The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  Pick me a blueberry!” It describes the intoxicating smell of his neck, and his bright laughter, and the way he grabs his “rhythm sticks” from the basket of toys and begins to drum on the top of the coffee table, shouting “Feel the beat!” It tells of Forest nursing and suddenly beginning to breathe loudly through his nose. He looks up at me and says, “Forest’s purring like the kitty!”

  My practice has taught me to pay attention to these moments—to shift my attention to what isn’t hurting; to feel the joy and connection, and rest in them.

  The true yoga, I have to learn again and again, is not about fitting my body into the idealized shape of a perfect pose. It’s about meeting my body and my heart just as they are—flawed, fragile, and glorious.

  I can’t reboot into a new metta-fied version of myself, always shiny and happy and serene.

  But I can remind myself that my capacity for metta exists and incline my mind in its direction. I can meet even my failures to do so with kindness.

  And when I do, metta helps me remember to not let the parts of my life that are hurting overwhelm the rest—so I don’t miss the magic.

  Yesterday, after we pulled into our driveway, Forest refused to get out of his car seat—he just wanted to sit there and hear “The Animal Song” over and over. “It’s by Bob Dylan,” he reminded me. So I cranked up the volume on the CD, got out of the car myself, and began to dance in the driveway. Eventually he got out too and began to dance with me, bending his tiny legs, bobbing up and down. “Man gave names to all the animals / in the beginning / long time ago…” The asphalt was warm under our bare feet, the breeze was cool, the crows fretted in the redwoods. The eucalyptus tree glowed in the setting sun.

  MARCH

  Forest has been learning to use a training potty, which sits next to the big toilet in my bathroom. We have established a ritual: he poops in the little potty, then I dump the poop into the big potty, then he flushes it down.

  One day I space out in the middle of this process—thinking about getting out the door in time for yoga—and flush the poop myself.

  Forest insists that he has to poop again, so that he can flush it. He sits on the potty with tears pouring down his face, screaming, “Do you want to poop? There’s no poop! Why is the poop not coming out? Mommy help you! Forest has to poop more and then Forest flush it down the toilet!”

  Just then, my husband walks in for his afternoon visit.

  “I’ll take over,” he says. “You can go to yoga.”

  But Forest howls, “No! Mommy help you! Do you want to poop right now??”

  “We could flush something else down the toilet!” I suggest, inspired.

  Forest gets an expression like maybe there’s a tiny ray of light in the darkness. “Something else? Flush something else?”

  “Like a piece of bread!”

  Forest’s face lights up. “Bread turns into poop,” he says thoughtfully, just checking to make sure.

  “That’s right,” I say. “Bread turns into poop when you eat it.”

  Forest looks suspicious. “Bread turns to poop when you flush it down the toilet!” He insists.

  “That’s right.” I’m willing to agree to anything. “Bread turns to poop when you flush it down the toilet.”

  My husband gets a piece of bread from the kitchen and squeezes it into a pale brown log. He carries it into the bathroom on a napkin. He proclaims, “Here comes the poop! Don’t touch the poop!”

  Together, he and Forest toss it into the toilet. Forest flushes it. My husband and I are laughing so hard we are practically pooping our pants ourselves. My husband says, “This is the strangest ritual I have ever done.”

  But the bread doesn’t go down! It comes bobbing back up! Forest looks terribly worried. “Maybe we’ll have to weight it down with little rocks,” I say, trying to keep a straight face.

  But Forest flushes again and it goes down this time, and we all say, solemnly, “Bye-bye poop,” and then Forest is happy again.

  “But I have to say, it will feel a little weird next time I make toast,” I tell my husband.

  Love—I am learning through being a mother—isn’t just an emotion. It is something you have to do.

  Yes, you have those amazing moments when your heart cracks open and you just cannot believe the waves of bliss, your good fortune. But you don’t always feel that way. Small children scream, they are difficult, they are shockingly immature, they do not leave you a moment to yourself.

  “All children want,” my mother once told me, “is 100 percent of your attention 100 percent of the time. If you give that to them, they are happy.”

  So you keep showing up. You keep showing up, and taking care of them, because love is not a state of being. Love is a verb.

  And gradually you are transformed into somebody else. The little straitjackets you have pushed your love into begin to soften and fray.

  That’s when the real metta can start to flow.

  MAY

  We are visiting my friend Rachael, and Forest decides he wants to exit her house through the cat door in her kitchen.

  Ever since a mutual friend introduced us earlier this year, Rachael—whose daughter Sonya is a year younger than Forest—has been a lifeline. Like me, she had a full career as an artist before becoming a mother—in her case, as an actor, director, and acting teacher. Like mine, her marriage has challenges. “Life’s too short not to be real with each other,” she says—and we tell each other about our loneliness, our frustration, our ambition, our exhaustion, as we watch our kids “parallel play” on her living room floor. She’s one of the few people I’ve told that my husband doesn’t live with me anymore.

  Forest is definitely too big to go through her cat door.

