Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  My left arm was falling asleep. I heaved myself onto my other side, laboriously rearranged my pillows. I tried to see Matt working a nine-to-five job. It was like seeing a Thoroughbred racehorse pulling a plow. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t imagine living with Matt, not really. I could only imagine yearning for him.

  But he’s changed. Or, at least, he’s promised to change. And I’ll change, too. My right hip was aching; I turned to the left side again. Did I dare to base a relationship on two people promising to be different than they’ve always been before?

  On the other hand, did I dare not to?

  I rolled back and forth for hours. No position was comfortable for more than a few minutes. Finally, long past midnight, I fell into a fitful sleep.

  I AM CURLED up on my bed with a jaguar. My hand is under his heavy, furred paw. The jaguar tells me he loves me, but he cannot be with me. “Why not?” I ask, weeping, burying my face in his fur. He looks at me with slanted, sorrowful eyes. “Our relationship worked when I was a kitten and you were a little girl,” he tells me. “But now that we’re both grown up, it will never work. You are a woman. I am a jungle cat.” “Please,” I sob. “Please. We can work it out.” But he just licks my forehead with his hot, scratchy tongue and leaps out the window.

  I OPENED my eyes and stared into the darkness. My hips were aching. The glow of a streetlight came in around the edges of my curtains, casting a faint light on the empty bassinet.

  Matt’s face had been awestruck as he put his hand on my belly and felt the baby kick. Tears had come into his eyes. He’d bent his face down over my belly, his lips a few inches away. His breath had been warm on my skin. “Hey, little guy,” he’d whispered. “It’s your daddy.”

  Lying in the dark, I cupped my hand over my belly again, a pulsating globe of life. I begin to cry, and cry, and cry.

  ONCE AGAIN, he was late, of course.

  I was sitting on the sand at Ocean Beach, nine months—and an eternity—after I’d last met Matt there.

  June in San Francisco is famously cold and foggy. But as if to rub my face in the fact that nothing in life is ever predictable, today was glorious. The sun shone in a cloudless sky. Just off shore, a seal’s head bobbed in the glittering waves, then ducked under. A container ship steamed slowly toward the Golden Gate Bridge. About twenty yards away from me, a man and his son, who looked about eight years old, were digging an enormous hole in the sand with shovels. The hole was already deeper than the man’s head. They were going at it with fierce efficiency—the man barking orders, the mound of excavated sand looming higher and higher, as if they were constructing a bunker for defending the coast from invaders, or a home they expected to live in for the rest of their lives. As if it wouldn’t just be filled with water and washed away when the tide came in.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.” Matt flopped down next to me, leaned over, and kissed me full on the mouth. “I had to swing by the Salon offices. They want me to shoot a story in Sri Lanka.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been enjoying the sunshine.” I felt the aftershock of his lips on mine, fought the impulse to lean over and kiss him again. Instead, I looked at him and raised one eyebrow. “Sri Lanka, huh?”

  “Don’t worry, it wouldn’t be until after the baby is born. And I wouldn’t stay too long. No more than three weeks. A month, max.” He pulled out his camera. “You look incredible. I’ve got to get a shot of this.” He lay down on his belly in the sand, looked at me through the lens, and clicked. “Check this out.” He showed me the tiny digital image, shielding it from the glare of the sun with his hand. The mound of my belly filled the screen, echoed by the curve of the hill behind me. But what really jumped out at me was the look on my face as I gazed at the camera—a combination of love and wariness, as if I were looking at the jaguar from my dream, and I didn’t know whether to fling myself into its embrace or run for cover.

  Matt saw it, too. He clicked the camera off, snapped the lens cap back on. “You’re not going to move in with me, are you.”

  I shook my head. I felt something ripping in my heart. “No.”

  He looked away. “I didn’t think so.”

  My throat was tight. I swallowed, but it didn’t help. “It wouldn’t work, Matt. It would destroy us both. And I can’t risk that. Not when there’s…someone else to consider.”

