Print edition: 
Does having children make you happier? Most experts say no. Just about every major study asserts that "bundles of joy" are actually bundles of stress, anxiety and depression. Researchers say marital satisfaction nose-dives after a first child is born and rarely picks up again until children leave home. One study that examined women's emotions during their daily activities showed that they found "child care" only slightly more pleasant than commuting.
Why, then, do so many parents — including myself — insist that their children are a source of happiness?
Here's Gretchen Rubin's take:
"In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness," Rubin writes. "Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes.
"Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don't really seem to bring much happiness at all — yet somehow they do."
I've been reading Rubin's new book, "The Happiness Project," which grew out of her blog of the same name. Rubin spent a year test-driving theories about how to be happier, a pursuit that included cleaning closets, making new friends, quoting Aristotle and singing in the morning, among other things.
I happened to read her take on parenting on a gray, soupy day in Wichita, the third in a row. I craved sunshine and cursed the fog. My kids, too, wondered if the gloomy haze would ever lift. Our moods were as leaden as the sky.
I had gone through my morning systematically, uninspired. I roused kids, poured coffee, packed lunches, brushed hair and signed papers, mired in the daily fog of motherhood.
"At any one time," Rubin writes, "the negative may swamp the positive, and I might wish I were doing something else."
Amen, I thought. Anything else. And yet... not really.
When I was newly pregnant, people told me my life would change. Parenting is the hardest thing you'll ever do, they warned. You'll never truly relax again. All correct.
But then, as author Marianne Williamson puts it, "The difficulty of the journey sometimes turns out to be its blessing."
Later that day my husband, a photographer, sent me a few pictures he had captured just outside the front door of our home. I called up the images and gasped — crows perched on gnarly branches, a line of trees shrouded in mist, like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Seen from a distance, the fog I had cursed all day didn't seem depressing anymore.
It was, like so many mornings, stark and oppressive and dismal and fierce — and beautiful.
