The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  It took me years to insist—yes, and that’s part of my point.

  DAY 2

  It’s the second day after my son’s birth. I’m sitting on my living room couch with Forest in my lap, clumsily wrapped in a flannel blanket. Mustard-yellow poop is leaking out the side of his cloth diaper cover onto the blue-striped ticking of the “My Breast Friend” nursing cushion, which is strapped around my waist like an enormous doughnut. Too excited and happy and anxious to sleep since he was born, I’m stunned with exhaustion.

  All afternoon I’ve been holding him. He looks so tiny when I set him in his bassinet—so far away, even if it’s only two feet from me. When Forest was inside me, kicking and squirming under my heart, I longed for the moment he’d be out and safe in my arms. Now that he’s out, it’s hitting me that that he isn’t safe anywhere. My husband frets: “I remember when I was about ten years old, I tripped and fell into a basket of newborn kittens that was on the floor by the fireplace. Two of them got squashed.”

  I love Forest so fiercely my heart hurts. I can’t forget what had happened to the first baby I loved this much.

  Last night, just home from the hospital, I lay in bed with my husband sleeping next to me and Forest on my chest, his heart against mine, his head tucked into the hollow of my neck. I was afraid to fall asleep, because I might roll over on him; afraid to lay him down next to me, because he might smother under my pillow or down comforter; afraid to set him down in the bassinet attached to the side of our king-size bed, because without my heart beating against his chest, his own heart might stop.

  So I just lay there, listening to the shallow, arrhythmic flutter of his breath, willing it to continue.

  A few hours before dawn, Forest spit up and began to gag, half-digested breast milk running out of his nose. In a panic, I sat up in bed, turned on the overhead lights, and sent my husband running to the medicine cabinet for the bulb syringe that the hospital sent us home with. We sat in the tangle of indigo flannel sheets, my husband holding Forest upright by his underarms, as I tried to suction the spit-up out of his mouth and nostrils.

  “Don’t do that! You’re hurting him!” My husband looked at me, incredulously, as I jabbed the tip of the syringe up Forest’s tiny nostrils.

  “But look! He’s choking!”

  “Anne, I think spitting up is normal. You’re making it worse. Just let it be.”

  Forest looked at us, eyes scrunched miserably against the light. His worry and concern felt palpable. Do these people have the faintest idea what they’re doing? he seemed to be thinking. Are they even remotely qualified to take care of me?

  When I finally fell into a fitful sleep with him still on my chest, I dreamed a terrible dream:

  I am standing at the changing table in Forest’s room, changing his diaper. I look down and see Sierra’s body lying on top of the white bag filled with complimentary baby supplies that I brought home from the hospital. Sierra is wearing a diaper, and I think that I should change it, or perhaps just take it off and give it to Forest. But when I begin to change her diaper the horror hits me—she is dead. I can’t understand why they sent us home from the hospital with her dead body as well as with Forest’s living one.

  I woke up with a jolt, panicked—where was Forest? As if in response, he started to wail. As I sat up and awkwardly put him to my swollen breast—which had begun to drip and spurt on its own at the sound of his cry—I knew that it was true: We brought Sierra home with Forest. She was there in the way that fear danced cheek to cheek with love in my heart; the way I desperately wanted to do everything right, as if Forest’s life depended on whether I could keep him from crying. Sierra was there in the way I lay awake and listened for every breath, willing him to stay alive.

  DAY 8

  Motherhood has smashed over me like crashing surf. For years I’ve been dreaming of swimming in this ocean. But now all I can do is flail in the waves, trying to keep my head above water, coughing salt water up through my nose.

  Until last week, my days revolved around an orderly rhythm worked out over almost two decades of spiritual practice. Every morning I’d wake up, write down my dreams, meditate, and do an hour of yoga; then I’d have a silent breakfast and get straight to my computer to write. I tried not to speak to anyone before noon; I didn’t even turn on the telephone until my morning work was done. At night, I was always in bed by 11:00, shutting out the world with earplugs and an eye mask. My life was stitched together with countless small rituals, spiritual sutures to keep my psyche from splitting at the seams.

