Recommitment

Meditation

Lately I’ve been disliking meditation intensely. I’ve been doing it anyway, but I’ve developed a feeling that there is no point to it. No endgame. I’ve been putting off doing it in the morning, trying to squeeze it in later in the day. Come evening, a glass of wine has been far more alluring than sitting down communing with the universal consciousness. A couple of years ago, when I’d been meditating for a few months, this is how it stopped for me. I’d push it back, then skip one, then one day I wouldn’t do it at all, then a week would pass and I’d realise I hadn’t done it at all; then the habit would be gone.

The problem with meditation is that it doesn’t fundamentally change your nature. It’s not going to change you from a pessimistic type to an optimistic Annie, it’s not going to make you one of those enviable extroverts who can chat to all and sundry about anything from cockatoo politicians to the intricacies of your auntie’s bunion operation if you are an introvert who prefers to scurry around the edges rather than trumpet on the stage. It won’t make you one of those calm, velvet-toned sensible people who never raise their voice, if you are by nature volatile and grew up in a shouty family to boot; it won’t make you all scientific and retrain as a (oh Jesus I can’t even think of one scientific job, apart from ‘science teacher’ or ‘brain surgeon’. It’s concerning)… if your jam is looser than that, less pinpointed on reality and more on the nebulous nuances of skipping and soaring words or hazy, haunting pictures.

I have to remind myself sometimes: what does it do? I’ll speak from my experience, not from what teachers have told me it would do for me. It has made me appreciate every small part of life, really note it and appreciate it. Often, that gratitude is there humming in the background even when I am in the midst of a mood or a bad temper or clouty bout of grumpiness. It has made me get out of those moods much quicker, in a matter of minutes sometimes, whereas before I would have chewed on the stinks of life for hours, days, weeks even. In tandem, it has made me pull way back from those same small parts of life to see them from a wider perspective, which makes me feel calmer about what on earth it is I’m doing with my life – fumbling around, hoping for the best it seems, mostly. It has made me much more accepting of myself – specifically, of my ‘bad’ attributes, shitty things I’ve done, appalling things I sometimes think. That means it has helped me to accept the darker sides of my soul and recognise that they are intrinsically human. It is made me write more because I give that ‘You are shit’ voice short shrift now. It has made me see (super corny alert coming up but sorry folks, this is what meditation does for you) that everyone else around me is my brother and sister, walking alongside me, forging their journey however they can, hoping for the same things that I hope for. Love. Acceptance. Security inside their souls. A role in the world, a meaningful purpose for their existence. A sense that their life, in its entirety, is not only a gift to themselves, but a gift to all around them too.

So I guess I will keep meditating. For now, anyway.

The X-files

Motherhood

Today I came across the term ‘emotional bandwidth’. Jessica Grose wrote a piece in the New York Times parenting magazine about why she is resisting having a third child. She has reached her limits with two. Everyone, she posits, has a different emotional bandwidth when it comes to raising children. How she puts it: In the context of parenting, this is how much patience and humanity you have left to give to your existing children.

Her ‘primal lizard brain’ is still telling her to have another, but her rational side is a firm no, and you can tell she is going to stick to it. I think, as I’m 43, biology has dictated that I won’t have another child but if I was younger, I would be in danger of having another one. I say danger because my rational side – so much more shrunken and ineffective than my emotional, instinctive side (nothing to be proud of) – doesn’t even get a look in when I see a newborn. Ms Logic pipes up, weakly, you do realise that you couldn’t cope with another child, don’t you? Then the dreamy side (read: the crazy side) dithers in with a monologue on how special that time is, what a peak moment in your life it is – making a baby, growing a baby, having a baby, holding a baby. That feeling of timelessness, conversely hung in a vortex of swiftly shifting time, when you cradle your little one; who still seems attached by an invisible umbilical cord.

