The Burden Bearers

When I was young, my parents had little money. I wasn’t one of those kids who could brag about having a hundred dollars in my savings account, either. I never wore new clothes. The family never had new anything. We grew a lot of our own food, bought the least expensive of everything, and even raided the dumpsters behind grocery stores. (For those of you who have never done this-you would not believe what treasures could be found on a good dumpstering trip!)

During the summer, even when my brothers and I were as young as four or six or eight, it was not unusual for us to spend half of every day working. Not work that our parents invented to keep us busy, but real work that contributed to the family’s welfare. In the late fall, some years we kids would bundle up and carry gunny sacks to the neighbor’s fields, and gather the cobs of field corn that the combine had left behind. We’d spend hours in the barn or in the basement shelling it, to feed it to the chickens.

We worked pretty hard. We didn’t have much.

One of the things we didn’t have was emotional burdens. Our life was what it was, and that was okay. It was later, after a certain amount of prosperity had arrived so we didn’t have to take some of those extreme measures anymore, that the real difficulties arrived.

There was one particularly traumatic event that didn’t really upset us kids too much, but it upset our mom. And I can testify that it is not merely a cliché that "when momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy." That became a cliché because it was-and still is-the truth.

The greatest burden we children ever carried was not poverty or hard work, it was our mother’s unhappiness.

"Good" mothers, unfortunately, have a nasty habit of sacrificing their happiness in order to make their children’s lives better. At least, they think they are making their children’s lives better. The problem is that if they have to sacrifice their happiness, they aren’t making their children’s lives better. "Good" mothers often take responsibility for a lot of things that could slide without hurting anyone, while failing to take responsibility for the thing that will affect their children the most: Mom’s own happiness.

We so easily forget that it’s better to have a cheap meal with love and happiness than to have the best steak with dissention and anger. We forget that much of what we consider to be necessary for our children wasn’t around when we were kids. If we survived without it, our kids can, too.

But there is one thing that has affected children for generations, and it always will: Mom’s level of happiness.

So if you are a mom­or a dad or a boss, for that matter­I challenge you to lay down your pseudo­responsibilities and make some changes in your life so you can be happy.

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