And what did you do to make yourself feel better?

I read a lot of parenting stuff. It's a normal thing for me: before I got married I got a book about the first year of marriage (needless to say, THAT went out the window when the whole farce crumbled. It had a lot of good advice about how to avoid fights about money, children, and religion, but NO advice whatsoever on the "I'm sleeping with my co-worker" dilemma. Useless trash.)

Anyway. I read a lot, perhaps excessively, about topics I am interested in and about which I don't feel confident. And let's face it: there's so much information out there on parenting that I'm not sure how anyone feels confident, even if you have raised 18 children (although I for one think that that's actually bad parenting -- how awful will your kid feel when you can never remember their name and only spend 2 minutes with them each day?)

Have I digressed again?

This is a round about way of saying that I read something interesting today, but I can't remember where, and so I am not going to credit the author, for which I apologize.

Everyone wants to raise a happy and resilient child. I sure do, especially because I admit that I tend to be, when stressed, a bit of a pessimist. (Reading this right now, The Man is saying "A BIT???!!!) I'm reasonably resilient, though -- which I like -- but there's a big difference between being resilient and slogging through things, and being resilient and bouncing back. It's surviving vs living, and I'd really like to do more of the latter.

So this morning's article on raising resilient and happy children said the usual stuff, but one thing struck me: it's easy, they say, to tell your kid to buck up after a long day. As a parent you have the gift of hindsight and you know very well that no matter what Mary did in Math class, that pales in comparison to having your husband come home and tell you that your marriage is over because he's been screwing around in the stacks of the library.

But what you need to do is commiserate with your child and then ask the all important question:

"And then what did you do to make yourself feel better?"

Which gives your child the idea that a.) they have the power to do this, b.) that there's no sense in wallowing over it and c.) they should do something about it, they have the right and the personal obligation to treat themselves nicely if something bad happens in their lives. Or even if it doesn't.

And you know, I think that this isn't just good advice for your kid: it's good advice for us all. Adult lives are fraught with stress: work stress, relationship stress, kid-raising stress, commuting stress -- the list goes on. And we're often battered by not just our own lives but by the problems of those around us.

And yet for some reason there's this Puritanical expectation that we as adults must just buck up and carry on. Too much self-indulgence leads to ... I don't know. Slothfulness? Gluttony? Some other of the deadly sins?

I am definitely one of those people who does this. I was raised to do chores before pleasure, and if there were too many chores, then pleasure got sacrificed. And don't get me wrong: I'm not suddenly going to stop doing my dishes.

But I think going forward me and my family are going to be encouraged to find one nice thing for ourselves each day. Maybe more. But one little treat, one little joy, one kind thought. Simple pleasures, but a recognition of them, a moment to appreciate a little joy in life, to guard against the battering. A way to make ourselves feel better, to treat ourselves nicely, to give ourselves a little frisson of pleasure in the face of a world that isn't always kind and beautiful.

So tell me: What are YOU going to do for yourself today?