I’m someone who finds joy and beauty in simple things. For those who know the Enneagram, I’m a classic 4; creative and sensitive through and through. But when it comes to moments with the people I love most, the beautiful becomes surreal, and joy fades all too suddenly.
There’s a haze of what-ifs. As soon as I start to feel warmth, trauma whispers, “This is all too good.” Within seconds, I have imagined the worst – bad things can and have happened (a story for another time). For me, this thought pattern began as a safety plan for my heart, and being prepared felt better than being blindsided. Motherhood only reinforced the need. The bigger the joy, the more cause to protect.
Fear was stealing my joy.
Recently, I said all this out loud in therapy. It turns out this killjoy phenomenon has a name – foreboding joy. Even better, it’s not unique to me, and it’s fairly common among mothers and those who have experienced trauma. For years, I have been okay with foreboding joy. I knew the reason for the onset of fear and learned to manage the rest. That’s why I never thought much of it until the birth of my third child. The perfect combustion of exhaustion and postpartum hormones stole the brief moments of joy I had. Guilt set in, and I began to tell myself that I was being ungrateful.
I knew the guilt was rooted in the lies I told myself, and naming them exposed their darkness. Foreboding joy will always be a part of my inner struggles, but instead of simply living with it, I began to wonder, out loud…
“How does one spend more time embraced in joy?”
Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not a mental health professional – writing here is just one way I work through my own complicated feelings. What I do know is that I have work to do and a lot of grace to give myself. I want to experience joy in a way that feels right for me. As a preschool teacher, I used to tell my students to take imaginary photos of their play before clean-up to help ease the transition. It was silly, but it worked.
To grasp my own joy, I’ve started taking pictures with my imaginary camera, capturing moments with my two girls. Most of the time, it’s just a mental pause, but sometimes we’ll take out our “cameras” together and capture something beautiful. It’s harder than it sounds, but this simple step in mindfulness is giving me back a few more seconds of joy.
