By Maria Markovich
@MarkovichMarya

Just as I was settling into my morning work routine of answering emails, I got a notification from my online photo storage system, which chose that particular moment to share an “11 Years Ago” memory with me. I caught a glimpse of the goofy smile of my middle child when he was kindergarten-age. He was clutching a favorite toy, a model of a Star Wars X-Wing fighter he used to carry around everywhere.  

It wasn’t the moment in my day that I would have chosen to indulge in reminiscing (it was like someone pushing their way into my office and thrusting a partially open photo album into my hands), but I couldn’t resist. Especially because—as the algorithm seemed to intuit—the photo was of the same child who had stormed out of the house less than an hour earlier. Now an emo teen, X-wing long forgotten.

Most days now, this teen toggles between two modes: stony silence or snarling. That particular morning at home had concluded with him slamming the door as he headed out to school. It was a final furious word in an argument I didn’t know we were having, since I’ve learned to give him a wide berth in the morning and we had hardly spoken. He’s angry at the world, because the world rousts him from his miles-deep adolescent sleep. The world forces him to spend all day in school. The world torments him with an endless parade of things that he finds stupid and boring but he can’t fully get away from. My role as parent makes me complicit in all of this, and so I bear the brunt of his dissatisfaction.

The AI that selected this photo could not understand the complex bittersweet feelings it evokes. I give in, and open up the album it has put together, scrolling through a series of photos that I snapped on a bright fall day more than a decade ago. I see this child, his siblings and a couple of neighborhood kids all playing together in our backyard. I managed to get a photo of one of his friends gleefully mid-air, as she jumped into a pile of fire-orange leaves. In another photo, the kids are setting up a parade of stuffed animals. (They really did that…a stuffed animal parade!) 

Hard as it is to believe now, happy was the default for this child back then, as it was for all my kids at that age. To be sure, this baseline contentment was punctuated by frequent squabbles, complaints, and occasionally an emotional outburst about some trivial thing or other, but otherwise the kids all seemed…happy.  

But not now, and especially not with this particular child. It’s tough for a mother to take, even though I know how common this transition is: I’ve seen it happen again and again in other families. In fact, it’s a cultural cliche: the cheerful child morphs into a broody, sulking, snapping teen. It’s not something we generally think of as tragic; indeed, in movies and TV, it’s often played for comic effect. And rightfully so. Some teen behaviors are so absurd, humor is a natural reaction, and sometimes our only defense.

But when it’s your own offspring who go from bubbly, enthusiastic children to cynical, pissed-off adolescents, you start to wonder: Where does that happiness go? And why does it go?

Maybe it’s because by the time a child becomes a teen, the world has revealed itself to be harsh—and the teen realizes that it’s up to them to navigate that harshness. And so they harden themselves for battle, developing a tough shell over the vulnerable child they once were. Or maybe it’s because teens have an internal drive to break away from something—their family—that they’re not even sure they want to break away from. Loosening family bonds is painful, even when you’re the one loosening them. 

But as I swipe through the unasked-for photo book, the question I most want answered is: Will the happiness come back? In other words, who is the real person, the happy child or the unhappy teen? I suppose that in adulthood, most of us eventually find an in-between equilibrium. We feel more in control of things, and don’t need our shells as much, or maybe we just learn to hide them more artfully. And maybe one of the things propelling us to have kids is the desire to experience childhood-grade happiness up close again.

All this goes through my mind as I sit there at work, now fully immersed in the album, enlarging each photo to catch every detail. Their clothes, the long-forgotten toys strewn about the yard, the moppy hair on all of them! I’m trying hard to look at those old photos as a both/and. Not: that is how my son used to be and now he’s not; but rather that this young almost-adult I am living with has already accumulated many feelings and experiences, and some are joyful ones. 

But I also take a little time to feel the grief of something good passing. I allow myself to lean into it. I think about how excited this child used to be to buy his school supplies each summer. I think about how chatty he used to be when talking about things he loved, like his X-wing. I think about that darn stuffed animal parade.

Then I change the setting on my phone to turn off automatic photo memory notifications, and I get back to work.

Marya Markovich is a health researcher during the day, parent in the evening, and writer in the very early morning. She has three Gen Z kids.

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