by Dani Shapiro
I joined Jacob at the riverbank, and stood next to him in silence. My own piece of bread was warm and moist in my palm. In the car, on the way here, I had tried to explain to him what we were doing; why he wasn’t in school, and instead was wearing an uncomfortable blazer and long pants on this hot September day. But I hadn’t done a very good job of it.
“What’s a sin?” Jacob now asked.
It was one of those Mommy-needs-to-get-it-right questions. There had been so many of them, lately; so many questions that felt like tests of my own mettle. Where is God? Does he exist? How come I can’t see him? Can he see me?
“Sin is a big word,” I said. “Why don’t we think of it as things we feel bad about, that we want to let go of. Things we’d like to do better in the coming year.”
Even as the words came out of my mouth, they felt inadequate. I was a phony. Play-acting the part of a spiritually inclined, or at least Jewishly inclined, wife and mother who had cajoled her husband and son into their good clothes so that we could enact a ritual so distant from our daily lives that we might as well have been kneeling at a Buddhist temple, or Catholic church, or wherever people kneel the world over.
I fought the urge to flee—an urge that was often with me, these days. Instead, I closed my eyes and breathed in the lingering summer warmth, the sharp scent of the river.
Please.
With a single word, I felt hot tears backing up. I was instantly lost in the place I always found myself during the rare times I summoned up the nerve to reach back and grasp for a bit of the tradition I grew up with. Numb, weepy, deeply alive, fighting it, fighting myself and the long line of ancestors waiting their turn, there to tell me that no matter how I’d like to think otherwise, this sunny day at the river was important. I could practically see them: old men with skullcaps and beards. Unsmiling women with huge bosoms and dark, tightly pulled-back hair.
I tossed a few crumbs in. I wanted to make it last.
Please. Help me to understand.
It would have been so much easier not to come. If we hadn’t come here today, Jacob would have been in third-grade Spanish, I would have been at my desk working on a magazine assignment, or maybe reading a student’s manuscript. Michael would have been at his office down the road, also sitting at his desk, working on a screenplay or procrastinating by reading the latest political blogs. A normal day. A normal assimilated day in our normal assimilated lives—lives that had nothing to do with ancient texts and metaphors as dusty and old-fashioned as the photographs of those very same solemn ancestors in their Eastern European shtetl that line the walls of our basement rec room.
I want to do better.
The words were coming to me unforced, unbidden. Do better. The list of things I wanted to do better at was as long as the Shepaug River itself. I wanted be a better mother, wife, writer, teacher, person, member of society. I definitely wanted to sleep better. Oh, and eat better, have more patience, drink more water. I wanted to practice yoga more days of the week. I wanted to understand the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites. I wanted to be someone who not only bought flaxseed oil at the health food store, but actually ingested it. There was no end to my desire for self-improvement. But was this what I meant?
I glanced over at Michael, who was standing on a large rock jutting out over the river, and was surprised to see that my husband was holding a piece of bread and appeared to be—was it possible?—involved in what was going on. He didn’t have that bored, going-through-the-motions look on his face that I knew so well in other circumstances, and would have expected to see in these. He was focused, thoughtful. Casting away his sins.
“Do we have to go?” he had asked me earlier that morning, sounding a bit like he must have when he was fourteen. “I can’t find my belt. Christ! My suit doesn’t fit.”
Jacob squeezed his eyes shut and tossed the first bit of bread into the water. Things you want to let go of. A school of silvery minnows darted around the bread as it floated downstream.
“Can I tell you what I wished for, Mommy?”
“Oh, honey, it’s not supposed to be a—”
But then I stopped. What was the difference, really? What was the desire to let something go, if not a wish?
“I wished for that remote-controlled helicopter,” Jacob said. “The one I saw on TV.”
I looked at my little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in his navy blue blazer and khakis. He looked more like a Ralph Lauren ad than a kid at High Holiday services. He was a thoroughly modern child. A Jewish boy who barely knew he was Jewish, who believed in Santa, who had never heard of the Holocaust, who had—as a two-year-old—been playing with a tower of wooden blocks when we heard the sound of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center a mile away. A boy who was now being raised in bucolic New England, in the land of white churches and village greens.
Please. The word came to me once more. It seemed to emerge from some deep and hollow cavern. I threw my last morsel of bread away, then turned from the river.
3.
I had reached the middle of my life and knew less than I ever had before. Michael, Jacob, and I lived on top of a hill, surrounded by old trees, a vegetable garden, stone walls. From the outside, things looked pretty good. But deep inside myself, I had begun to quietly fall apart. Nights, I quivered in the darkness like a wounded animal. Something was very wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that I felt terribly anxious and unsteady. Doomed. Each morning I drove Jacob down a dirt road to his sweet little school. We all got yearly physicals. Our well water was tested for contaminants. Nothing—absolutely nothing I could put my finger on—was the matter. Except that I was often on the verge of tears. Except that it seemed that there had to be more than this hodgepodge of the everyday. Inside each joy was a hard kernel of sadness, as if I was always preparing myself for impending loss.