I have three small children, all less than two years apart in age, and my emotional bandwidth has been stretched. Often it is flimsy and at breaking point. When Jessica spoke of this concept, and how much patience and humanity you might have – and might do well to note you have – in reserve for your children, it made me feel a bit ashamed. Lately, I’ve had only miniscule amounts of patience with my children. Yesterday, we instigated a new ‘ticks and crosses’ system for the two older boys. If they get more ticks than crosses at the end of the week, each will be allowed to buy a small toy from the beach shop near the beautiful strand where we are spending the summer. This morning, I had to add an extra column for myself. The middle child was throwing tantrum after tantrum, because he had read one of the letters in his name as an ‘X’. No matter how many times I told him it was not an X, but a letter of his name, he kept stamping his foot and yelling and screaming that it was an X, and I should take it away forthwith. I lasted about six or seven minutes, then came over all Robert de Niro in Goodfellas: ‘You want an X? I’ll give you an X. I’ll give you ten Xs.’  Then I aggressively drew lots of deep big Xs all over his chart, which obviously drove him crazy.

A minute later, I was sorry. How can I teach these children about patience if I have none? How can I teach them about compassion if I am showing none? What about anger? If I am continually losing my temper, how on earth do I expect them to keep theirs? Anyway; I drew an X in my column for unacceptable behaviour and losing my temper, which pleased them both no end. I wouldn’t be allowed to get a toy this Friday if I kept going on like this for the rest of the week. I could only agree with them.

Growing pains

Motherhood

Yesterday my son came back from the park, mortified. Something which he found really embarrassing happened to him (I won’t say what), and it was in front of the older kids, who all laughed at him.

He felt hurt and ashamed. It was the first time I had seen him like this. It was like he’d just crossed the line from the innocence of infancy into that darker sphere of childhood, where slipping up on social norms could whip you, leaving welts on your psyche, if you did not adhere to them exactly.

It cracked my heart a little. Could I go down to the park and talk to the older boys, make clear what had happened and how it could have happened to anyone of them? No way, he said, panicking, that will make it much worse, please don’t do that. I tried to make light of it then, saying – it’s no big deal, don’t even think about it anymore. It is a big deal to me! he said, his eyes widening. I was as hurt as he was, I think. I remember well that feeling of being laughed at by other children, when something out of the ordinary happened. Do you want to talk about it? I said. He shook his head. A tear rolled down his bronzed cheek. We were all quiet for a moment, then his little brother announced: They weren’t laughing at me.

I just wish it hadn’t happened Mama, whispered my eldest, graciously ignoring the younger’s unhelpful statement. He went off to flick through a book, even though he can’t read yet; it always makes him feel better.

I watched him as he mouthed out sibilant sounds to himself, making up stories he thought might match the pictures. I know, I know, my child, I thought. I wish it hadn’t happened to you either. I wish I could protect you from anything bad happening to you – hurtful things, sad things, embarrassing stuff, painful moments. Anything worse. Everything sharp and sore. I wish I could stand in front of you, your protector always, taking all your hits for you, so you wouldn’t have to feel any of the spikes you will inevitably feel when life hurls its taps and punches, tiny and enormous, toward you.

But I can’t. And I won’t. How else would you grow?

Blinkered

Mental health

This morning, I was thinking that the cruellest side-effect of depression is that it robs you of your interest in life. There are many other things that it does: envelops you in darkness, makes you cry, makes you numb; makes you sleep too much or not sleep at all – and these are just a few nasty nails in your daily existence, which becomes like a stifling coffin when you fall foul of this mood disorder. There are countless more. The worst is the thievery of your lust for life, something which is your birthright.

So how does this look, exactly? Well; take everything. Take the sea, the stars, the planet around you. Take music, orchestras, sonatas and smoky nights. Take eucalyptus, maple, oak trees, flowers – roses, marigolds, daisies, peonies. Take books, poems, words, art. Food. Take people in all their glorious infuriating love and laughter and jealousy and sorrow. Take craft, the joy of work, of bending your mind to something that nourishes it. Animals; a dog’s head nestling on your lap. The balletic paw of a cat. The sight of a goldfinch.

Take interest in everything outside of yourself, where the world is, where all its wonder is, where acres and oceans and aeons of discoveries lie, ready to be peeled open and feasted on with a child’s delight. Take all of this and discount it. Fold in to yourself. Take away the universe itself. It cannot hold your attention, not even for a second.

It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? That such a state of mind can exist and persist within our delicate design.

