My Current Definition Of Happiness

Derek: Well, your son's lucky to have a mom that chose him over her career. I wasn't so lucky.
Haley: Yeah, I'm sorry. We all make different choices and we need different things. I think eventually we learn to define happiness for ourselves on our own terms in spite of the pain other people have caused us. You know?
-Even Fairy Tale Characters Would Be Jealous, One Tree Hill

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I am a One Tree Hill junky. The show sometimes makes me angry with bad storylines, but the quotes that I get from it are heavenly. I sometimes think that my life has been a mix of Peyton Sawyer’s and Brook Davis’ lives from the show – Only because I’ve actually experienced a lot of what they have. It’s weird to watch a storyline on a television show and think – I’ve lived that. Now if only one of them could experience being a step mom – although Brook is currently a foster mom so I guess that’s kind of close enough. Anyway, last week’s episode had the above snippet. It made me feel rather content.

I think my definition of happiness has had quite a makeover. It received the same treatment as The Plan. It was cut here, trimmed here, allowed to grow here and then shaved some more from over there. My definition of happiness has been through quite a lot, and I think that it might be a work in progress.

Reflecting back, I see that at first I thought happiness was landing my dream job. Happiness to me was being the busy, hard working career woman that I was. Around the end of 2007 I began to realize that my career wasn’t happiness. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew that living in an area that I didn’t like breaking my back performing a dream job that wasn’t exactly a dream was not happiness. No way was that true happiness.

And then the boyfriend walked back in. And that was happiness and it wasn’t happiness. It downright reminded me of the line from Shakespeare:

“My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy.”
-Romeo And Juliet (Act 1, Scene 5)

My love had three boys. And although I have come to dearly love those boys … the situation has brought me great heartache at times. If I stayed in this relationship I wasn’t going to get what I had earlier planned as a happy ending.

And here I am. It has been a little over two months since I’ve moved in. Jumping forward I see that my definition of happiness has a lot of room to grow and change and develop.

But for now happiness is…

• Being with my boyfriend and seeing the smile on his face
• Being able to live with all of my boys, and not have to drive from over 300 miles away to see them
• Having my family with me, and sharing my new family with my family
• Snuggling with my cats on the couch
• Seeing my orchid plant still in bloom (amazingly it is still alive)
• Getting a hug from the boys
• Hearing the boys tell me that they love me
• Hearing the boys tell me they missed me when they come home from Jane's house
• Seeing the confidence on Older Boys face last night when he told me that he won two of the matches at his martial arts lesson.
• Seeing the joy on Middle Boys face when he realized that he can read words on his own
• Seeing the smile on Younger Boys face as he learned how to finger paint yesterday

Happiness is going to be enjoying life, in spite of the frustration that Jane might bring. Happiness is enjoying the small things that make me feel alive and thankful that I have taken on this opportunity. Happiness is whatever I decide it will be, and only if I remember to allow myself to have it.