#6. Duty is Not the Enemy of Happiness
Our world tells us that happy mums will be good mums and that happy mums lead to happy children. So we prioritise happiness. We think the duty of motherhood is the parasite eating our happiness and that the solution is to get rid of it. It hasn’t worked. Women, men, children and teenagers are alarmingly miserable. Happiness pursued at the cost of goodness will be a shrinking, shrivelling, fragile happiness. It devours mothers and their families. While disordered duty devours, rejecting God-centred duty makes us deathly miserable.
Being happy is a bit like staring at a star. Focus on it and it disappears. When we scramble to pin it down, trapping it to keep, happiness gets away. It’s not tame and docile. Happiness cannot be crafted, curated and edited into life. By force, we’ll never get hold of it. We’ll have hints and wafts, barely enough to enjoy, gone before we know it.
A child at play finds it hard to imagine that packing the dishwasher is on his path to happiness. But trying to get happiness by ignoring responsibility ruins pleasure. There’s discomfort in taking a good thing at the wrong time, knowing it will be interrupted any minute and that there will be fallout for the poor choice made. But when the child gives in to reality and does the right thing at the right time, in the right way, he stumbles into the experience of enjoying a fulfilled obligation. He finds that even though it took effort, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it. He finds that play is sweeter when the work is done. Happiness grows when we give in to goodness. It’s one of the natural features of how God made the world.
The times I’ve been most miserable as a mum were when I have been most clumsy in my thinking about goodness, the times I’ve been most hesitant to use the word ‘good’ and ‘ought’ and ‘duty’; the times when I’ve known the good and have been least inclined to do it. As I mentioned in this article, there are also times when we see a whole lot of good we long to do, which our hands are powerless to give. The sorrow of circumstantial inadequacy is different from the unhappiness of choosing to leave good undone. We work hard to escape the awful weight of our inadequacies. But when our strategies bypass God and his goodness, we feel worse. The key to feeling better is not to minimise the responsibilities of motherhood.
When we do have an idea of what our God-defined duty is, our frustration comes more from resisting it, than from doing it. Or from resisting God when he doesn’t give us what we want. The thing is, giving in to God’s goodness is the path to happiness. Since the Garden of Eden, human beings have tried to secure their own happiness by giving up goodness. It’s where all the trouble began.
By throwing goodness away, we toss aside the very thing happiness feeds on. Like a flame without oxygen. To feel better about our inadequacies, we cast off duty and obligations. Try to lock in happiness at the expense of God-centred duty, and we’ll forfeit it—our own and our family’s. The flame of joy dies without goodness. If our duties are out of order, then guilt and shame will dominate our hearts and minds. We will not find joy if we’re resisting the good things which our Lord is calling us into. Our mood will be more volatile, or at least, wobbly. A robust heart and mind become brittle when we are disordered.
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A truly happy mother is someone who is coming to terms with the God-given duty of mothering, not running away from it. But this kind of happiness has nothing to do with life being uncomplicated. Happiness is never undiluted. It’s suspended in a mix of other feelings. We can’t distill it into isolation. If our definition of happiness is happiness alone, without any hint of tension or frustration or difficulty, we’ll not notice when we’ve got it. We’ll be too busy trying to soothe the discomforts. Happiness is always in a mixed bag. We need to expect happiness to coexist with discomfort.
If we stop trying so hard to be happy, we’re much more likely to end up there. Happiness sneaks up on us while we’re not watching. It’s there all the time, but not bottled on the shelf for the taking. It finds us while we’re doing the good we were made for, our God-given, God-ordered, God-centred duty.
Happiness feeds on goodness; happiness can’t survive for long without it. They belong together because they both come from God. Fullness of joy is only found in submissive nearness to God, sinking our toes into his goodness and the good things he has made us responsible for. That is how God made us to be. Like trees near water, happiness and goodness grow close to God.
No one is happier than God and there is no goodness away from him. Happiness and goodness come from him. Perfect goodness is a divinely happy thing. We can’t get happiness apart from goodness and we need God for both. There is no getting around Him. We won’t find what we’re after anywhere else. Psalm 16 sings it beautifully. Go and read the whole psalm, but here is a snippet:
‘I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing”...
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.’
What we think about God (and all things in relation to him) has a direct impact on our mood. It’s not the only factor, because bodies and brains in a fallen world often have disproportionate and disordered moods, from many complicated causes. But ultimately, our moods line up behind our theology, and eventually follow where it leads. Our struggle to do what is good, and our difficult moods are, deep down, struggles to calibrate our perceptions with God’s truth.
In Jesus, Christians are anchored in the supremely good and happy life of God. Our future in the New Creation will be an undiluted experience of happiness and goodness. There will be nothing lacking, no disappointments, no tension, no frustration, no tears. Being with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit will be fullness of joy and pleasure forevermore. For the mother who belongs to Jesus, it is certain.
This means we can be optimistic in the present. Jesus is on his throne and the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the seas. Everything which is out of joint now will be made as it ought to be. Jesus will do it. No matter how complicated (even distressing) our life is now, there is always the thread of confident hope into the joy to come. Our happiness to come is more real than real and more scratchproof than a diamond; that future grows our happiness now. Something other than mothering makes happy mothers happy. But it’s a happiness that grows as we give in to motherhood while we wait.
