It Was Never Their Job to Make Me Happy

Once upon a time, I truly believed that my husband, my four kids, my boss, my coworkers, my neighbors, Comcast, and traffic were the cause of my unhappiness.

If my family, Comcast, and traffic would just do things my way, we’d all be happier.

In other words, if the world out there changed… then I would finally be happy.

I held this belief–not consciously, but it was somewhere deep in my being. So much so that, in the early 90s, when my boys were still in pre-school, I bought myself a pink sweatshirt with big fancy script writing on the front that said:

“If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

I wore it for months.

It was meant as a not-so-subtle message to my four strong-willed, independent kids. (It was meant for my husband too, but he mostly ignored it.) The idea was simple: if everyone would just do what I wanted, the way I wanted, then we could all be happy.

At the time, this felt like a perfectly reasonable strategy.

I see now how upside-down that thinking was—but back then, I truly believed it.

To be fair, I’d been hearing the opposite message for decades.

“Happiness is an inside job.”
“Happiness is a choice.”
“A person is as happy as they make up their mind to be.”

I knew the quotes. I could say them. I even sounded wise when I said them.

But clearly, I wasn’t really living what I was preaching. I mean… if you’re wearing a sweatshirt announcing that everyone else is responsible for your happiness, the message hasn’t quite landed yet, right?

Then, in 1998, I started meditating. And one of the first things my teacher said was something like this: the whole point of meditation is to be happy.

That stopped me in my tracks. I loved this new thought. The radical core component of this teaching was simple: my happiness was in my control–no one else’s.

So I began meditating and practicing what he taught—not to escape my life, but to understand my own mind, my emotions, and the way I related to the world. Slowly, something began to shift. Not magically. Not overnight. But genuinely.

A few years later, when my boys were about ten or eleven, they were part of a small youth group that came to our house in the early fall to do yard work and earn some money. Being ten and eleven, there was more trampoline jumping and turning wind-fallen branches into ninja swords going on than actual work.

At one point, I came outside and used my stern mom voice to tell them to stop goofing around and get to work. This was still early in my meditation practice, and I hadn’t yet learned that kids respond far better to humor and guidance than to firmness and fear.

One of the boys—Clayton—immediately got very small. His shoulders dropped. His eyes widened. He looked like a puppy who knew it was about to be punished.

He rushed to apologize, telling me how sorry he was for making me unhappy.

And in that moment, my heart broke.

I knew enough about his life to recognize what I was seeing. Keeping the adults around him happy wasn’t a personality trait—it was something he’d been taught. Something he’d learned to do to avoid being yelled at or punished. A way of staying safe.

I felt torn. I didn’t want to undermine his mom or contradict what he’d learned at home. And at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to accept the idea that it was his job to manage my emotional state.

So I softened my voice and spoke very gently—not to correct him, but to own how I saw things.

“It’s not your job to make me happy,” I said.

He stared quizzically at me, genuinely surprised.

I took a breath and continued, carefully, “It’s my job to make me happy. Not yours.”

He drank that in like a thirsty soul discovering water.

His shoulders lifted. His face softened. There was a visible sense of relief—It was as if something in him could finally exhale. He smiled. He seemed lighter, freer, as if he’d just been given permission to put something down that he’d been carrying for a long time.

On that cold fall day, with the wind and leaves blowing through the yard, something quiet but important shifted.

I said something to make them laugh. We all relaxed. The boys got enough done to earn their money.

And I walked back inside realizing that sometimes the most loving thing we can do is refuse to pass on a belief that was never true to begin with.