Happy Hours
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 7, 2015

A new year always brings talk of happiness. We wish it on others, we hope to heap it on ourselves. We fantasise about it, plan for it, burden our credit cards to buy it. We tell ourselves that we deserve it. But how do we measure happiness?

As a child, I remember happiness feeling like my chest was going to burst. An uncle’s gift of a 20-cent piece pressed into my palm made me hyperventilate. I pedalled furiously to the lolly shop, seven-year-old brain frothing with anticipation, my precious coin snug in the pouch of my koala purse.

Smarties were three for a cent, musk sticks and caramel cobbers, two cents each, Gobstoppers, ten cents. Could I, would I, blow 20 cents on two Gobstoppers? I dithered at the lolly counter until Mr Gripps, accustomed to my life-changing deliberations, sighed and hung the white paper bag back on its hook. As he turned to unload a crate of peaches, I leapt to a decision. And then I rode home one-handed, clutching a bag of musk sticks (5) and a single gobstopper in one sweaty palm, wobbling with happiness.

As a teenager, my happiness dipped and soared like my hormones. Some weeks it lasted only as long as my boyfriends. But girlfriends could always bolster my fragile self esteem. At one slumber party, we 16-year-olds stayed up watching Steel Magnolias, stiff-necked in our corduroy beanbags, littering the sleepout with popcorn. We sobbed when Julia Roberts lay lifeless on the porch, howled when they switched off her life support, then fawned over her grieving husband at the funeral.

At midnight, using an ice-cream lid as a Ouija board, we held hands and conducted a séance, feverish with excitement. Happiness was ours when we conjured the ghost of 95-year-old Mrs Werne from three doors down. (She’d died, mysteriously, of old age.)

At 2am, high on Fanta and hysterical when Mrs Werne rustled up a gust that rattled the windows, we mapped out the requirements for our future happiness from the safety of our sleeping bags. Mine was conditional upon marrying Richard Gere, becoming an ABC newsreader with a lifetime pension and giving birth to triplets. (I had the triplets, it turned out, but they took ten years to emerge.)

Unhappiness was Mum arriving at my sleepover house next morning to take me home to my only-child existence, sullen from sleeplessness.

Now, still at the beginner’s end of middle age, I’ve learnt that my happiness depends on relentless participation. I need to be busy and needed and creative. I need daily triumphs. I no longer covet a BMW or a famous husband.

Perhaps happiness is the stringing together of small pleasures. Holding hands with my Collie-bred heartthrob. The sound of my children giggling in another room. Horsing around at the beach. Eating brownies with home-made icecream. A freshly vacuumed floor (do domestic satisfactions count?)

Perhaps happiness is a day of upticks: a sleep-in, a friend’s husband given the all clear after cancer, finding a forgotten block of chocolate behind the cat biscuits. At the salon where I’ve had my hair cut for a decade, the owner, Hans, always greets me by asking “How can I make you happy?” What better way to foster loyalty than by reminding his clients that his happiness depends on theirs?

On a recent drive to the farm, eldest son floated this question: “Mum, if you had to choose, would you rather a broken leg or your dodgy knee?” I chose my dodgy knee. Later, I realised that over a lifetime, my painful knee will deliver far more misery than six weeks on crutches.

My generation has made the pursuit of happiness its crusade. We delude ourselves that contentment is the difference between a weekend at Rottnest and a week at the Shangri-La in the Maldives. Will renovating our melamine kitchen make me happier? It might – for a month. But then I’ll get used to the shiny new cupboards and the self-cleaning oven and turn my discontent to our 80s faux-marble bathroom. (Life-long happiness always lives on the rung above ours.)

Even parading our happiest selves on Facebook is not enough to trump the competition. Someone’s always funnier, prettier, richer, more in love. I’ve weaned myself off Facebook. It makes me feel inadequate for no good reason. Am I happy enough? As happy as everyone else? On Facebook, the opposite of happy is envy. I just want to be content with what is.

In the supermarket last week, some new textas caught my seven year old’s eye. He badgered me up and down three aisles before I snapped:

“For goodness sake, honey, you’ve just had Christmas!”

He looked at me wide-eyed with hurt and said: “That was ages ago.”

Happiness is fleeting even when Santa Claus delivers it.