  Now all that has been torn away. I sleep when Forest sleeps, wake when he wakes—which is usually after less than two hours. I pace the floor with him wailing in my arms, hour after hour. He screams whenever I set him down, so I make peanut-butter sandwiches one-handed with him tucked under my arm and use the toilet with him in my lap.

  He only sleeps if he can hear my heartbeat. From midnight to dawn he lies on my chest, his head tucked into the hollow of my throat, awakening every two hours to nurse. In the day, he naps in my arms as I rock. If I dare to set him in his bassinet, he wakes up with a roar of outrage, red-faced and flailing.

  “Babies at this age are very portable,” my pediatrician assured me blithely when I called her last week to make our first appointment. “You can take him anywhere!”

  Sure, I thought. Portable, like a ticking bomb!

  “You won’t always feel like you love him,” my midwife, Johanna, told me when she came for his checkup yesterday. “You just have to act as if you do.”

  I feel staggeringly incompetent. I don’t know the right way to pick him up, or put him down, or wipe his behind. He has worn the same shirt for three days straight because I can’t figure out how to change it without making him scream. I haven’t given him a bath because I’m afraid I’ll drop him in the tub. My life is awash with alien gear: I wrestle with the straps on the car seat, the buckles on the BabyBjörn frontpack, the tubes of the breast pump, the Velcro on the nursing pillow, the slits on the front of my nursing shirts.

  I know how to navigate even the most challenging yoga vinyasa flow. I can meditate for hours in silence without wriggling, facing down knee pain, back pain, demons of anger and fear.

  But the practice of taking care of a newborn is an initiation like no other. And in the annals of spiritual practice written by men, I’ve rarely seen it praised or elevated.

  I know young women who have been warned by their dharma teachers that if they have a baby, their spiritual practice will grind to a halt. Only one of my meditation teachers has a child. She once told me that after her baby was born, her own teacher told her, “You better not have another one or you will never teach again.”

  DAY 13

  I’ve assembled an arsenal of holistically oriented childrearing manuals. They drift in a small avalanche across my couch; I flip through them as I nurse Forest for hours.

  My favorite is a little book called The Continuum Concept, written by a woman anthropologist—herself childless—who claims she spent years in the jungles of South America studying the child-rearing practices of rainforest tribes. The book assures me that if I simply hold Forest in my arms all the time, skin to skin, day and night, he won’t cry, won’t get colic, won’t die in his sleep. He won’t become a teenager who deals drugs or a young man who sleeps with women and never calls them again. For God’s sake, he won’t even spit up.

  Before Forest was born, I had ordered a cloth baby sling and—in the absence of tribal role models—an instructional video about how to use it. I planned to wear him everywhere in my Over-the-Shoulder-Baby-Holder sling while I went about my daily life harvesting corn and answering the phone and drawing water from the well and checking my email, in the manner of the ancient Maya.

  It all sounded fabulous. The only problem is, none of it has worked.

  Forest still cries a lot, and loudly. He cries every time I set him down.
He cries if he has been awake more than fifteen minutes. He cries if I put him in a stroller or car seat. He cries whenever I change his diaper. He cries at the sound of his rattle. He cries if the lights are too bright.

  And most of all, he cries if I try to put him in the sling, which he despises with a passion. He likes having his arms and legs extended and free, not coiled into a cozy fetal pose. When I try to cram him into the sling, he roars, kicking his legs against the fabric, his face contorted with fury, staring into my eyes with a desperate intensity. What makes you think, say his eyes, that just because you are thirty-seven years old, and I am only ten days old, you have the right to tell me what to do?

  He seems wracked with frustration, like an old soul trapped in a helpless body. When a friend came over last week to bring me a lasagna, we stood by his bassinet together and watched him grunt and flail: So many things to say and do, if only I could get control of my goddamned neck muscles! “It’s as if in his last life he died in the middle of all his projects, and he can’t wait to get back to them,” she commented.

