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Moms can't name what delights them
Chasing core memories
While researching joy, Kate Bowler, a Duke professor and author, found that many women and moms don't believe joy is for them. They run around chasing core memories for their children, buy expensive concert tickets a million miles away for an artist they don't even like, and end up at a Ramada Inn with three other people's children. Ask what brings them delight, and nothing comes to mind.
It has been a long time since they wondered whether a day, a week, a year, or a life should include that feeling. Life turns into a project to get done, with little room for the question of whether it is good to feel this alive.
What joy actually is
Joy doesn't have to be constant to count. It is the capacity to be surprised by moments and to have a magnet for something that lights a person up, the kind of activation that feels good and alive. A particular color blue or the way one kid laughs can be cherished in a way that opens more and more space in a tired heart.
Why does the mental load fall unevenly?
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild documented this in her 1989 book The Second Shift. She followed working couples and found that employed women did substantially more housework and child care than their husbands. By her estimate, the extra work added up to roughly an extra month of twenty-four-hour days each year. Later time-use surveys in many countries have continued to show women doing more unpaid household work on average.
How does savoring amplify small pleasures?
Psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff defined savoring in their 2007 book Savoring as attending to a positive experience and deliberately amplifying it. Their research describes techniques such as sharing a moment with someone, noticing sensory details, and remembering it afterward. Savoring can happen while a pleasure is under way, while looking ahead to one, or while looking back on one. They developed a scale to measure how strongly people savor in each of those three ways.
Why did core memories enter parenting language?
The phrase comes from the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter. In the film, a girl's most important experiences are stored as glowing orbs called core memories, each powering a part of her personality. The film drew on consultation with psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman. Its idea that a few vivid moments define a childhood spread widely among parents.
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