Can't think of any good Mother's Day gift ideas? How about happiness -- both yours and mom's. Gretchen Rubin thinks that just trying to make your mom, wife, sister or friend happy on Mother's Day can actually make you happier, too. That's a Mother's Day gift for everyone.
The Yale-trained lawyer-turned-author spent a year looking for ways to increase the joy in each day. Then she wrote a best-selling book about it.
In The Happiness Project -- Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun (Harper, $25.99), Rubin recounts her systematic approach to a more cheerful existence.
She spoke by phone last week about happiness and Mother's Day.
With the annual march through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day, Passover and Easter, is it important to celebrate holidays like Mother's Day?
A lot of people feel like it's very commercial driven; that it's concocted by greeting card makers to hoodwink people into feeling guilty for not doing something. I think it's really helpful to have a reason to express gratitude for your mother and your father.
I like having these reminders to take the time to celebrate and to do something thoughtful.
In your book, you refer to splendid truths. For example, "One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy." How does that apply to Mother's Day?
There are sort of two sides to that. That old saying, "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." Everybody in a family has a huge impact on the happiness of everyone else. Most mothers say what would make them happy is to have their children be happy. It's a circle. Sometimes with your parents, they are the people that you complain to. Now that I am an adult child with children of my own, I express more to my parents that things are good. That, basically, everything is fine, and I am happy. They're happy in my happiness. The happiness of a parent is so important to a family. Some people feel like it's selfish to want to be happier. If you're a mother -- if you're taking time to have fun and you're getting enough sleep -- it's easier to have all that happen. Is it a duty to be happy? An epigraph on my book is from Robert Louis Stevenson: There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. Maybe there is something that is keeping you from being happy. It's hard to say it's a duty to be happy, but maybe it's a duty to try to be happy. Some people almost feel like it's morally more admirable to be unhappy. They take pride in being unhappy. It's better to be happy because there is this effect on other people. Happy people are more altruistic, more likely to intervene. Happy people make better leaders.
You're not doing anybody any favors by not being happy. In your book, you say that you're not a shopper. How do you reach out to show your appreciation? I'm not a good gift giver. One of the things that I love to do that people really appreciate, I will go to people's houses and help them clean their closets. I think you can look for ways to be generous. One thing I did for Mother's Day is I bought a laminator. It's great for people with little kids. You write a story or make a picture and it seems more permanent or fancy. It's easy to store. It's a cute keepsake. The best keepsakes are ones that don't take up much room. Do you have a Mother's Day ritual? We don't really have one. When I was little we would attempt to make breakfast for my mother in bed, which she probably did not enjoy. Some people -- for a variety of reasons -- feel blue amid all the hype around Mother's Day. Do you have any advice on that front? It's always helpful, if you're not getting what you feel like you need, to give it to someone; maybe by doing something for your own mother or an important teacher in your life. It's very hard when you feel like you want others to do something for you, and you don't get it. Sometimes you just have to recognize the reality of it.
I had a big milestone birthday. A friend asked, "What did you do for your birthday?" "Oh, nothing." She was appalled. It literally did not cross my mind that we would do something. It doesn't matter to me. I wasn't disappointed. You adjust expectations and be clear about what you want. If you tell people, "I don't care," then don't expect them to do it. Sometimes people say, "I wish you would do this for me," and they don't. That's painful. It may be that something that was important in your family was not important in theirs. It's not deliberately cruel. Finally, any advice for mothers on Mother's Day? On my blog, I write about my spiritual master, St. Therese of Lisieux. She talks about the need to respond to the intent of the gift instead of the gift itself. Before you open it, maybe you say to yourself, "This is the present. It was chosen for me. Even if it is another hideous sweater." As best you can, it's good to really try to say to yourself, "Remember what they were trying to do."
