Happiness in Journal

Apparently stay at home moms and housewives are the happiest people around. I’m really starting to understand why.
And I’m beginning to resent the prejudices that my mother, govt schooling, feminism, etc, poured into my formative concepts about feminity. I still vividly recall the deep hatred embedded in the disgusted sneer on my mother’s face when she drove away from some after school activity with us kids in the back- as she spewed toxic rhetoric about all those mom’s who didn’t even work. It of course occurs to me now that my mother was insidiously jealous of those SAHMs, not critical on any rational basis. She hated them because they had what she wanted. Happiness. Or at least, the potential for it.
I am also aggrieved that no one took any interest in my happiness. Yes, I deserved to have people around who cared about me. I deserved to discover what did and didn’t make me happy. The people in my life not only didn’t facilitate that, but they were benefited by my misery, depression, dissociation, self-blame. It’s a tradegy that I am learning in my 30’s what makes me happy. This is something that is learned in childhood.
I experience the meaning in giving away the things that I most desperately needed. Which is to say, raising children empathetically, peacefully, enthusiastically, makes me deeply happy. It’s partly that I see and feel in almost a visceral way, the difference in my son’s experience compared to my own. And to know that I did that. Me. I made people. I did the work. I created his environment as much as his body. The most important part of his environment being his relationships, which is me, and the father I chose for my children. I feel proud. I feel confident that not only is his life infinitely improved over mine, but that I’m not a mere reactionary consequence of a bad childhood. The actions and choices I make are grounded in objective principles and standards. Not arbitrary history nor how I feel about it.