Party tricks

Motherhood

Yesterday my five-year-old picked me out an enormous black ‘crystal’ necklace from the local discount shop. It is hideous, and one of the most beautiful presents I have ever received because he is beside himself with the joy of giving.

The three of them were taken out to buy me a birthday present last night, and I told my husband that I wouldn’t judge him if they decided that the best present for a 43-year-old woman was a small box of boy Lego (I reject the pink Lego on principle). Usually, it is hard to steer them away from self-gifting – as it is, come to think of it, hard to nudge myself away from self-gifting – but they really invested themselves this time in the art of buying presents. I got: two fabric pink roses, a small square bar of dark cherry chocolate, socks with red flowers on them (‘Look Mama, these are real socks for women so you don’t have to wear ours anymore’), a tube of suncream, an oddly shaped navy T-shirt and the aforementioned startlingly ugly moody crystal necklace. It’s the first time I’ve seen the older boys taking more pleasure in giving than getting something; they were lit up, glowing.

Other birthday things: While dithering in the park yesterday I made plans to join a few others on the beach at 6.30am for yoga and then a swim in the sea. That is my ideal morning! I enthused to them; yes, this would set the tone of the year so perfectly. Yoga, then a swim! Where would you get it? Then I turned to pick up the baby, fell and twisted my ankle badly. Now I can’t walk on it.

You just can’t make plans, can you? I mean, you can sketch out a broad picture of how you’d like your life to look, and set yourself in that general direction, knapsack on your back and hoping for the best, but that’s about it. Anyway. I am 43. In words stolen from a mindful self-compassion course I did a few years ago which I absolutely hated – this year, may I be happy, may I be safe, may I live with ease, may I be free from pain.

And the years go by (if you are lucky)

Meditation

It’s my last day of being 42 today. I had a friend who died at this age, of a brain haemorrhage. He was on holiday with his beloved wife and their three small children. They went to bed, and only his wife woke up in the morning.

Why does it take horrific happenings like these to remind us to live our lives? We think, when we hear about such tragedy, that it will always happen to someone else. Never to us. We take so much for granted. When my sons piled into my bed this morning, tumbling and hugging each other and trying to hug me too, I hauled them off each other, and off me, because I think I have all the time in the world for wild morning hugs like these. Of course, I don’t. I feel the years passing now at warp speed, and I have three rapidly changing little boys to demonstrate the voracious velocity of the years.

Sometimes it makes me panic, sometimes it makes me feel wistful, sometimes it sends me off into long meanderings in my head about how I really need to start taking care of myself so that I don’t succumb to one of the terrifying lifestyle diseases that so many of us end up getting. Rarely does it make me stop and exist only in the moment. You hear it all the time in relation to meditation and particularly mindfulness – living in the moment, being present. Now is all you have. We all know that intellectually but it can be hard to do if you spend a lot of time living up in your crazy-maze brain as opposed to in your body – feeling, sensing, smelling, loving. And crying, I guess. If living in the present is the ideal, then it’s necessary to live the crappy moments too. They often feel never-ending, but of course they do end. Everything ends. Everything begins.

So tomorrow, a new year begins for me. I want to live in it, and not in the years before, and not in the years after. But look at me now; writing this. Thinking about how I’m going to live next year – and not today. See how easy it is to forget?

Good morning

Creativity

This morning, as I stretched out, a small boy lying fidgeting either side of me, I let out one of those grunting, half-yawning questions. Out it popped. I must have been having a heavy dream or something. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ Jesus. What a thing to slip out of your mouth at 6.30am. I don’t know where it came from. Am I really so concerned about the purpose of existence that it was the first thing my brain threw at me in the early light?

