Present to yourself, gift to the world

Meditation, Motherhood

In this podcast, I love what Jillian Lavender says about taking time for yourself, in her case specifically to meditate. She says something like, let’s turn on its head this whole idea of carving out some time for some self-care (yes, self-care, irritating term, but it is self-care nonetheless so let’s go with it) being selfish. It is not selfish, she says, it is the most generous thing you could do for yourself and for your family.

Yes, you are taking yourself away from them for ten minutes, or fifteen, or however long you can stretch to, and it often takes some mathematical maneuvering to find the time, particularly if you have very young children, but things have always changed when you get back. Your perspective has always shifted.

Having small children is stressful, it just is, the end. I’ve got a five year old, three year old and a one year old. The three year old is almost always having tantrums, the five year old isn’t far behind him and the one year old – well the poor soul is suffering so much with cutting teeth, and has been since soon after birth. It means he wakes about five or six times a night, and because he’s breastfed, it’s the only way I can comfort him. Some days, I just find it all really stressful. Let me be clear, the glory hours far outweigh the drudgy ones. Having children is exploding stars and love and joy; but it’s a headwreck too. I’m not sure how other mothers do it, but I find all the constant screaming and shouting really challenging (ahem, to say the least) and the problem with it is, my monkey beast comes out, every time, and I just want to shout and scream back. My son threw an apple at me last night and guess what? I threw it back. I feel terrible about it, it’s not cool behavior for an adult.

So back to what Jillian said, in my case it’s true: I think meditating is the most generous thing I can do for my family and for me, because when I am consistent with doing it, it makes me a better person. It just does. Better, stronger, calmer, less tired, less snappy, less of a dick. It also gives me the extra gift of deeply appreciating the smaller moments, the fleeting pearls of mothering these beautiful tiny children that I know I will wear like a precious, treasured necklace when they are grown.

Good enough

Creativity

I couldn’t find the time yesterday to write a post, not the post that I wanted to write anyway. When I did put one up, I thought: it’s not good enough, but it will have to do.

If, like me, you tumble and wrestle with the idea of not being good enough then you might notice one of two things happening in your life. 1) You think, it’s not good enough so I’m not going to do it at all or 2) You think, it’s not good enough, it has to be perfect, so I won’t stop until it is perfect. If it’s the latter, you are probably making your own life – and everyone else’s around you – a misery in the relentless pursuit of an impossible ideal. If it’s the former, it’s much more serious. You are rejecting life itself.

Who says it’s not good enough anyway? Cue trumpet sounds: yes, it’s that crotchety old critic in your head, there to cheer you on as usual – not, as Mike Myers would say in Wayne’s World, a highly intellectual film I watched as a teenager. At this stage, I’ve started about twenty novels, I’ve got endless poems scribbled here and there, and bits of random prose scattered across countless notebooks. All seeds that weren’t watered. Nothing has been finished because my ‘you are not good enough’ voice has been deafening these last few decades. I allowed it to paralyze me for years. I’m middle-aged now, and even writing this I’m thinking – no! No you are not! But yes, yes I am, I am middle-aged now and I have left it this long to turn around and fight back with great force against the ‘not good enough’ mantra.

Lately, I’ve understood that there is no such thing as not being good enough. It’s just a ghost, a kind of mental haunting, utter nonsense thrown up from some stuck, dodgy part of your brain. I fell foul of perfectionist problem number one. It was my downfall, in many areas of my life. I’m not good enough, so I’m not going to try. What that really meant was that I was terrified of failing. How brave people are who put their ideas, their creations, out into the world! My perfectionist number one problem was not conscious, but it is now. Perhaps it’s age, or meditation, but it has come sharply into consciousness – so knife-like, in fact, that I can feel the blade of it sliver over me each day.

I have work to do. Creative work, ninja-style. That means I have to kick the butt of that old it’s not good enough pal of mine. It feels urgent because that cranky, toothless critic has kept me in a stupor for almost a quarter of a century. Perfectionism is a kind of evil that can freeze you into a block of ice – and what does it take to make you melt? Honestly, I’m just finding out myself, but it’s happening to me at the moment. I’m melting. I’m dripping. It won’t stop because frankly, telling myself that I’m not good enough is just not fucking good enough anymore.

Quick! Go sit still

Meditation

‘I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one,’ said Gandhi. Great things come out of stillness. Out of the quiet and nourishing womb, comes a newborn. Out of the silent embrace of sleep, comes a fresh perspective on another day. Out of the deep cavern of the earth, roots twist in and then, like a miracle, appears all the glory of plants. The waves that whirl on the surface of the ocean are mere froth masking its vast, calm liquid depths. All things must be still before they explode into life. So must we.

Oh, alright. You get it. But it’s so hard to stop and be still (and I don’t mean sitting numbly watching Netflix). When we do try, we berate ourselves for not being in constant motion, carrying out the urgent mechanics of life – like robots. Right now, it’s a challenge for me to find time to meditate and write, two things I really want to do. I’m busy with the bulbous, boisterous task of raising three small boys. And that’s cool, that is exactly how I wanted it, it is what I’ve chosen for myself. But I know that enriching myself by meditating and writing will absolutely benefit my boys – so I keep trying to snatch slivers of time to stuff full of silence, and then full of words. I stick my neck out a bit to meditate. People in my street probably think I’m odd because I often go and hide in the car to do it when my husband gets home. I’ve done it in the loos at work, and in random hotel loos too. In coffee shops. Libraries. Supermarket car parks. The breastfeeding chair in St Stephen’s Green shopping centre (with the baby). Airport lounge. Bus stop. Dentist waiting room. I’m always scoping places out and thinking: would it be weird if I meditated here? Normally the answer is yes – but I do it anyway, because I can’t be going off to sit on the foothills of the Himalayas to do it. My life is here, not on a fantasy mountain.

