by Anne Cushman
“Teabag!” he exclaims ecstatically. “Do you want a teabag? Do you want some tea? Is it ready?”
I kiss the top of his head, inhale the smell of his hair. “Sure.”
He slides out of bed. “It has to steep. Forest will steep it!”
He runs joyfully down the hall in his footsie pajamas. I slip on my robe and follow him, thinking of all the things that I long for that seem so impossible I don’t dare say them aloud.
SEPTEMBER
“Before we begin,” says the couples therapist cheerfully, leaning back in her chair, “I have one very important question.”
My husband and I sit side by side on the therapist’s soft, cream-colored couch. There is a floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall behind my husband, so I can’t look at him without seeing myself. Is this some kind of metaphor? I wonder. The therapist’s pit bull is sleeping beside her, casually blocking the exit. On a side table, a lit candle shaped like the head of a Buddha is slowly melting.
“My question is this,” she continues. “Are you coming to therapy to put your marriage back together? Or to consciously take it all the way apart?”
My husband and I look at each other. I catch a glimpse of my worried face in the mirror behind him. The dog shifts and whines in its sleep, its legs twitching as it chases an imaginary intruder.
Finally, one of us says, “We don’t know.”
When I come home from therapy, Forest—who I left with his babysitter—is sitting on the kitchen floor next to my old boom box, hitting the repeat button on his favorite Bob Marley CD. As I walk in, he looks up at me with a big grin. “Every little thing! Gonna be all right!” he announces.
I pick him up and wrap him in my arms, hoping he is right.
My husband and I are determined not to let our fracturing marriage impact our coparenting of Forest. We are not going to use him as a weapon to hurt each other. We’re going to make sure that whatever happens between us, he will have two parents who love him.
We’ve agreed that at just two years old—and still nursing—Forest still needs to live with me. Forest’s dad will help support me to go on living in our home. Late most afternoons, Forest’s dad comes over after he’s done at his office. While I get in some yoga or get some writing done, he chases Forest around the living room, holding the stuffed lion and pretending to roar. Sometimes we take Forest for walks together, with him walking between us, each of us holding one of his hands. We all dance together and clap our hands to his favorite song by Al Green, “Love and Happiness.” Forest shouts, “Do you want more ‘Yuv and Happiness’?” And we play it again.
We are still a family. Except that after giving Forest his bath, his dad leaves, and I’m on my own again for another long, long night.
Forest is in the middle of what is often called the “terrible twos”—the age when toddlers claim their sense of their independent personhood by defying and testing their parents. He’s a funny, precocious kid who hit all his milestones early—talking at ten months, walking at eleven. He’s also what my parenting books call—tactfully—“high need.” He demands constant interaction, negotiating every transaction like a little lawyer. He’s especially good at this when I’m trying to slip out of the courtroom for a break. On yet one more night when I’m exhausted and Forest doesn’t want to sleep, I drag myself into the dim light of his room in response to his call. Forest, standing in his crib, wide awake, greets me.
“How ’bout we make a deal?”
“Forest, we already made a deal. More nummy and then you get in your crib with no crying—that was the deal.” Long pause, then, hopefully, “More deal?”
Forest has eccentric obsessions and rituals—for example, he’ll regularly turn down a trip to the park in favor of dragging me to the “weird gri-age” to eat a bowl of blueberries with him one at a time, while he ponders and kicks the mechanism by which the garage door opens and closes. While he sleeps, my journals fill with notes and anecdotes about this small, goofy person I’m living with.
As we were walking into the house yesterday, Forest pointed at a container of liquid soap for washing the car, which earlier I had stopped him from pouring on the ground.
“No wasting,” he says.
“That’s right,” I say, “no wasting.”
Pause. “Do you want to waste???” asked with great eagerness.
“No, I don’t want to waste.”
Chin puckering. “I really want to waste!!!”
“No, no wasting.”
In despair: “Oh man! I really want to waste!!!”
I’m in love with him. And I’m exhausted.
For my Friday morning yoga and meditation class at Spirit Rock, I am leading a deep-dive series on metta, the quality of loving-kindness that Buddhism teaches is the natural state of the human heart and mind, once all the things that obscure it are removed. At this ragged stage in my life, claiming this as my natural state seems about as plausible as announcing that my natural home is on Pluto. But still, every week, I guide my students to melt the armor around their hearts through gentle backbends and twists—to do their poses with kindness, greeting each part of the body with compassion. After yoga, I lead guided meditations in which we recite the classic metta phrases over and over while broadcasting healing energy in all directions: “May all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings be safe. May all beings live with ease and well-being.”
One Thursday afternoon, in the middle of the metta series, I get in a fight with Forest’s dad when he arrives to take Forest for a walk to the park. After they leave, I go into my yoga room and kick the wall next to my meditation cushions so hard that I leave a big dent next to the altar, right behind my little bronze statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion.
The next morning my foot hurts so badly that I can’t do standing poses in class. I revise my sequence so it’s all reclining, restorative positions. “Radiate kindness in all directions,” I instruct my students in my most soothing voice, as they drape back over their bolsters.
