to try to control it. And it puts a lot of pressure on our partners. Here's a clip from a talk at the Kansas City TedX.