My two sleepy boys looked at me, blinking. We are in Wexford for the holidays. It is sunny, it is outdoorsy, it is full of resplendent flowers – maybe it is the meaning to life. I don’t know. I haven’t been writing this blog for the last four or five days because I took my sneaky writing hour to write a longer essay. It was a big long stinker about my 15-year dance with depression and my hope – my belief – that I have finally found a reliable route out of it by practicing meditation every day (among other things, of course. Nothing is a panacea). It was painful to write and my husband got the brunt of my crappy mood. Actually the boys didn’t fair well either. I was snappy and I lost my temper with one of them (the middle one.) It made me think: Sheesh. This writing lark – it can be joyous, yes, but it can also be an excruciating pain in the bum. It was as if, by writing this much longer piece, I took a huge greasy spoon, clunked it in down into the depths of my brain and gave everything a vigorous stir around. Flotsam was flying around in there for a few days. I was unsettled and disconcerted. Anyway; it’s written now and submitted to a magazine and I feel better that it’s done. Better out than in, as one of my meditation teachers taught me. (Perhaps the world might disagree with that if they read it).

So back to lying in bed this morning, snuggled up with my two boys, as the fragrant day lay ahead, out here in the country with the smell of the sea and sweet roses in the air. I don’t know why I needed to ask, the answer was clearly there in front of me. I didn’t expect a reply from either of them, but as they both lept up out of bed, the older one grabbed my arm then kissed me on the nose and said: ‘The meaning of life… is you.’

Fist fight

Meditation, Mental health

I had a not-so-lovely dance with rage this morning. It doesn’t really matter what set me off, I’m telling you about it because each time it happens, I am freshly shocked as to where the anger comes from and how it can be so powerful as an emotion.

It’s horrible. It is absolute monkey brain in action. Now that I meditate regularly I notice that the anger usually rises and falls quickly. It doesn’t stay, because I can feel it in my body, I can pinpoint it almost as a separate thing to me. I’m not blindly angry about things anymore. I think meditation has made me take a huge step back from it. It makes me want to examine it. There are distinct levels of being you discover when you meditate every day and there is always, always a very distant layer at the top – one that observes. It looks at what you are doing and it doesn’t say, holy hell that is terrible, or well done chump you’ve lost it again. It’s just sort of sitting there, holding you. I suppose if it could speak it would be calm and neutral. Oh I don’t know what it would say! Anger is such a destructive emotion but I absolutely believe that it is better out than in.

You obviously can’t keep directing it at other people, but you can’t suppress it either. Someone did say to me years ago that my torpor of a depression was anger turned inwards. I thought it was a pretty lazy thing to say, like, how handy for you that you’ve compressed my decades-long depression into one sentence. But now, after some years of looking within myself in order to try to correct my less useful tendencies, I see that they were right.

Anger is not really going to go anywhere, I guess, once you have those tendencies. I think this is brilliant from Maria Popova’s website Brain Pickings. She draws the reader’s attention to the poet May Sarton, who says: ‘Sometimes I think the fits of anger are like a huge creative urge gone into reverse, something dammed up that spills over…’ The creative urge gone into reverse is a great way to put it – it’s some kind of life force; tangible, gone in to reverse, yes. It is something dammed up, for sure. It works with triggers, of course it does – the thing that you are getting angry about now might be small, but it is certainly triggered from something that happened to you in your past.

If you want to grow, really grow as a human being, and become the best one you can be, then you have to spend some time figuring out what these triggers are, and then you have to disable them. They must be unpicked, taken apart and made harmless in their dissection – that’s if you want to stop suffering. And don’t we all?

Irritating, resplendent truth

Meditation

One of my favourite blogs to read is Cup Of Jo; Joanna Goddard is a champion of womanhood and love, and I basically want to be her best friend. I came across a piece on it last night, What If You Can’t Have a Baby?, featuring Mara Kofoed talking about her journey from trying desperately hard to have a baby – she did everything she possibly could for ten years – to deciding to stop trying, and instead focus on building a flourishing, happy life without children.

It’s really the life that chose her and her partner Danny, but they fell into it and embraced it. She says: ‘Every ounce of myself is done with pursuing, pursuing, pursuing. It’s like someone has died and instead of dedicating a life to changing what is, we are going to move on and try our very, very best to live the best life that we can.’ We all know that we must to do this to have a shot at being happy – accepting what is, stop chasing what is not. Mara and Danny have both done this, and then some, and you can read about it on their blog About Love. Mara speaks so eloquently on finding wholeness within yourself and it really resonated with me. In fact, she realized without having children what I only could after I had them. You can’t be fulfilled by having a child. That’s your job to do for yourself. Mara says: ‘I realized I was putting pressure on this child to fulfill me, when in reality, it’s my job to find fulfillment, not anyone else.’