“Metta is a purification practice. It brings things to the surface,” my mentor, Anna Douglas, tells me. “And sometimes what it brings to the surface is all the things that are getting in the way of your access to metta. So often, when you do metta, you feel the opposite.”
Great news! The practice seems to be working.
OCTOBER
Forest has a new obsession: smelling the tiny bottles of essential oils I keep on the window ledge in my bathroom. He can identify each with a sniff: lavender, clove, ylang-ylang, cedar, mint, pine. Whereas he used to wake up in the morning and say, “Do you want to listen to Al Green?” now he wakes up and asks, “Do you want to go smell the bergamot?”
He has also developed a craving for the cherry-flavored Infant Tylenol I give him when he has a fever. Between demands to “go smell the essential oils,” he demands hits of “red medicine” and wails when I refuse. Sometimes I compromise and take him to Whole Foods for a red smoothie instead. “Now we’re cooperating,” he tells me cheerfully as he sucks it up through his straw.
“He’s a total stoner kid!” I tell my sister on the phone. “It’s like, ‘Hey man, let’s drop some red medicine, put on some Al Green, and smell the essential oils.’ Is this my punishment for a misspent youth?”
My sister reassures me that this is totally normal two-year-old behavior. But I’m starting to wonder. One night, while his Grandma Joan is visiting from down the street, Forest screams so long and loud for red medicine that she leaves in a huff—her children had never screamed like this, she berates me, not once. After she leaves, Forest keeps screaming. I am so tired, lonely, and at the end of my rope that I scream back—a long, wordless shriek that stops him in his tracks, his face convulsed with horror. Then I collapse on the sofa, crying.
“Mommy! Mommy!” he wails in distress, then suggests, “Some nummy will help Mommy feel better!”
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br /> And then, with anxious determination: “Mommy’s happy! Mommy’s happy!”
I sob, “I’m sad.”
But then I pull myself together, put on my Mother mask, and say, “But you do make me happy. I’m happy now. Is Forest happy?”
He briefly—and horribly—makes his face into a caricature, a grimace, of a happy smile. Then he drops the mask and goes back to crying.
“Metta—loving-kindness—is not about producing a particular feeling,” I once heard Ajahn Sumedho, a Buddhist monk, say. “It’s about the attitude of the mind and heart with which you meet everything—even the rage and hatred. It’s not about pasting on a happy face. It’s about being with the tears with kindness.”
Can my metta practice include this moment too? Can its healing energy touch even the parts of me—and my family—that are the most broken? Can it help me reknit my unraveling heart?
I know I’m not the only meditation practitioner—or teacher, for that matter—to crash on the submerged rocks in the sea of human relationships. As a journalist chronicling the world of yoga and Buddhism, I’ve told their stories: The alcoholic, married Zen master who had affairs with his senior students. The Indian guru who encouraged his devotees to lifetimes of celibacy—with the exception of secret trysts with him.
But I still believe that somehow, if I had just done my practice right, my life would look different. My husband and I would be living happily together. My two-year-old would snuggle sweetly in his grandmother’s lap at every visit, giggling as she read “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout / Would not take the garbage out!” On the rare occasions when he pitched a tantrum, I would follow the advice in the parenting books: Set firm boundaries. Respond, don’t react. And he would be happy again.
Instead of thinking of the collapse of my marriage as a failure, a disaster, can I hold it in my heart as my koan, my doorway into the deepest wounds of my psyche that need healing? Can it be the knot that I must penetrate with loving awareness so I can dissolve into the big heart of my true nature? Can my broken heart teach me to cherish my connection with all the other aching beings in this imperfect world?
I rock Forest as he cries. “May you be happy,” I tell him silently. “May you be peaceful. May you be safe. May you live with ease and well-being.”
I try to hold myself with the same kindness.
NOVEMBER
I snap at Forest when he won’t stop banging his cup on the sliding glass door to the patio. His chin starts to quiver, so I hug him and say, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Mommy’s just feeling sad.”
He studies my face. “Mommy is sad and pretty.”
“Oh, thank you, sweetie!” Now I feel even worse about snapping at him.
He thinks for a minute and says, “E minor.”
I know he’s been learning to recognize the chords that his dad plays on the guitar, but I don’t understand what he means. “What about E minor?” I ask.
“E minor is also sad and pretty.”
* * *
—
My husband and I are both seeing other people—while still going to couples therapy with each other to try to figure out what form our relationship is going to take.
I never ask him who he’s seeing. She’s just the phone, ringing unanswered in his pocket as we push Forest’s stroller down the sandy path to Muir Beach. She’s simply the reason I get his voicemail when I call him at midnight, worried because Forest has a fever.
He doesn’t ask me about the man I’m seeing either—a carpenter and massage therapist I’ve been friends with for years. My acupuncturist has listened to my pulses and told me that I need to “eat more meat and have more fun.” So my lover cooks me steak, unclogs my kitchen drain, massages me with lavender-scented almond oil in front of the woodstove in my living room, scatters rose petals on my bed before we lie down together. He always leaves before Forest wakes up to nurse.