  He can put his head through the flap, but then his shoulders get stuck. He can put his legs through, but his butt won’t go.

  But he just won’t believe that he is too big. He keeps trying and trying, getting more and more frustrated and exhausted. “Mommy help you!” he keeps crying. “Do it, please!”

  “You’re too big,” I tell him again and again. “You need to go through the big boy door.” When he won’t let go of this obsession, I try to distract him with a cheerful, “It’s time to go home and have a burrito!”

  But he just stands there sobbing, his chin quivering. He says, “Okay, here’s the deal. We go through the cat door. Then we go through the big boy door. Then we go home and have a burrito. Does that sound like a plan?”

  Trying to get through a door you can’t fit through is a futile task. But Forest’s not the only one who’s been trying to do that, I reflect as we drive home.

  I’ve had this idea of our marriage as a door my husband and I need to fit through—a door of a certain shape and a certain size. The problem is, it’s the wrong kind of door. And there’s just no way we are going to fit through it.

  * * *

  —

  About six months after the cat door incident, Forest’s dad and I tell our therapist we are going to get a divorce. After the session we drive away together, tears streaming down our faces. “I love you,” he says as he drops me off at what is now my house, not ours. “I wish I could be the one to come home with you, comfort you. I wish I could.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  By the time Forest’s dad and I actually signed our divorce papers, Forest would be five, and his dad and I would be friends again. After the notary witnessed our signature, we went out to lunch together. We toasted each other with sparkling water. We promised to coparent “till death do us part.”

  A few days later, in the car, Forest told me, “Some kids’ parents live together and love each other. Some live together and don’t love each other. Some don’t live together and don’t love each other. Others don’t live together but love each other.

  “That last kind is the kind that you and Daddy are.”

&n
bsp; It sometimes takes a long time for metta to transform a heart.

  It’s not like buying an airline ticket to a different city—a one-way ticket to metta, please!—and flying there nonstop. More often it’s like a long backpacking trip through a desert. Every day you wake up, look around—same arid dry sand for miles. And you go on walking, earnestly checking your compass and the stars. After days you may find that you have been walking in circles and are back in the same place that you left from. You start out again.

  And then one day, there are a few sprigs of grass in a meadow, and then more, and then a little stream. And one day—much, much later—you realize you are living in a green field, by a meadow and a stream, and you can’t remember the last time you were thirsty. And you can’t quite pin down the moment that the landscape changed. You just know that you are no longer where you were.

  Here’s something that I wish I had known, as I wept in that car with my husband that day after our therapy session: That many years later, I would be riding in a different car with Forest, age thirteen. Trying to change lanes through unrelenting traffic, I am stressed out by the time I will glide up the on-ramp onto the freeway.

  “Phew,” I say, as my shoulders relax. “That’s a relief.”

  “You should send a message to your past self,” Forest tells me. “Your self of a few minutes ago. Tell her it’s all going to work out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, time runs in two directions,” he says confidently. “So when something stressful happens, and then it works out, I always send a message to my past self, letting me know that it’s going to be okay. And when I’m feeling stressed out, I tune in to get the message from my future self—and that helps me relax.”

  So here’s what I’d like to say to my past self: “You will be happy. You will be healthy. You will be safe. You will live with ease and well-being.”

  And off in some other dimension, I imagine my past self, believing me through her tears.

  SUTRA 7

  Beyond the Beyond

  • • • • •

  FOREST WAS FOUR, and his preschool teacher was dying of lung cancer.

  I’d known that she was fighting it a year earlier, when I first enrolled Forest in the Peaceable Kingdom, the wonderful little Montessori school that Toni ran on the bottom floor of her hillside home.

  But month after month she continued to show up in her classroom every weekday morning—as she had for over thirty years—sitting at the head of a low table on a child-size chair, her spine ruler-straight and her gray hair cropped short, greeting each child with a warm smile and a firm instruction to “put on a smock and choose some work to do.” Just after Christmas, though, after a particularly rough bout of chemotherapy, she left the classroom, went upstairs, and went to bed. She didn’t come back down.

  “Toni is resting,” her assistant, Sarah, explained to the children.

  But after she had been gone a few weeks, Forest came to me one evening in the kitchen as I was stir-frying tofu and broccoli. “Toni is never going to get better. She’s never going to come back to school.”

  “Did Sarah tell you that?” I asked.

  “No,” he told me. “I just figured it out for myself.”

  “We don’t know for sure that that’s true,” I told him, trying to choose my words carefully. “But she is very sick. Does that make you sad?”

  He nodded. “It does.”

