I've been struggling with my patience (lack of) lately. In keeping with my typical response to problems/questions/struggles, which is to do some research (read a book about it), I've been reading about Buddhism and motherhood. Because who's more patient than a Buddhist, right? Anyway, I came across this essay and it really touched me.
Happy Mother's Day to all the mamas out there!
Mothering as Meditation Practiceby Anne Cushman (excerpt from Tricycle magazine)For the first few weeks of my son Skye's life, he would only sleep if he could hear my heartbeat. From midnight to dawn he lay on my chest, his head tucked into the hollow of my throat, awakening every two hours to nurse. In the day, he'd nap in my arms as I rocked, a slideshow of emotions - joy, exasperation, amusement, angst, astonishment - flickering across his dreaming face, as if he were rehearsing every expression he would need for the rest of his life. If I dared to set him in his bassinet, he'd wake up with a roar of outrage, red-faced and flailing. He cried if I tried to put him in a baby sling, frontpack, stroller, or car seat. He cried whenever I changed his diaper. And every evening from seven to nine, he cried for no apparent reason at all.
When Skye was two weeks old, I ate black bean tacos for dinner and he screamed until sunrise, his body stiff and his fists clenched. While I sobbed along with him, my husband actually called the emergency room, where the nurse on duty told us, kindly, that it sounded like gas. The next morning, a nutritionist friend assured me that everything would be fine so long as I stopped eating dairy, wheat, yeast, soy, corn, legumes, garlic, onions, tomatoes, sugar, peppers, broccoli, and citrus fruit (and considered dropping fish, mushrooms, and eggs). As Skye finally fell asleep in the crook of my right arm, I collapsed on the sofa in my bathrobe, eating cold brown rice with my left hand and spilling it in his hair.
It was about that time that I decided that what I had embarked on was an intensive meditation retreat. It had all the elements, I told myself: the long hours of silent sitting; the walking back and forth, going nowhere; the grueling schedule and sleep deprivation; the hypnotic, enigmatic chants ("and if that looking glass gets broke/Mama's gonna buy you a billy goat..."); the slowly dawning realization that there is nothing to look forward to but more of the same. And at the center of it, of course, was the crazy wisdom teacher in diapers, who assigned more demanding practices than I had encountered in all my travels in India like "Tonight you will circumambulate the living room for two hours with the master in your arms, doing a deep-knee bend at every other step, and chanting, Dooty-dooty-doot-doot-doo, dooty-dooty-doot-doot-doo." Or "At midnight you will carry the sleeping master with you to the bathroom and answer this koan: How do you lower your pajama bottoms without using your hands?"
Like all great spiritual practices, these were exquisitely designed to rattle the cage of my ego. They smashed through my concepts about how things should be (rocking in the garden swing by the lavender bush, watching the hummingbirds, while my newborn slept in a bassinet by my feet) and pried open my heart to the way things actually were (standing by the diaper table, flexing one tiny knee after another into Skye's colicky tummy, and cheering when a mustard-yellow fountain erupted from his behind). And with every breath of my "baby sesshin," I was offered the opportunity to cradle my child in my arms like the baby Buddha and be present for a mystery unfolding. . . .
As a new mother, I've found myself wondering: How are other women negotiating the dance between practice and parenting? How does their practice affect their mothering? How does being a mother affect their practice? Are mothers changing the forms of Buddhism in America?
And - the most compelling question of all for me - can mothering really be a path of practice every bit as valid as the monastic path? Can suctioning the snot from a sick baby's nose have the simplicity and purity of a nun's prostrations? Can wiping out a diaper pail lead to "the awakening of the Buddha and the ancestors?"
On one level, this question seems absurd. Nothing could be further from the regimented march of a formal retreat than the disheveled dance of motherhood. The books on my bedside table used to be about pursuing Awakening in the Himalayas. Now they're about preventing awakening in the middle of the night. There's a diaper changing table where my altar used to be; my zafus and zabutons have been requisitioned to cushion Skye's play area. Forget about chewing a single raisin for five minutes and admonitions to "when you eat, just eat" - I'm on the phone with Skye on my hip, ordering baby-proof plates for the electrical outlets as I eat cold veggie potstickers with my fingers straight from the cardboard box and rub fresh spit-up into the floor with one socked foot. It's hard to find the moment even to tell myself that this is a spiritual path - I'm too busy looking for Skye's other mitten. . . .
Could there be any better way to get my nose rubbed in the truth of impermanence than to love a child in a jagged, careless world? Napping with Skye in my king-size bed - his head on my breast, my nose pressed against the dark silk of his hair - I watch the heartbeat fluttering in the soft spot on his skull. Forget about freeways, and plutonium, and stealth bombers - I've been sternly warned that even a teddy bear could suffocate him in his crib. At night, when he's been silent a couple of hours, I creep into his room and stand in the dark, not moving for fear of creaking a floorboard, until I hear him sigh.
And even if everything goes absolutely perfectly, I know that this particular Skye - the one who warbles and passionately sucks on the bill of his rubber duck as he splashes with me in the tub - is going to dissolve like bubble bath. Yesterday he was a kicking bulge in my belly as I swam laps in the July sun; tomorrow he'll be a middle-aged man, weeping and scattering my ashes in a mountain lake. Watching Skye rub strained carrots into his eyelashes, my husband says, 'It's so beautiful that it hurts.'
I feel plugged into the world now, in a way that I never have been before. As I feed my child out of my own body, I see how I am fed by the body of the earth. I'm crocheted to a chain of mothers before me, and a chain of unborn children who will inherit a world that I can't even imagine. I want Skye's grandchildren to be able to swim in the Pacific, and hike the granite ridges of the Sierra, and gasp at the blue herons standing on one leg in Bolinas Lagoon.
Is this "attachment"? Or connectedness?
I don't mean to be grandiose. I know these insights aren't the pristine diamond of samadhi. They're a sloppier, stickier kind of realization, covered in drool and Cheerio crumbs. But maybe this is the gift of mothering as practice - a kind of inclusiveness that embraces chaos and grit and imperfection. It's not based on control or keeping things tidy.
It makes room in its heart for a plastic dump truck in the middle of the living room floor, and rap music leaking under a bedroom door at midnight. It doesn't slip away in the middle of the night to search for enlightenment. It stays home with Rahula the Fetter, and finds it there.
As mothers, what can we make of that story of the Buddha leaving his family in the middle of the night?
I asked Fu Schroeder. "Oh, but he wasn't the Buddha when he left his child. He was a young prince, in terrible pain," she answered.
"If you're awake, you don't leave your child. Where would you go?"
