The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  Watching his face is a meditation in itself. It’s like watching the human mind-body in its purest state, raw and unfiltered. Watching his face, I understand my own heart better.

  In Buddhist practice, “nonattachment” is often elevated—a disentanglement from the world personified by the ideal of a celibate monk.

  But parenting is explicitly about forming secure attachments—the bonds of intimacy that allow a child to thrive. This kind of attachment is an expression of love.

  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 feel how I am 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 Forest’s grandchildren to be able to swim in the Pacific, and hike the granite ridges of the Sierra, and gasp at a blue heron standing on one leg in Bolinas Lagoon.

  Is this “attachment”? Or connectedness?

  In the legends of the Buddha’s life, the young prince Siddhartha grows up in a palace, sheltered his whole life from the harsh realities of the world. His awakening doesn’t begin until, as a young man, he slips past the palace walls and sees what are known as the four messengers, all of them also men: an old man, wrinkled and withering; a sick man, coughing and wheezing and leaking pus; a dead man being carried to a funeral pyre; an ochre-robed holy man, who has cast off the world of sickness, old age, and death to seek what is eternal.

  Those four messengers are what set off his spiritual quest. Siddhartha leaves the palace in the middle of the night to look for enlightenment, without waking his sleeping wife and son, Rahula, his “fetter.”

  But what if the son were not a fetter, but another messenger? One who pointed the way to a different kind of awakening, the path that the Buddha didn’t travel but his wife did?

  DAY 25

  Last night, Forest was writhing and grunting much of the night, even though I’d eaten nothing but baked potatoes and a salad for dinner. Around dawn I fell asleep and dreamed: I hear about some people who claim they can stop your baby from crying “in just two minutes.” I go to see them because I am desperate. I try to ignore the dead babies lying all over the place and hand Forest over. Then as I am walking away, listening to him wail, I see that there are more dead babies everywhere. I suddenly realize that they are going to kill him. That his last moments will be knowing I have betrayed him. I start to run back, thinking, he’s so wonderful, how could I have done that, what if I am too late, has it been two minutes yet…

  When I wake up—what a joy to have him here in my bed, snoring next to me! “Cry all you want,” I told him, and covered his head with kisses, inhaling deep to drink in the smell of his hair.

  I think of what a Zen teacher told a friend of mine who was fretting about what career path to take: “Just being alive is enough. Anything else is extra.” Right now, that feels true—for me as well as for Forest.

  DAY 31

  Forest is one month old. His baby hair is starting to fall out, so he has a sort of mohawk left on the top, and a fringe around the edge of his hairline, the rest of it disappearing. His face is getting rounder, so he looks like a fat, bald, middle-aged man. When he woke up this morning he was cross, his bowels giving him trouble again, and he looked at me suspiciously like a bank manager who was about to turn me down for a loan.

  But a small miracle: he fell asleep for a while in his infant seat. So I spread out my mat and did yoga next to him—one eye always on him, one part of my attention always there.

  At first, as I practiced, I felt the urgency to do as many poses as I could—I should get my body back into the shape it was before the birth! I should strengthen my abs! Tighten my butt! Release my upper back from the strain of nursing!

  And then I realized—the challenge now is to do one pose, just one. But to do it well. Which means not to do it correctly, anatomically, but to do it fully, completely, feeling the magic of just this breath coming in, just this breath coming out. Legs like tree roots connecting with the earth. Spirit emanating out of my body like mist rising off a swamp.

  I could feel my back muscles releasing into a wide-legged forward bend—my heart yielding, my head dropping down. In this shape, I bowed to the magic of this moment: my baby, one month old, sleeping by my feet in his infant seat, his little snores wheezing in and out of a tiny nose, the mystery of breath keeping him alive too. His mouth a pouting flower, his T-shirt riding up around his shoulders, stained with drops of balsamic vinegar from the salad I ate last night with him in my lap. His fingers curled loose, poised to reach out and grasp the world.

  I must do this pose, fully. Then maybe one more. Then maybe one more. Until he starts to grunt, and get red in the face, and strain, and then burst into a wail—and it is time to pick him up, put him to my breast, and do the poses of motherhood again, a breath and a breast at a time.

  DAY 35

  I said to my husband, “Forest has so much personality that sometimes I forget he is a baby. Then he does something baby-like and surprises me.”

  “You mean, like he poops his pants?”

  “Well, yes, there’s that. But that doesn’t surprise me—he’s just a guy who does that sometimes. What really catches me off guard is when I sense how much he needs me.”

  How small he is, how completely vulnerable! He needs me desperately and knows it—so when he wakes up in bed when I’ve gone to the bathroom, and finds me not there, oh, the intensity of his wail! And the palpable relief when I immediately appear again and take him in my arms! It’s so different when he wakes up in the night and I am there—my belly warm under his, my breath on his face—and he sighs a little and sinks back under.

  I’d like to be able to hold myself, in my yoga and meditation practice, in the same way that I hold him. To feel my own warm presence there, so I don’t have to be anxious or on guard or obsessed with achieving a particular pose or level of fitness.

