Saying Yes to Joy

A Christmas photocard I designed over a decade ago is my all-time favorite: Our giggling toddler twins sit together at Grandma’s upright piano. A single word accents the shot: Joy! The boys’ beaming smiles made this musical moment jolly. The random notes they banged out? Not so much. But the sound of their happiness will always be music to my ears.

Holding on to joy is the tricky part, isn’t it? Sometimes we confine joy to that narrow space between concerns about “what ifs.” Or, we put it off until some imagined future in which we’ll totally have our act together. When my husband and I welcomed our twins after two failed pregnancies, static buzzed in the background of my happiness. <em>Will my nursing difficulties harm their growth? Will health problems show up? Will the caregiver mistreat them</em>?

Friends assure me I am not alone in succumbing to such buzzkills. A Sisters reader shared that she’s in therapy — not to heal from another numbing breakup — but to be able to fully experience the joy of her new marriage. Her words, like many of your emails, touch me deeply. So does a recent Reddit post by a cancer survivor who cried after her last radiation treatment. She was free to apply to grad school, to get off disability and go back to work. She’d met someone and fallen in love. “I can't shake the negative thoughts,” she writes. “ <em>This is the day he ends things with me. This is the day my side effects start again.</em> I feel like the universe is holding a carrot of happiness out, and the second I grab it, everything is going to crumble.”

Can you relate to what our experiences share? It’s the tendency to avoid getting our hopes up, or letting our guard down, as if we might jinx ourselves if we surrender fully to joy. So, when difficult times make way for happier ones, we squander them waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sometimes it’s not a shoe we fear dropping, but a ball. Earlier this year, I took on a new project at work, and you’re reading it now. <em>Sisters</em> is an amazing opportunity to connect with other African American women, your lives and your stories. That’s something I’ve done for years at publications like <em>Essence</em> and <em>Ebony</em>, but I’m particularly pleased to serve Black women here at AARP. Launching <em>Sisters </em>involved a new workflow, new skills and new collaborators. As I awkwardly learned to juggle these balls, I often put joyful parts of my personal life on hold. <em>I can skip tonight’s workout … I should visit Daddy, but I need to catch up on readers’ emails … I can miss the boys’ away game.</em>

I can make up a skipped workout. But some joyful moments are a one-time offer, and my nose-to-the grindstone mindset nearly caused me to miss a huge one. Our boys, now teenagers, have gone from sitting on our laps to running laps — at football practice. They speak excitedly with their father about the line of scrimmage and turnovers. I can’t always follow their conversations, but I grasped that something amazing was happening when their team racked up wins weekend after weekend.

My optimistic and frugal husband prebooked and insured cheap flights to Orlando just in case they made it to the national championships. Resigned to not taking days off until I could juggle all the workplace balls with ease, I decided not to go — the same knee-jerk response I had to last year’s all-star games.