It was a huge shock to me when I had a baby that I didn’t feel instantly complete and fulfilled. It took me about five years to get pregnant, and all of that time I put my life on hold with a big ol’ bad attitude of ‘I’ll be happy when I have a baby.’ I was convinced I couldn’t be happy until I had a baby. What a shame, I missed out on a lot of living in those years by steadfastly refusing to accept things as they were. And what a wake-up call, after I was insanely lucky enough to have one son, then another, then another – to realise that it is not my child’s responsibility to bestow happiness upon me. That lesson came pretty quickly after the birth of my first son, but it wasn’t until after my second that the message really hit home: Yo, Jacqueline. You’ve got to make yourself happy. No-one else will. So figure out how to do it, stop looking for an external source, and find it within you. It is the only way. There is no other way. Not money, not status, shopping, shiny things, books, stuff, dinners out, wine, pills, love affairs, not travelling to far-flung fabulous places, not the glorious cuteness of babies and children in their spectacular sweet, sweet innocence, nope – it’s you. It’s inside you. You were born with it.

Don’t get all frustrated and read this like: WHAT the fuck? Happiness is inside yourself? I can’t think of anything more irritating than that, where is my credit card/glass of wine/new dress/thrilling love diversion? That’s what I would have done a few years ago. It’s irritating because it is true, you keep hearing it everywhere because it’s true, you might not even finish reading this post because it is true.

Only YOU can make yourself happy. Then the world opens up, and you see that its stunning gifts are right in front of you. They were there all along.

Out of the darkness arrives the sweet dawn

Mental health

I read this last night in a brilliant collection of essays by Parker J Palmer. ‘Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives.’ He goes on to say that when he got depressed in his early 20s, he thought he had developed a ‘unique and terminal case of failure.’ It wasn’t until many years later he understood that what had really happened was that he had ‘merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.’

Sorry for quoting the shit out of Parker J Palmer, but there is something incredibly powerful in what the author is saying here. Absolutely, when I was younger, I thought I had developed such a singular sense of failure. It certainly didn’t occur to me that all the older, wiser people I came across might have had horrific struggles with bleakness, darkness, depression, crappy things happening to them too, any of it, all of it. In fact, when I think back to the kind of stories I heard about depressed people – well, Sylvia Plath springs to mind and she stuck her head in the oven. What I’m saying is that the tales of depression I heard about always seemed to end pretty badly. As a teenager and young adult, I did not know that most people had been through their version of Palmer’s ‘journey of darkness’, most had troubles, they all grew from them. Grew up, out in every direction, exponentially. I don’t know why I thought most people had escaped it – that arrogance of youth, as Robyn Davidson called it, perhaps. We are all human, we have troubles and sorrow, we all do. We become fully signed up members of the human race when we peak over to the dark side, when we jump in it, or worse, when we get stuck in it.

Parker is talking about us being role models for younger people. And not the kind of role model that is defined by achievement after achievement and acquisition after acquisition (and I say thank God for that! I ain’t got nothin’ but love in my life). No, the kind of role model who is honest, who talks about any struggles they have had with gentleness and with truth. The kind of role model who is compassionate about the human spectrum of emotion, and knows that the darker shades etched on the page bring out the beautiful bright hues of light. He is saying that we should become the kind of grown ups who say this: Don’t be afraid of the dark, it helps you fall in love with the light. It helps you become the light. When it is dark, and you are stumbling and fumbling everywhere for the switch, or for a match (where’s that fucking match?) to light the candle, or for the flicker of dawn – you will find it. It will come.

This is a surety, this is how we are made, this is what it means to be human. It is how life works, a communion of different shades which meld into the beautiful whole that is your existence. (Or come on, when you are depressed, the hole that is your existence). We tread and skid through hills and valleys, all the way through life. As you get older, you really start to see this, you learn it into your bones; how could you not? We are designed to keep afloat in the whirlpool emotions; we get to feel the same levels of deep joy as we do deep sorrow. That is the pay off for our journey into darkness.