Beneath the normal routine of my life—the school functions and lunch boxes and Little League games and family dinners—all was churning, random, chaos. We’d had a close call when Jacob was an infant—a scary time—but that was behind us now. Wasn’t it? Still, I couldn’t stop thinking. What was going to keep bad things from happening: a tree branch from falling, an electrical wire from coming loose, a cluster of cells from mutating, a speeding baseball from slamming into a small, vulnerable head? Was there no pattern, no wisdom, no plan?
I had put off thinking about this, because it seemed that there would always be time. Later, in a few years, I would turn my attention to the big questions—once I had taken care of the smaller ones. Except the smaller ones just kept coming. And gradually—though it felt like a split second—I realized that I had reached the still point at the very top of a curve. I’m not much for roller coasters, but now I felt like I was on one. It had been so slow, going up. But the ride from here on in was going to be impossibly fast. Had I lived half my life? More? Sometimes I looked at Jacob’s lanky legs, his growing-boy body slung across the sofa, and saw with aching clarity that eight years had gone by since we’d swaddled him in his infant seat and brought him home from the hospital. It all goes so quickly, every parent says. Take in every single minute. This is always offered as a piece of wistful advice, because of course it’s not possible to take in every minute. It’s hard to take in even a single minute.
I needed to place my faith in something. I didn’t want our family’s life to speed by in a blur of meals, schools, camps, barbecues, picnics, vacations—each indistinguishable from the next. I wanted to slow it down—to find ways to infuse our lives with greater depth and meaning. My own childhood had been spent steeped in religious ritual. There were rules for eating, speaking, sleeping, praying. I never knew why we did what we did—it was simply the way it was. I had fled this at the earliest opportunity, but replaced it with nothing. I wasn’t exactly a nonbeliever. Nor was I a believer. Where did that leave me? Anxious, fearful, lonely, resentful, depressed—troubled by a powerful and, some would say, deeply irreverent sense of futility.
Most nights, when I stretched out next to Jacob on his narrow bed with a few books balanced on my stomach, he had other plans. He wanted to talk about what happens when we die. His questions had been coming fast and furious. He wanted answers—his voice piercingly clear and pure. “I don’t want to die,” he’d say. And then: “What happens? Where do we go?”
“Well…” I played for time. “Some people believe that we come back in another life. It’s called reincarnation.”
“You mean, I could come back as a dog?”
“No, I don’t think so. Probably not. Probably as a person.”
I watched his delicate profile as he digested this information.
“And other people believe there’s a heaven. That we go to heaven when we die.”
I left hell out of it, since I was cherry-picking anyway.
“And other people think that the soul continues to exist,” I went on, feeling his small, beating heart pressed against my arm as he lay on his side. “That we stay alive when people remember us.”
“Like Grandma?” he asked.
My mother had died when Jacob was four. He would have few memories of her. And none of my father. None at all.
“Yes,” I answered. “Like Grandma. And your grandpa, too. I think about them every day.”
But when it came to a deeper response to Jacob’s questions, I was failing him and I knew it. I was laying out a smorgasbord of options, but I wasn’t telling him what I believe—because I truly didn’t know. Each day, e-mails I had signed up for kept appearing in my in-box—My Daily Om, Weekly Kabbalah Consciousness Tune-up—like the results of a Rorschach test: spiritually confused wife and mother in midlife, seeking answers. For years, I had dabbled: little bite-size morsels of Buddhism, the Yoga Sutra, Jewish mysticism. I had a regular yoga practice, but often felt like I was only scratching the surface. My bookshelves were filled with books I had bought with every good intention, important books containing serious insights about how to live. Over the years, they remained unopened. Taking up space.
What would happen if I opened the books? If I opened myself—as an adventurer, an explorer into the depths of every single day? What if—instead of fleeing—I were to continue to quiver in the darkness? It wasn’t so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there.
4.
Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green! Here we come a-wand’ring, so fair to be seen!
The first, second, and third graders filed into the theater and onto the bleachers for the Winter Solstice concert. Parents were crammed into the theater’s seats, some still wrapped in their winter coats. Eric, an emergency room doctor, Liz, a landscape architect, Denise, an attorney, Darren, a software designer. I was friendly with many of them, but still I always had to brace myself for these school events. I felt cut off from the other parents, as if they lived in a country to which I had been denied entry.
Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too, and God bless you and send you a happy new year, and God send you a happy new year.
As Jacob climbed the bleachers to the second riser, his eyes scanned the audience in the dark, searching us out. Like the other boys, he was dressed in a white button-down shirt and black pants. The girls had gotten a bit more creative: leggings under skirts, black Mary Janes with white lacy socks. Jacob spotted us, tilted his head to the side, and gave us a distinctly Jacob-like smile, both bashful and proud.