  In desperation, this morning I called my mother on the East Coast. “How did you manage with seven children?” I wailed.

  “I worked harder with the first baby than I did with all the rest put together,” she told me. “And after the first three or four, it’s easy! The older ones just play with the younger ones!”

  This did not sound to me like a short-term solution. I asked if she had any more immediately practical advice. She did: “Always make sure all your clothes are the color of peanut butter and jelly.”

  Unlike my own mother, my husband’s mother lives right around the corner. But at seventy-eight, Grandma Joan is an unreliable narrator. In her memory, her babies never had leaky diapers, they never cried in the middle of the night, and they woke up cooing every morning. When she first saw my Over-the-Shoulder-Baby-Holder, she asked, “If carrying your baby in a sling is so great, how come they’re all killing each other in Rwanda?”

  “Mom, people are killing each other all over the world,” my husband said.

  She snorted, “Not with machetes!”

  DAY 18

  Last night, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. Forest was asleep, belly down, on my chest. His breath was shallow and fluttering. Was he breathing all right? I turned on the light to be sure. In response, Forest began to wail.

  The more he screamed, the more anxious I got. His face grew red, his body stiffened, and he seemed in excruciating pain. I carried him downstairs to get my husband, who was pulling an all-nighter in his home office, preparing for a business presentation the next morning. Together we took turns rocking Forest, walking with him, bouncing him. Nothing worked. He screamed until he ran out of breath, choked, sputtered, began to scream again. I began to cry myself.

  Finally, my husband called the hospital emergency room. “We have a two-week-old baby, and we’re worried. We think there’s something wrong with him.”

  He described the symptoms, then nodded as he listened to the response. “Mmm, hmm. Mmm, hmm. Great. Thank you.”

  He got off the phone and turned to me. “She says it sounds like gas. She says that sometimes that makes babies uncomfortable.”

  Uncomfortable? “I ate black bean tacos for dinner last night,” I said uncertainly. “Maybe that’s what did it?”

  Forest cried until dawn, when he passed out in exhaustion in my arms. I collapsed on the couch, afraid to put him down, and tried to doze. As the sun came up, my husband talked on the phone with one of his best friends from high school—now a psychic healer, nutritionist, mother of four, and unofficial adviser to half the mothers in the SoCal town of Ventura.

  After he hung up, he handed me a list. “She says you should stop eating dairy, wheat, yeast, soy, corn, legumes, garlic, onions, tomatoes, sugar, peppers, broccoli, and citrus fruit. You should also consider dropping fish, mushrooms, and eggs.”

  As if on cue, Forest woke up and began to cry again. My husband went downstairs to sleep a few hours before his meeting. I sat on the couch in my bathrobe and nursed Forest, eating cold oatmeal out of a mug with my left hand, and spilling it on his hair.

  Just after Forest finally fell asleep, the doorbell rang. I got up in slow motion, baby still tucked in my arms, and moonwalked to the door to greet a FedEx deliveryman with some papers for my husband’s presentation.

  “Shhhh,” I hissed, reaching for the envelope with one hand, jerking my head toward Forest. “He’s sleeping.”

  The man nodded, his eyes averted. “Just sign right here,” he said, staring studiously at my doormat.

  I signed, wondering why he wasn’t looking at me. The man took the paper and scurried off.

  On my way back to the mirror, I glanced in the bathroom mirror and froze. I had forgotten to close the milk bar. One breast was hanging out through the slit in my nursing pajamas like an Amazon warrior’s. A streak of spit-up ran down my shoulder, with a few crumbs of oatmeal lodged in it. Below my breast was a yellow poop stain. My unbrushed hair stood on end. My eyes were red-rimmed and glassy.

  Who have I become?