  My body has channeled a whole new life into the world. Does it care whether it has tight buns? It needs to be nurtured, cherished, supported so that a new strength can well up naturally from within—the strength of love pouring through bones and blood and muscle and milk, as naturally as my breast milk lets down when I hear Forest cry, or even a few moments before.

  While he snoozed in his bassinet just now, I folded into a seated forward bend, releasing my heart toward the ground. I could feel that my body would never be the same as it was before pregnancy and birth—but then, nothing ever is the same as it was. Clearly what’s called for is not to try to shape or control my body or try to beat it into the shape of someone else’s. Instead I must let it unfold naturally into its next form.

  This is my job in mothering too: to accept, to nurture, to create an atmosphere in which my child can unfold. Not to try to impose a shape on him from the outside but to trust his natural impulses, to water the seeds of what is best in him and let him blossom.

  DAY 40

  I’m scheduled to direct a conference on yoga and Buddhism that is coming up on the East Coast in a couple of months. My husband and Forest are going to come with me—plus, in a panic, I’ve just asked two of my East Coast sisters to meet me there as babysitters. When I planned this, Forest wasn’t even born, and it seemed plausible that I would teach the whole thing with him cooing in that sling around my neck. Now it’s clear that that will not be remotely possible.

  Plus, I am having a major attack of insecurity about my keynote speech. What will I say? I’m not a yoga master or a dharma teacher! These days all I am is a mom!

  I haven’t done any formal sitting meditation since Forest was born, just sitting and nursing him; my walking meditation is the slow kinhin out of the room when I’ve put him down for a nap, praying that a creaking floorboard won’t wake him, or the hours of pacing back and forth with him fretting and moaning on my shoulder. And as for yoga—wel
l, I’ve come up with a new way of doing asanas: I lay him on his back on his sheepskin, wind up his mobile, and hold a pose for as long as the mobile music box lasts; then I wind it up again and do another pose. I can sometimes get fifteen whole minutes of yoga done that way before he starts to fuss! And the only problem is that I do it all to the tinkling ice-cream-truck tune of “Hush, Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word.”

  DAY 42

  Forest is asleep next to me in our king-size bed, looking so tiny in the tangle of down comforter, pillows huge next to him. I know he is sleeping so deeply because the bed smells of my skin and sweat and breath and milk.

  I have been mastering “the ten-minute yoga practice.” It’s a way to release the physical strains of motherhood—the ache in the shoulders and neck from rocking and nursing, the tweak in the low back where hormone-loosened ligaments let go their grip on the bones. Even more important, it’s a way to bring myself back to my center and align myself with my intention to be present. Even if I’ve just eaten, I seize the opportunity to do a few poses when he snoozes—a few handstands, an elbow balance. Then, when he notices I am gone and demands me back, I see if I can maintain my stream of mindfulness.

  My challenge is to accept that this particular baby, right now, wants to be held all the time. To accept that what he needs in order to thrive—to grow to his maximum potential—is to constantly be in someone’s arms, in someone’s lap. This might be more than—or different from—what some other babies his age might need, and this is okay. It doesn’t mean that he will be a needy person, a disagreeable, demanding child. This is simply who he is now.

  Here’s what I realized in my last mini-yoga and meditation sessions: you don’t need to go to India to visit the birthplace of the Buddha, the “awakened one.” The Buddha—as in, the capacity of the human heart to be awake—can be born anywhere, every moment. Born in failures and disappointments and broken hearts and failed relationships and shattered dreams, as much as in triumphs and successes. Born in my tight muscles, my cramped neck, the poses I try to do and fail, the ones I used to be able to do and can’t anymore.

  When I reject my body—because it is imperfect, impermanent—I reject my life; and as I embrace my body, I embrace my life. This fleeting, impermanent, glorious, imperfect life that is not turning out at all as I expected.

  As I write that, next to me Forest opens his eyes, studies me for a while with his serious blue-gray eyes, makes an astonished, thoughtful O with his lips, then goes back to sleep.

  DAY 77

  Forest’s eyes are almond-shaped, enormous, glowing. He watches everything with this intense absorption, his lips parted in amazement. Sometimes it is all so intense that he just has to suck on his fist. What other response could there be?

  My favorite moment of the day with him is first thing in the morning. He still wakes up every hour or two throughout the night—but then I just nurse him in the dark, half-asleep. But at daybreak, I lift him, still grunting and struggling, into my lap and smile at him and say, “Good morning, Forest!” And he stops grunting and looks straight at me and breaks into a smile so big his eyes crinkle up and practically disappear and his ears start to wiggle. His whole body squirms with delight, like he’s so happy to see me he’s about to explode with joy. And even if he keeps grunting (because that darn poop! it’s just so stubborn!), he’s smiling at the same time. He opens his eyes wide and looks at me again, and grins again, this big toothless happy grin, so wide I can see the streaks on the roof of his mouth. That’s the best moment.