  “But that is who I’m considering. He needs—” He picked up a stick of driftwood, snapped it in two. “Look, Amanda. You didn’t have a father. And I might as well not have had one, for all the time he spent with me. I’ve spent most of my life pretending that’s no big deal. That I’m not walking around with a hole inside me the size of…the size of that sandpit they’re digging over there.” He nodded toward the father and son up the beach.

  I looked at them. The man was standing on the edge of the hole, leaning on his shovel, looking into it. The boy was standing beside him, leaning on his shovel, too, his posture a comically precise mirror of his father’s. “I want you to be the father. I want you to be as involved in the baby’s life as you want to be. I just can’t be your girlfriend again.”

  “I recognize this speech.” He tossed the pieces of driftwood onto the sand. “It’s the ‘can’t we just be friends’ speech. I should know. I’ve given it enough times myself.”

  “Look. I’ve spent most of the last year getting over you, trying to fill up my own giant sandpit. I don’t want to go back to hoping you’re going to fill it for me.”

  “I know. I guess I just hoped we’d be able to be on the same beach while we shoveled.”

  “We can be on the same beach,” I said. “Just maybe not on the same blanket.”

  We looked at each other. I wanted to sob. I wanted to run away. I wanted to throw my arms around him and never let go. I wanted to grab him by the neck and shake him until he turned into the person I wanted him to be. Breathe. Feel the stretch. Hold the pose. And then, for just a moment, I saw him as he really was: Not my father. Not my guru. Not the guy who was going to take away my loneliness by loving me. Not the guy who was going to take away my happiness by leaving. For a moment, he was just an ordinary human being: Like Lori. Like Devi Das. Like Ernie. Like Ishtar. Like my mother. A complex package of brilliance and idiocy, gifts and wounds. An ordinary person stumbling along a rocky trail in the dark, hoping the moon would come out.

  “You’re not going to be able to get rid of me, you know,” he said.

  “I’m going to be over at your house all the time.”

  “Great. Because there’ll be a lot of diapers to change.” And then I said, involuntarily, “Oof!” Because the baby had taken his head like a battering ram and slammed it up against the inside of my cervix, as if he were breaking down a door. There was a stabbing pain, and my uterus clenched as if it were trying to crush a watermelon. “Oof!” I said again.

  “What’s up?” asked Matt.

  A gush of liquid rushed out between my legs, soaking the sand as if I’d just peed in my maternity jeans. My whole belly clenched again. I grabbed Matt’s arm.

  “Here comes our baby,” I told him.

  Pose Dedicated to the Monkey God Hanuman

  (Hanumanasana)

  Kneel on the floor in a low lunge. Step your right foot forward about a foot in front of your left knee. Slide the left knee back as you drop the right thigh toward the floor. Now gradually begin to extend your right heel away from your pelvis, dropping your pelvis toward the ground in a deep split. Feel the burn of your hamstrings and groin as you challenge the strong and stubborn muscles that lash your thighbones to your pelvis.

  So great was Hanuman’s love for his masters, Rama and Sita, that he tore open his chest with his claws to reveal their image engraved on his heart. To rescue the kidnapped Sita from her bondage to a demon king, Hanuman leaped through the air from India to Sri Lanka and stole her back.

  Now you ask your body to split its legs wide in a human imitation of the god’s great leap. You claw open your heart and reveal the Divine
etched upon it. You launch yourself over the ocean that separates the person you think you are from the person you can become.

  Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening, kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night…Mirabai says, “The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.”

  —Mirabai (1498–1565)

  CHAPTER 26

  ELEVEN HOURS AFTER Matt and I had left the beach—speeding up Fulton Street and across Golden Gate Park in the battered old truck on which I blamed my entire pregnancy—I was pacing around my private birthing room on the fifteenth floor of the UCSF hospital, trying to jog my uterus into high gear.