  Spiritual practitioners have costumes that communicate the dignity and value of their practice: the elaborate robes of the Zen monk, the form-fitting leggings of the yoga babe. What does my unkempt attire signify? Meditation practice is supposed to crack the facade of the construct of self, so something more real shows through. Is that what’s happening here? Or am I just losing it?

  DAY 19

  Forest has consented to be in the sling around my neck as I write this. He is snoozing away, making little snorts and grunts, his brow furrowed as if he’s pondering the big questions: Poop, breasts, milk, the connection between them, the way the world disappears and recreates itself when I go to sleep and wake up, the way my purple and green rattle floats in front of me, vanishes. Where does it go?

  I’m realizing I could have paid a lot of money and traveled a long way to study with a guru like this—a demented Zen master or Tibetan crazy wisdom teacher, who might put a glossy ad in Yoga Journal promising to help you “cut through the rational mind.”

  On a long meditation retreat, there’s this moment when you realize—There’s Nothing Else to Look Forward To. This Is It. At first, you’re sitting in meditation waiting for the bell to ring so you can get up. And then the bell rings and you get up and do walking meditation, slowly back and forth, waiting for the bell to ring so you can sit. Then you sit again, and your back hurts and your leg hurts and you’re bored and you’re waiting for the bell to ring so you can walk. And then the bell rings…After four or five cycles like this you begin looking forward to lunch, and then you stand in line looking forward to seeing what’s on the buffet table; then you eat while looking forward to each next bite (you try to bring your mind back to the present bite but the next one promises to be so much better!). As you eat, you wonder if there will be second helpings available; there are, and as you eat them, you look forward to your nap after lunch. After your nap, as you do your “work practice” in the kitchen, you look forward to being done chopping vegetables so you go back and meditate again.

  And so, you sit and walk, and sit and walk, and sit and walk, always leaning into the next moment. And after several days of this, something cracks deep in your mind and you understand on a deeper level, for a moment, what you previously knew only conceptually—that life itself only unfolds right now. Body sensations, thoughts, emotions, sights, and sounds arise and pass away, always in the present moment. And for a moment you really get this, and you are in bliss. And then the bliss passes, and you start looking forward to it coming back. And the whole cycle starts up again.

  That’s what this period of time is like—an endless meditation retreat. It has all the elements: 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 th
at looking glass gets broke / Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat…”).

  And at the center of it, of course, is the crazy wisdom teacher in diapers, who assigns more demanding practices than I ever encountered in all my travels in India: “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 have been exquisitely designed to rattle the cage of my ego. They smash through my concepts about how things should be: myself rocking in the garden swing by the lavender bush, watching the hummingbirds, while my newborn sleeps in a bassinet by my feet. They pry open my heart to the way things actually are: myself standing by the diaper table, flexing one tiny knee after another into Forest’s colicky tummy, and cheering when a mustard-yellow fountain erupts from his bottom, as his dad applauds, “Hurray! You’re the Prince of Poop! You’re the Pope of Poop!”

  And I’ve finally realized: This is it. Nursing, diapering, rocking the crying baby, looking forward to nap, nap being over. The flashes of pure joy as he looks up at me and smiles. The next poop, the next pounce on my nipple. The waves of bliss and love. The waves of utter exhaustion and frustration.

  The essential practice is just to be here for now. And now. And now. And with every breath of my “baby retreat,” I am offered the opportunity to cradle my child in my arms, to feel my heart crack open, and to be present for a mystery unfolding.

  DAY 23

  Forest’s moods change so fast. When he sleeps, his emotions flicker across his face as if he is rehearsing every expression he will need all the way through adolescence to old age: Rolling his eyes in exasperation, sneering, smiling, rounding his lips in an ooo of amazement, arching his eyebrows in disbelief, opening wide as if laughing in glee. Then the look of sudden horror: Oh God, not the poop coming again! I thought I took care of that already, please mommy make it stop! The wail of outrage, the red-faced grunts…then the expression of deep peace when it’s all over.