Every year around this time, holiday catalogs and circulars plump up the Sunday paper and I begin to think about what to give my grandchildren for Christmas. Every year, I have the same conversation in my head, one that revolves around love and values and materialism and messages.

I want my grandchildren to see me as their loving, warm, kind Grandma Joni, whose gifts are thoughtful and fun and remind them they are always in my heart.

Nothing like setting myself up for failure, right?

This season’s bundle of holiday advertising looks a little different. Major retailers have re-engaged their lay-away plans and now push deeply discounted prices that make it more affordable than ever to over-spend. One offers scores more gifts now $10 or less, another has affordably priced board game sets designed to evoke those fond memories of family game nights.

I flipped through the first few pages of inexpensive toys, but the farther I got into the flyers, the more expensive the gifts became. One new toy promises kids the ability to move objects using only the power of their little minds, and I wonder whether we really want to encourage that ability in children.

But the image in the center of the next page stopped me cold.

A television screen emblazoned with a colorful woodlands scene.

A smiling boy, perhaps eight or nine years old.

Shouldering a pump-action shotgun.

It’s a video game, I know that. Certainly, the child must know that.

But still.

In Michigan playwright Kitty Dubin’s newest work, The Blank Page, novelist Amy Kaplan puts her career on hold to marry and have a child, only to find herself caught between the needs of her family and a looming deadline.

Kaplan is a professional Everywoman, in her angst and sleepless nights, her relationship and parenting failures and her struggle to achieve that mythical state of Balance. Her life mirrors the picture painted by “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2009. The authors note that over the past 35 years, women’s lives have improved, but women have grown less happy over that same period of time.

This steady erosion applies in all areas – personal, work, family, marriage, home, community – despite apparent objective gains in all those areas. Economic upheaval aside, most of us would see ourselves as much better off than our mothers and grandmothers. Cultural expectations are far less restrictive; women no longer attend college just to get their “Mrs. degree”. We have the power of choice at the ballot box, in the workplace, at the grocery store.

But something’s wrong, in a way that sounds to me like Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”.

In a discussion at Friday’s “Women in Leadership Summit,” presented by the Oakland County Employment Diversity Council, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs for MGM Grand Detroit Juliette Thorpe Okotie-Eboh noted those who came of age in the 1970s were told women could have it all – the great job, the beautiful home, the perfect family. “We just had to learn to multi-task,” she said. “I think the veneer has worn off that a little bit. I think a lot of women in my generation worked themselves to death.”

Is it any wonder women are less happy? Stevenson and Wolfers examine a number of studies that shed some light on women’s lives. One of the most interesting conclusions came through the research in The Second Shift, an exploration of how work affects women’s and men’s home lives:

Women, they argued, have maintained the emotional responsibility for home and family; a point that is, perhaps, best exemplified by the familiar refrains of a man “helping” around the house or being a good dad when “babysitting” the kids. Thus, even if men are putting in more hours, it is difficult to know just how much of the overall burden of home production has shifted, as measuring the emotional, as well as physical, work of making a home is a much more difficult task.

That ”emotional responsibility,” I think, weighs heavily on women and makes their choices difficult. The unspoken parenting expectation  falls almost exclusively on mothers, from conception forward.

Consider that men can delay having a family, while women are born with biological clocks that tick away in the decades during which they are also expected to be building a career. Consider that the majority of workplaces mirror and support the structure of men’s lives, not family life.

In theatre, challenges and conflict are resolved in short order, within the characters themselves. Amy Kaplan finds her peace, and to be sure, we are all responsible for our own happiness. At the same time, it seems counterproductive for a culture to remain unchanged when we know it creates obstacles to the success of more than half our nation’s population.

Doesn’t it?

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When I downloaded my copy of The Shriver Report: “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” I was struck by a sense of deja vu. Just a few weeks earlier, I had received an invitation to an event hosted by The White House Project called, “Add Women, Change Everything.”

The coincidental titles place quite a burden on the shoulders of American women, who already appear to be less happy than men, according to Huffington Post blogger Marcus Buckingham.

But you know what? I think we’re up for it.

Consider that women have labored for centuries under the religious presumption of inferiority. In the first books of the Judeo-Christian Bible, we are clearly delineated as somehow inferior to men, unclean during our natural menstrual cycles and after childbirth. After childbirth. And still, many women have borne children for generations.

Consider that women’s accomplishments too often take a backseat to men’s, that a relative few iconic women have earned a place in our history books, which are replete with apocryphal tales of our “founding fathers.” In fact, the National Women’s History Project 2010 theme is “Writing Women Back into History.” And still, many women make history.

Consider that, since 1870, fewer than 40 women have run for President, and only one, Senator Hillary Clinton, has ever come close to being endorsed by a major party. And still, many women continue to run.

For every obstacle a man overcomes, we have two, the obstacle itself and the generational labels attached to our insides to remind us we are the “weaker sex.” We are told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways we do not deserve opportunities and education and achievement, that having these things make us unattractive partners.

And still, many women have them.

Already, people are arguing over whether The Shriver Report is too cheery, not inclusive enough of single women, ignores in its conclusions the life-threatening realities women face. I am still reading. I am also planning to attend the Add Women, Change Everything event, as a member of The White House Project Michigan Cabinet, a group dedicated to raising funds that will equip more women to make their voices heard.

But sometimes, I wonder if women already do change everything.

I wonder if more of us need to realize that’s what we’re doing.