Meanwhile, my husband and I drive together to couples therapy every other week, trading stories about Forest on the drive up and back. In the therapist’s office, we try on various visions—maybe we will stay married but also see other people and live in separate houses! Maybe we will build another house on our property, right up the hill from the main one, and one of us will live in it! Maybe we could try an approach we’d read about called “bird-nesting,” where there is one house that the kid lives in, and the divorced parents take turns visiting instead of having the kid come back and forth!
A part of me knows none of these arrangements will ever work. But when Forest gets sick, his dad is the only one who worries as much as I do. When Forest says something hilarious, my husband is the first person I want to tell about it. Forest is ours. After one difficult night, when Forest had kept me awake from 2:30 to 5:00 a.m., his dad greets him the next evening by asking, “Did you have a difficult night?”
Forest answers, “You did. And so did Mommy.”
“Good empathy!” his dad says, encouragingly. And when Forest looks puzzled, “That means, good feeling.”
Forest’s face lights up with comprehension. “Just like the feeling when the poop’s about to come out!”
And his dad and I burst out laughing together.
I keep trying to find my way to a kind of love that can hold this whole strange, painful situation. I think of something I heard Thich Nhat Hanh say when someone asked him the difference between lay practice and monastic practice. “They’re exactly the same practice,” he said. “But monastic practice is easier.”
There’s one way of doing yoga that’s about perfection: polishing your postures until they sparkle like a magazine cover.
And then there’s the yoga of the slipped disc, the blown-out knee, the bad-news blood test. The yoga that’s about holding in your heart your broken and bumbling human body, even when—especially when—it’s clearly falling apart.
It’s this yoga that I’m turning to now—the yoga that teaches me that it is through my brokenness that I can touch my full humanity, the way I might touch the soft spot on the top of a baby’s head and feel the heartbeat.
I remember years earlier, just out of college, I went to the post office to mail a package and the woman behind the counter was crying. She wept, silently, as she weighed my package, took my money, printed out the sticker, and affixed it to the box. Back then I didn’t know what to do or say. I pretended she wasn’t crying. I said a polite thank you and turned away.
Now, it amazes me that all of us aren’t regularly bursting into tears as we go through our days. Now, I know what I’d do: I’d meet her eyes across the post office counter. I’d say, “I’m so sorry you’re hurting. I know how you feel.”
I’d send her metta.
JANUARY
I dream that I am on a meditation retreat.
I can’t make it to the meditation hall, though, because I am trying to clean up a child’s play area, which is littered with plastic horses, pigs, and sheep. I am frustrated and anxious.
Suddenly my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, appears in front of me. I feel a powerful blast of his distinctive energy—firm, peaceful, and radiant, “a cross between a cloud and a bulldozer,” as another Zen teacher once described him. I instantly feel at peace.
Lovingly and with utter certainty, Thich Nhat Hanh gives me a spiritual command: “Your practice is to take this one small area and make it beautiful.”
* * *
—
Is this time of my life terrible? Or wonderful?
Here’s one thing that I’ve learned for sure through my practice of yoga and meditation: Nothing is solid. Drop below the idea of things—my back, my shoulder, my child, my marriage—and what is revealed is a shimmering, ever-changing, shape-shifting river.
Life isn’t painted in solid swipes of all one color, like a fence. It’s as pixelated as an impressionist painting. It’s made out of countless dots of moments—some ecstatic, so
me heartbreaking. And joy and sadness oscillate, breath by breath.
I might say something like I have a bad back. But my meditation practice tells me to look closer at what I call “bad,” to name what I actually feel, moment by moment: Is there pressure? Tingling? Burning? Throbbing? Is the sensation continuous or does it move around? What I call pain may be made up of a thousand shimmering sensations—some of them unpleasant, some of them not.
And I can also turn my attention to somewhere in my body that isn’t hurting—that may actually feel wonderful. Yes, my back hurts. But the cool taste of a peach from the farmers’ market is still a sunburst of joy in my mouth.
It’s like that with my life. My journal wails my hard times:
Last night, Forest woke up at 4:30 to nurse; then called me ten minutes later, wanting a diaper change; then again, five or ten minutes later, wanting another diaper change. When I called through the wall of his room “No! Wait until morning!” he sobbed, “You can’t sleep with a pee-pee diaper, you don’t want to sleep with a pee-pee diaper,” over and over until I changed it. Then five minutes later he needed it changed again. After that, he wanted to nurse again. (“One more nummy, then sleep. Are you having a hard time sleeping?”) Then he refused to get back in his crib. By this time, it was six o’clock, and I was so exhausted, and I knew it would be light soon. I shouted, “Go to sleep! Go to sleep!” He burst into tears and lay down, clutching his blue blankie, his breath hiccupping, sobbing “Forest’s sleeping! Forest’s sleeping!” So of course I picked him up and said I was sorry, nursed him (still hiccupping) till he calmed down. When I put him back in his crib, he fell asleep until 8:30. But I couldn’t get back to sleep. I felt so awful, such a bad mommy, such a failure at my life. I wanted to call Forest’s dad and rage into his voicemail, “Why aren’t you here?”
* * *
—
But on the next page, it sings to my joy: how I curl with Forest on the couch and read Jamberry aloud to him. “One berry, two berry!