  But along about 4:00 p.m., I am sometimes so tired of being Mom. When my neck is hurting because I slept half the night before sitting up with him in my lap. When all I have done all day is nurse and change diapers and walk around the house showing him things he points at: This is squash! This is the refrigerator! There, out the window, there are the deer who are rutting in our yard, literally chasing each other around the lawn doing battle, because your dad and I keep forgetting to close our gate, and there’s no more garden left to protect anymore anyway, because we’ve let it slide back into wilderness and neither of us has a moment to weed or water or mow!

  Tonight as I was nursing him to sleep—which took two hours, playing the same CD of classical music over and over, nursing and rocking and putting him down oh-so-carefully, but then he’d wake up when his head hit the lambskin, and I’d have to start all over again—I was thinking, what if I just surrendered to just doing this, without trying to do anything else? What if I let go of being a teacher, being a writer? What if I dropped into this role the way I might drop into my life as a monk at a monastery—taking on the new dharma name of “Mom” that erases my previous identity as surely as the Japanese dharma names assigned by a roshi?

  Suppose I just let myself be nobody but Mom, for a while?

  Forest is asleep now, in his co-sleeper, and I am huddled on the bed, shielding the light from my computer screen with a pillow, hunching over to see under the pillow to tap the keys. Trying to write about him. It sounds like he’s waking up…I have to stop writing now. Can being Mom be enough? How about being nobody?

  DAY 87

  Forest had his first trip to the beach the other day. It was sunny at our house, but foggy and a little chilly at Muir Beach. I put him in the frontpack with a jacket and hat on (the hat kept creeping down over his eyes, but he didn’t seem to mind) and draped him with blankets. My husband and I walked up and down the beach, pointing out: Ocean. Dogs. Big kids (one-year-olds and two-year-olds). He was moderately interested, but apparently didn’t think it compared to shopping at Whole Foods. He had this slightly critical look on his face, like, I’m a baby who’s been around the block a few times. I know a thing or two. What do you want to show me now? Well, not bad, not bad…

  I have been trying to get him used to drinking from a bottle, so his dad or a babysitter can feed him and I can be gone for the length of a yoga class. But he is not cooperating. I pump a little breast milk in the morning, and then my husband offers it to him in a bottle later in the day. He drinks maybe half an ounce, sputtering and spitting out the nipple every few sucks, then breaks down and cries. Afterward, he talks about it for a long time, indignantly. It’s as if he’s a wine connoisseur who’s gone to a fancy restaurant and been served a glass of cheap jug wine—the fact that it’s got alcohol in it doesn’t make up for the delivery method. Even after the bottle has been taken away, he keeps talking about it: The nerve! Can you believe it? At the prices they charge? Hey, you guys, did you hear what they did to me?

  DAY 99

  Forest is three months old, and what everyone said would happen is happening: It is getting easier. He is sunny, smiling—my little lover, gazing at me adoringly, laughing at my jokes, melting my heart. We bought a mountain stroller, so now I can head to Tennessee Valley, Mount Tam, or wherever else I might want to hike—and instead of screaming throughout the whole walk, he is peering around at the world with a goofy, wide-eyed grin.

  Of course, I loved him from the start. But now I find myself lying in savasana at the end of yoga class thinking about his smile, wanting to get up and run home to kiss him. Last night he was sleeping in the co-sleeper while I was in the living room, working on my laptop. I heard him start to toss and grumble, and he didn’t seem to be resettling, so I tiptoed into the room and lay down on the bed next to him. The room was dark, but I reached out my arm and felt around until I touched the little blanketed bundle of his body. In the darkness I felt a tiny little hand reach out of nowhere, come down on top of mine, and grab my finger. He sighed and went back to sleep.

  My identity is breaking open the way my pelvis broke open to let him into the world. My psyche is dilating like my cervix, making room for something new. I am becoming Anne-with-Forest.

  There’s a classic Zen koan in which one monk asks another, “How does the bodhisattva Kuan Yin use her many hands and eyes?” The second monk responds, “It is like someone in the middl
e of the night reaching behind her head for the pillow.” The answer evokes the naturalness with which compassion wells from the awakened heart.

  Maybe motherhood can release the heart as surely as monastic practice. Or to say it another way—maybe with years of practice, a monk could be like a mother in the middle of the night, reaching for her baby’s hand.

  I’m thinking about the talk I’m going to give at the yoga and Buddhism conference next month. I’m going to ask: 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, maybe these questions seem 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 are 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 repurposed to cushion Forest’s play area.

  Forget about chewing a single raisin for ten minutes and admonitions to “when you eat, just eat.” I’m on the phone with Forest on my hip, ordering baby-proof covers for the electrical outlets as I eat cold veggie pot stickers 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 Forest’s other bootie.

  And yet. Last week I had tea with Fu, the Zen priest from Green Gulch Zen Center who was one of the officiants at our wedding and at Sierra’s cremation. Seven years ago, she and her partner adopted Sabrina, an HIV-positive baby born to a crack-addicted mother. I asked Fu how becoming a mother had affected her practice. “I became a human being,” she told me. “And that’s what Buddhist practice is all about—becoming a human. Through meditation I had gotten very good at putting a little bubble around me. My love for this child was a crowbar that ripped open my heart.”