We are not daily beggars who beg from door to door, but we are neighbors’ children whom you have seen before…
Jacob looked straight ahead, arms loose by his sides; his voice was clear and distinct to my ears, even among seventy-five others. And suddenly—why hadn’t I expected this?—a rumbling rose up from deep within me. It was familiar, unstoppable—an avalanche. I knew I had to sit there and let the rocks fly. If any of the other parents happened to glance in my direction, they would never have known from looking at me. Outside, I was composed—serene, even. But inside, all hell had broken loose. It was the daytime version of my nightly panic. I knew that I couldn’t fight it; resisting only made it worse.
We almost lost him.
It was all I could do not to whisper it out loud. To put my hand on the shoulder of the mom next to me, or the one in front, or behind. None of them knew this thing that defined me, the knowledge I wore like an invisible cloak. We almost lost him. I leaned into Michael and wondered if he was thinking about it too. Would we ever sit in an audience and watch Jacob do normal little-boy things—swing a bat, recite lines in a play, sing in a holiday concert—without having the thought? We almost lost him. Repeating it was like a prayer, a mantra. It was my own personal covenant. I could never allow myself to forget, even in the happiest times. Especially in the happiest times. It was a private bargain I had struck—but with whom?
I was always compiling lists in my mind: what had gone wrong, what could go wrong. I hadn’t figured how to live with my heightened awareness of exactly how fragile it all is. And so the lists grew and grew. I was trying to control the universe—and it’s hard work to try to control the universe. I thought that maybe by naming each potential disaster, I could prevent it. Michael could have a heart attack shoveling snow. Lightning could hit our house. The superstitions I grew up with—Yiddish terms, peasant language left over from the Old World—rose up from some buried place. Poo, poo, poo. I warded off the evil eye like a fishwife. K’ayn ayn hora. I counted to eighteen, chai, the Hebrew number signifying life. Eighteen, for the number of seconds I microwaved my morning coffee. Eighteen, for the number of crunches I did at the end of my yoga practice. Eighteen, so that the angel of death might pass over our house for another day.
5.
Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been driving home late at night from a baseball game when someone threw a glass bottle of salad dressing off an embankment. The bottle hit the roof of our car and shattered. One fraction of a second earlier, and it would have hit the windshield.
Salad dressing, I thought to myself, when Michael told me what had happened. I never considered salad dressing.
6.
Maybe books weren’t enough. Maybe I needed to travel to some far-flung place, though it didn’t feel very practical. Thoreau may have lived in isolation, but I lived in Connecticut. I drove carpool, ordered socks by the dozen from Land’s End, paid the mortgage, filed health insurance claims, gave dinner parties, supported my local congressman. I worried about bills, and was drowning in Post-its: Michael, colonoscopy. J—dentist! The lists fluttered everywhere. They were attached to the edges of my desk, the pages of my appointment book, the kitchen counter. I was mired in the domesticity that I loved—that same domesticity that kept me on a treadmill from the first sounds of pounding feet in the morning to the last hazy thought—We’re almost out of dog food—that drifted through my mind before passing out at night. Could I find and hold on to a deeper truth than the whir and strum of my daily life, which seemed designed to ensure that some day I would wake up—after the years of packed lunches and piano practice and rushed dinners—and wonder where it all had gone?
I told myself that I could sort this out—right here, from the central command station of my life. What good would it do me if the answers ended up being out there? I wasn’t out there! And what’s more, I knew that anything I might learn by going away would disappear in a flash once I was back home, sorting the dry cleaning from the laundry. I wasn’t in a shala, or a zendo, or a shrine, or temple. I was here in my house—and I needed to figure out how to work with what I had.
After all, some of my greatest moments of clarity—those little eureka moments of truth—had happened in unlikely places: wheeling a cart down a supermarket aisle, driving along an empty stretch of highway, lying in bed next to Jacob as he drifted off to sleep. And I knew from my yoga practice that those insights are already fully formed—they’re literally inside our b
odies, if only we know where to look. Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word, samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story—a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release that story. Release your stories, and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.
I wanted to release my stories and find what was beneath them—I wanted to work with the raw materials of my life—but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I felt like I was sweeping these ideas and concerns, like dust motes, into the corners of my days.
8 a.m.: school dropoff
9:30–11:30: magazine deadline
12:00–3:00: spiritual awakening
3:15: school pickup
3:30–4:30: piano lesson
5:00–7:00: more deep inquiry
7:00: dinner on the table
No—I quickly realized—I needed help. A jump start. I needed company, fellow sojourners. I needed teachers. And maybe this was where the shalas, the zendos, the shrines and temples, came in. But I had never been much of a joiner. At the edges of any group—from the playgrounds of my childhood to the cocktail parties of my adulthood—I always felt like an outsider, my nose pressed to the glass. And anyway, where was I supposed to go? And when? And who would take care of my family? They might go naked, not to mention unshowered, and eventually starve to death without my constant presence. And besides, I didn’t like groups. And I needed a private bathroom. And I was afraid I’d be homesick. Did I say I’m not much of a joiner?