There he stood, my little 1 1/2 year old, with his blond curls on his head and his diaper in his hand. As in, not on his little bottom. And yes, there was poop. And it was Not Good.

I was writing about happiness. I had stopped writing about happiness just to go get that little booger up from his nap. I was needing a break from the sort of thing I kept finding in my research on happiness. Things like this:

Happiness is…“the ultimate state of conscious feeling where all the five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love. Happiness flows out of ‘FORGIVE’ness and not ‘FORGET’ness,” says Asesh Datta here.

This is why happiness is so elusive; we’ve just defined the heart and soul out of it.

How in the name of all that is yellow and buttery are you supposed to make all five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love?

First of all, what is dreamless love? Is love normally full of dreams? Is it better without the dreams? How do you get it to be dreamless? How can you tell? Can you be happy with love that stubbornly retains one or two dreams involving giant French fries, a purple tuxedo, and a burro named Roxy?

And how do you integrate all five senses into this sort of state? Let’s just refresh on all five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Please explain to me how you can smell dreamless love. Please. I want to know.

Anybody?

By now you’re thinking Okay, ha ha ha with the sarcasm, where is the happiness?

Well, it’s elusive, like a deer, so quit being so pushy.

I take that back. Happiness isn’t elusive. Happiness is hard work. We pretend it’s elusive so we don’t have to fess up to being lazy. That way we can continue to be unhappy without feeling like it’s our own fault, which allows us to continue complaining about the utter injustice of the universe and how we’re gonna tell that Happiness Guru a thing or two when we get up there. Or over there. Or through there. Whatever.

Happiness isn’t elusive, like a deer. Happiness is big and ugly, like a rhino. Happiness likes stare-downs. Happiness needs plenty of space and care and feeding. Happiness makes great big piles of poop.

Uh, my analogy might have broken down on that last one.

And now I have a story to tell. I finished the line above (the one about the rhino poop, you remember?), and went to wake up my napping children. Well. They weren’t exactly napping anymore. They had been awake for an undisclosed amount of time as I recorded my brilliant and vanishing insights into your happiness. That is the price they pay for having a famous authoress a writer as a mother.

I opened the door to my daughter’s room. I opened the door to my son’s room. I smelled rhinos. Well, I smelled something I now unfailingly associate with rhinos.

Those are the little ironies of life. You get up from writing about happiness and walk in to wake your wonderful, cuddly, cute baby only to find yourself scraping poo off the floor, which was put there by said baby, whom you are currently not referring to as “wonderful” or “cute” and very definitely not “cuddly.” Half a roll of paper towels and a bottle of disinfectant later, your happiness is being put to the test. And this is the essay question that stumps you at the end:

Can you be happy while you are cleaning up poo?

I will now defer to my collection of quotations from people much smarter than me:

Abraham Lincoln, who certainly knew a thing or two about cleaning up gigantic messes, said that “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Benjamin Franklin said that “It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man,” so according to the illustrious Mr. Franklin, me cleaning poo off the floor is a happier person than me sitting around idly in that cushy blue chair, reading a novel and nibbling pistachios. I don’t know. I’ve always admired B.F. but he seems to be falling a little short of insightful on this one.

Here’s what I think: happiness doesn’t come when you have more fun; fun comes when you have more happiness.

We wait for certain conditions and expect them to provide happiness and we’re always disappointed. Reality can never live up to fantasy. Disney World is fun when you’re there, but it’s never quite as good as it was in those hours of imagining how great it would be to go to Disney World.

You don’t imagine standing in line for an hour, melting into a pool of sweat in the shiny asphalt, and wearing a scratchy polyester jumpsuit as a fill-in for Captain Kirk in the make-your-own Star Trek movie event. So you go, you have fun, but it’s not as good as the expectation. Too often we let that gap between what we get and what we expect just destroy our happiness.

I didn’t expect poo on the bed when I walked into my son’s room, but that’s what I got. And there was my moment of destiny in the pursuit of happiness: do I curse and mutter? Do I let it ruin my day? Do I yell at my child?

I’m basically a selfish person, and I’d rather be happy than be unhappy. So I stopped and looked and then I laughed. Because, really, what else can you do?

I laughed because it’s a great story. I laughed as I took the sheets of the bed, bathed the child, and mopped the floor. (Okay, I might have stopped laughing at some point because you can’t just laugh indefinitely; bear with me, I’m trying to make a point.) Here’s the point: Happy is up to you. Happy doesn’t make the mess go away, but it does make cleaning up any kind of mess better.

Oh, and yeah, I also laughed because it’s not as great a story as my friend’s, whose daughter not only took off her diaper and pooped but then proceeded to wipe it all over the walls. Comparison isn’t always a bad thing.

Images courtesy of mpeterke and lanuiop.