  I was wearing a white hospital gown tied at the back, with a fetal monitor strapped around my waist that broadcast every contraction in squiggly lines on a roll of paper unfurling by the side of my hospital bed. Lori was walking with me, her arm tucked under mine, so I could grab her whenever another contraction hit. Matt was stretched out on the bed, flipping through a copy of The Birth Book: Everything You Need to Know to Have a Safe and Satisfying Birth, as if cramming for an exam in a course where he’d skipped most of the lectures. Devi Das and Ishtar were squeezed into an armchair on the other side of the room, eating cherry Popsicles from the minifridge.

  From the big picture windows at one end of the room, I could look out over the nightscape of the city, twinkling with lights, all the way to the distant arc of the Bay Bridge. When I’d arrived, I’d found the view inspirational. Now I just wanted to bang my head against the glass.

  “You’re doing great,” said Lori for the twentieth time, as I dug my nails into her arm and whimpered.

  “I’m not doing great. Eleven hours into this, and I’m only six centimeters dilated!”

  “That was forty-five minutes ago. I’m sure you’re farther by now.”

  Matt looked up from his book. “It says here that an increase in pain means that your labor is progressing.”

  “Ah! Pain means progress! Just like in spiritual practice!” Devi Das waved his Popsicle at me.

  “Actually, it’s only the internalized patriarchal terror of women’s bodies that makes childbirth painful,” said Ishtar. “I’ve heard of lots of women who experienced their labor contractions as being like giant orgasms.”

  I wanted to rip her eyebrows out with my teeth. “Well, guess what? I’m not one of them.”

  “Don’t feel inadequate,” Devi Das reassured me. “We’re sure half those women were just faking it.”

  Another contraction seized my belly and I gasped as I grabbed Lori’s arm. “Ouch. That was a big one.”

  “You can moan if you want to,” said Ishtar. “Don’t be inhibited.”

  “I’m NOT inhibited! Why does everyone think I’m inhibited?”

  “Well. All I’m saying is, don’t be.”

  “Would you like another Popsicle?” asked Devi Das. “The lemonade ones are quite good.”

  “No. I would not like another Popsicle.” I looked at Lori, telegraphed an urgent message with my eyes: Get them out of here before I do something bad.

  THE FIRST SIX or seven hours of labor had actually been quite festive. Ishtar had brought her iPod to plug into the birthing room’s sound system, programmed with a selection of soothing, spiritual music: Tibetan refugee nuns chanting the Heart Sutra. Native American drumming. Five versions of Pachelbel’s Canon. She’d even loaded in the CD I’d picked up in the Kerala ashram of Prana Ma chanting the 1,008 names of the Divine Mother. “Your birthing room should be like a temple,” she’d said, switching off the overhead lights and plugging in a nightlight in the shape of a Tara. Devi Das had brought some sandalwood incense we’d picked up at the Satyanam Ashram and stuck it into the empty water glass on my bedside table. Sitting in the dim light squeezing Matt’s hand—just a little more often than the pain actually called for—I’d imagined the nurses whispering to each other in the hall: “Have you been in Room 5? It’s better than going to church.” I’d done so much yoga for so many years—this baby was going to just slip right out, with just enough discomfort that I’d have a good story for my book tour.

  But eleven hours into it, I was as sick of the labor as I was of the Heart Sutra CD. I was out of incense. Matt had put the lens cap back on his camera. Everyone else had eaten pizza and burritos and ice cream, while I’d had nothing but Recharge, ice chips, and Popsicles. I’d been in and out of the bathtub so many times that my fingers were wrinkled and puffy. The pain had been growing steadily worse, but not dramatically enough for me to feel like anything interesting was going to happen anytime soon. I wanted to fast-forward to tomorrow morning, when presumably I’d have an actual baby in my arms. But I had no idea how to get from here to there. I knew I shouldn’t have skipped that last birthing class. That must have been the one where they gave us the secret trick for getting the baby out.

  Now Lori snapped into sheepdog mode and herded Devi Das and Ishtar out of the room, ordering them to go home and get some sleep so they’d be able to help out the next day. Dr. Pat came in, and I lay down on the bed so she could check my cervix. “Still only seven centimeters. Your labor may be stalled. If it goes on like this for much longer, we’ll need to give you some Pitocin to get things going.”

