Monday, January 21, 2008

You can steal happiness

"It's a mean town, but I don't care. Try and steal this. You can't steal happiness."~The Weepies

Except you can.

I like the idea of The Weepies song, "Happiness." The song basically says that if you're really happy, no one can steal that happiness from you, but I have to say that it's been my experience that people can and do steal happiness away from each other. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but I do know that there are certain people in my life who don't seem to like it if I am happy and it's almost as though they want to knock it out of me so I can't have it if they're not having it. Misery loves company but I guess happiness should just shut up and stay in a corner somewhere. I don't get that about people. I am always happy when/if other people are happy. I'm not jealous of them. I don't want to knock their happiness out of them just because I might not be happy in that same moment or if they have something I don't have.

As a for instance, the other day I had made a cake for my daughter's birthday. Her father wasn't going to be home the day of her birthday so we went into her room with the candles all blazing and we started to sing to her. Well, she had the ceiling fan on and all the candles blew out so I stopped to relight them and as I was relighting them she motioned with her hands to "speed up the process" so I asked her if she had a problem with us singing to her and she said, "well, my birthday's tomorrow, not today." Um...no kidding. I'm the one who gave birth.

Me and her father were just happy and being silly and all of the sudden it was like...STOP!!! You cannot be happy because I'm not in the mood for it right now. So then I asked her if she wanted some cake and ice cream and she curtly told me NO and reminded me AGAIN that it wasn't her birthday. OKAY! I hustled out of her room and got my husband some cake and ice cream because the reason he wanted to sing early was so that he wouldn't miss out on the cake. I know. He's like 2 years old on a good day.

But my point is that I was feeling happy about her birthday and WHAM!!!, then I was in a bad mood because I started to think how I went out of my way to do something nice and how it was unappreciated and how I am sick of having to tip toe around all these moody people who want to steal my happiness away from me.

So even though I like that Weepies song, I'm afraid it's just a bunch of nice sounding words, set to a catchy tune, that sadly don't ring true in my world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'll take her share of the cake and ice cream, if you don't mind.
I know enough now to not let others ruin my good mood, but I went through so many years of letting it affect me profoundly.
Since my husband works a wacky rotating schedule, every year we look at the calendar and compare our children’s birth dates to his days off so we can plan a time for the four of us to get together as near to their birthdays as possible. We do this with the major holidays too. Sometimes they’ll pout in their rooms or refuse to go along with it. It used to worry me a lot. Now I ignore it. I can’t believe how long it took me to figure that out.
Tammy