  * * *

  —

  Forest had come to the Peaceable Kingdom as a three-year-old refugee from a larger, more chaotic preschool, where he had spent his days sitting alone on a chair in the corner singing to himself and watching the other children squeal and play. By age three, he’d grown into a precocious, thoughtful, but eccentric child who could converse with adults about relativity but couldn’t figure out how to play blocks with another little boy. Toni took him under her wing—as she did all the children—teaching him math and reading while training him step-by-step in the fundamental rules of social engagement: “Forest, go ask Baxter, ‘Can you show me where to hang my coat?’ Now say, ‘Thank you, Baxter!’ ” A native Frenchwoman and strict disciple of the Montessori method, Toni had faith in the power of social conventions, and her rules quickly penetrated our own home too. Within a couple of weeks, Forest was watching me disapprovingly as I sneaked a piece of pasta with my fingers before placing our dinner plates on the table. “At the Peaceable Kingdom Montessori School,” he reproved, “we aren’t allowed to start eating until everyone is sitting down and a grown-up says ‘Bon appétit.’ ”

  Forest’s first questions about death had started long before Toni got sick, as he encountered dead bugs, dead flowers, the half-eaten mouse our cat deposited on our doorstep, a crow we found in the garden with maggots crawling in its eye sockets. “Does everything die?” he asked as we buried under a lavender bush a hummingbird that had flown into our sunroom window and broken its neck. “Will I die too? Will you?”

  I hadn’t prepared any good answers in advance. As a California Buddhist mom, I didn’t have a culturally agreed upon story to tell him, like the one I had learned as a child in Catholic school: when you die, your soul goes to heaven to live with Jesus. When it comes to discussions of the afterlife, Buddhism—at least the secular, intellectual brand I’d been studying here in the West—didn’t really have any answers I thought would be reassuring to a three-year-old. (“Well, sweetie, it all has to do with the chain of interdependent co-origination…”) Unlike some brands of Buddhism, the paths I’d studied didn’t emphasize reincarnation, at least not in any literal sense, and I had trouble telling him a story I didn’t believe myself. But I wanted to tell him something that would make him feel safe.

  “Nothing really dies,” I told him. “It just turns into something else. Everything is always changing form. Do you remember the pumpkin that rotted into the earth in your garden? Tomatoes sprouted where it used to be. This bird will go back to the earth and turn into lavender flowers and butterflies.”

  “When you die, will you turn into a flower?” he asked, looking a little worried. “Maybe,” I said, patting the earth down over the hummingbird. He thought for a while, then asked, “But will the flower know that it used to be Mommy?”

  He’d gone right to the heart of the central koan, the question of the persistence of individual consciousness. This was what had always bothered me too about New Agey stories that tried to gloss over the finality of death by professing an eternal identity. If you don’t remember that you used to be a shepherd in medieval England or a princess in ancient Egypt, what difference does it make that you were?

  Now, all I could say to Forest was what would come to be my mantra when it came to questions of the afterlife: “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  When Toni had been absent for over a month, Forest paused one evening as he was bouncing naked on my bed after his bath. “I’m going to assume that Toni’s dead,” he said.

  “Oh, Forest-berry, she’s not dead.” I wrapped a towel around him and pulled him into my lap. “She’s just very sick.”

  “But she’s going to die.”

  I pressed my face against his damp hair. “She probably is.”

  “Will the worms eat her body?” he asked.

  “Yes, they probably will.” I wondered if I was a Bad Mommy. Maybe I should make up a nicer story than this: No, no, sweetie, worms don’t eat people. They just eat crows. But Forest’s dad and I had always prided ourselves on telling him the truth, as best we could.

  “But she won’t feel it,” he said thoughtfully. “Because she will be dead. How long will it take her to go back to the earth and turn into something else?”

  “Oh…about a month? Maybe a few months?” I felt myself getting into deeper and deeper waters. What kind of images was he creating in his head of his beloved teacher?

 
“Oh, that’s way too long.” He shook his head. “I think maybe…a day. And then she’ll turn into a cat.”

  All on his own, it seemed, Forest was generating from scratch the theory of reincarnation, the story that—whether or not you literally believe it—captures an eternal truth: that nothing is separate from anything else, that all life is inextricably interwoven from generation to generation. He smiled at me. “So if I see a cat coming up to me and saying ‘meow, meow,’ I’ll know it’s Toni.”

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later, Forest and I drove to Lake Tahoe so he could play in the snow for the first time. It was just the two of us, a special mommy-son solo adventure before I left to attend my first residential meditation retreat since before he was born. After a day of sledding, as we snuggled under a blanket by the fire, he asked me, “When children die, do their mommies die with them?”

  The question took my breath away. Forest didn’t know yet that he’d had an older sister. “Sometimes they do, but not always,” I said. I stared at the flames, remembering Sierra’s sweet round face, the fire of her cremation. A month after she died, I dreamed I went to visit her in a damp basement, where she was crying “Mama! Mama!”

  Forest shook his head. “No, that’s not right!” he said. “You’re wrong about that! A mommy wouldn’t let her kid be dead all by himself!”

  “You could be right,” I said. Certainly, some part of me had died with Sierra. Sometimes I am able to see her in the lavender bushes and the butterflies and Forest’s plump lips and long fingers, so much like hers. Most days, that’s not nearly enough to bring back that part of me that had gone with her.

  “So if I die, you will die with me.” Forest leaned his head against my shoulder. “So it will be okay. We won’t be lonely. And we can talk to each other in dead language.”

  * * *

  —