  “No! I don’t want any drugs. I’m doing natural childbirth, remember?” Great. First my cervix was opening too soon. Now it wouldn’t open at all.

  “Mmmph. I’ll check back in an hour or so. Then we’ll see.” Dr. Pat walked out.

  Matt was starting to pace the room like a caged tiger. “Mind if I step outside and take a little walk? I need some fresh air.”

  Oh, God, he’s headed straight for the airport. Next I hear from him, it’ll be a phone call from Bali. I took a deep breath. “Go ahead.”

  As soon as he was gone, Lori sat down next to me and took my hand. “Listen, Amanda. I think you’re going to have to let things get a lot more intense.”

  “You mean, with Matt?”

  “No, not with Matt. Jesus. Could you maybe stop thinking about Matt for one second, seeing as how you’re in the middle of having a baby and all? I mean with your labor.”

  “That’s not up to me.”

  “It is up to you. That’s what I’m saying. I think you’re shutting things down.”

  The last thing I needed right now was another lecture from Lori. “Why would I do that? Believe me, I want to get this baby out more than anybody.”

  “Part of you does. But part of you is terrified of letting things get out of control.”

  My uterus clamped down again. I grabbed the rail on the side of my bed. “Um, Lori? I’m kind of busy right now. Could you save it for later?”

  “Amanda. Listen to me. You’ve always tried to control everything, to figure everything out in advance in your head. You like to wrap everything up into tidy little packages, like you do in your guidebooks. But this isn’t Childbirth for Idiots. You’re going to have to let go.”

  That wasn’t fair. Which of us was the world’s biggest control freak? And besides…“I don’t control everything!” I protested. “I can’t control anything!” The list of things I’d failed to control scrolled through my mind: Matt. India. Enlightenment. My book. My mother. My father. Even my own thoughts.

  “But you try. And I think everything—everything—would go better if you didn’t.”

  I closed my eyes. “Okay. I’ll let go. There. Are you happy?” Maybe if I let go, the gods would reward me by making everything go the way I want. I’d let go, and then I wouldn’t have to let go. Here I go. I’m letting go, and surrendering, and softening, and…

  “I’m back.” Matt walked in the door. “It’s an awesome night out there. The whole block smells like jasmine.” I opened my eyes. And as I did, a wave of pain crashed through me that was bigger than anything I’d ever felt, bigger than anything I’d ever imagined.

  “Oh God.” I grabbed onto Matt’s arm as he sat down on the other side of my bed from Lori.

  “Are you okay?”

 
“Yeah.” No. The pain had passed, but I kept my grip on his arm.

  “Matt? Could you tell me a story? Just to kind of take my mind off…everything?”

  He puts his hand over mine. “Sure. I’ll tell you the story of how we first met.”

  “I already know that story.”

  “No. You know the story of how you met me. But you don’t know how I met you.”

  “Okay. Whatever. Just keep talking.” I was trying to keep breathing.

  “I walked into the studio and spread out my mat next to yours. That first time, it was just because it was the only space in the room that wasn’t taken. You were this twig of a girl, all arms and legs and the biggest eyes I’d ever seen. You were the only woman in the room who didn’t look like she was auditioning for a part in a yoga video. You weren’t wearing any makeup, and your hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and you were wearing sweatpants and a ratty old tank top. But once you started moving, I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. Your body was like water.”

  My nails dug into his arm. “Keep going.”

  “I remember we were practicing second series that day. You were working on putting your leg behind your head. You kept your eyes closed, like you were off in some world where I would never be able to follow you. I remember the way the smell of your sweat mixed with the smell of the incense. A few days later, you left your red sweatshirt behind in the yoga room. I picked it up and took it home with me. I meant to give it back to you at the next class. But instead I just kept it under my pillow. It gave me the craziest dreams.”

  “So that’s what happened to that sweatshirt! I liked that sweatshirt.” I rolled onto my side. “Oh, shit. Here comes another one.”