I find a way to make it work. At 4.30am (I go back to sleep afterwards, come on!), when the baby naps, when the boys are watching a sneaky episode of PJ Masks, when I’ve nipped out to the supermarket. And particularly in busy times, when there is no time to meditate, I know that for me it is extra important to meditate. That is, to remove my bananas, jumping jack brain out of the melee for a short while so it can soothe itself, even just a little. I don’t see the benefits immediately, they are accumulative; it’s often days, weeks, or even months later that I piece together the puzzle and note that it was the deliberate bouts of silence that made the noise bearable. No: that made the noise beautiful.

A tale of two cities

Mental health

Ten years ago, I spent a month in New York with my sister, who lives there. It was Spring. The city was fizzy and infused with life – times a gazillion. I was in an exploratory mood and opened myself up. I studied everything and everyone around me; tiny things like how an older lady with very black hair stuffed into a red knitted hat was sitting on a bench, gesticulating to her male friend, who was nodding vehemently while clutching an over-flowing carpet bag. Or how, in one glossy neighborhood, all the women, heck all the men too, were so groomed that they seemed to shine, as if someone had painted them on to the street. I nearly bumped into Yoko Ono on the corner of a block and it was just one of those New York things – yep, there’s the iconic Yoko, just sauntering down the street. Horns honked with a special New York dialect that sounded like music to me, people yelled across the street, laughed, fought like lovers, carted bags of large, doughy freshly baked bread as they hightailed it down the street.

Everything was amazing. All of it. The people, the noise, the dirt, the guts, the glamour. It sounds corny, but I felt like New York opened its arms, drew me in, then gave me gift, after gift – wonderfully weird conversations, belly laughs, random, quicksilver friendships, beautiful vistas (even if it was rubbish over-flowing in a trashcan, I found beauty in it), things that made me cry with joy or want to punch the air. I was riding on a kinetic, almost tangible, vital energy I’d immediately tapped into on arrival and I didn’t want to ever stop skidding about on it. The city has a humongous personality, and if you get on the right side of it, it’s all-consuming, utterly intoxicating, enough is never enough; you want to keep piling more on.

A couple of years later, I went again. My mood was different, though I didn’t realise it at the time. I was closed off, sad. Worried about things. New York folded its arms, shrugged. It turned away. People were rude, relentlessly so. Its streets really were mean, just like the Scorsese film. People shoved and pushed, rolled their eyes. They had no time to talk. They didn’t want to know. I felt stifled, bewildered, wondering where ‘my’ city had gone.

Some time later I stumbled upon a quote by Anaïs Nin: We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are, and with a visceral jolt back to the snapshots in my head, I thought of New York. Each time I was there, I had polar opposite lenses on. The later trip, I somehow became entangled with a grim underbelly of the city and its bleak undertow of negativity. And that first, explosively exquisite time – well. I’d risen up like freshly bloomed flower, delicate face turning eagerly up to the rain, sure of the nourishment that was to come.

I think about these two city trips sometimes. Why is it that when you are cranky as hell you come into contact with more of the same? Why, when you are as happy as a clam, do you get showered with an ocean of joy? It’s unfair, isn’t it? Perhaps the first time, New York should have been more unkind, made me wobble on its giddy merry-go-round. Later, it might have had the decency to cheer me up, throw me a few tidbits to haul me out of my grump. There’s a lot of awfully woo-woo stuff I could reference here but I won’t. If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that this is how life works.

Vigilance on all fronts

Mental health

I went to see author of Mind On Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, Arnold Thomas Fanning, speak yesterday. Something he said about his recovery struck me: he used the word vigilance. He’s been well for years now; he’s on medication, he’s had therapy – but he also said he has to remain vigilant for the returning signs of mental deterioration.

It’s something I used to joke about with friends years ago, how to handle depression. It’s Vigilance On All Fronts, I used to say, with a half-hearted Charlie’s Angels move, imaginary gun in hand. As the years went on and my messy 20s morphed into my 30s – when shit was getting really real, as in, if you don’t do something about this ongoing mental health problem of yours, your life is going to be fucked – it began to dawn on me that there is no one single way to keep yourself out of the gloopy mire of depression. If you are prone to it, and you are not constantly careful, always on the watch for it, your feet will always remain boggy and muddy and you might never be free of it.

I don’t think you ever feel free from it anyway. Ugh. Once your brain has gone there, and you know it can go there, there is always the fear of slipping back. When I was trying to get out of it in early adulthood (impossible in my teens – all adults in my life were mystified by my behavior, even though it was straight up mental illness, clear as a blue day) it felt that most of my body was covered in this miry muck, even my face. I was blinded by it.

There was no ability to pursue a ‘vigilance on all fronts’ plan as I couldn’t even get to point one, letter A, any start of any plan. My question most days was as simple as how can I get out of bed when I don’t feel that life is worth living? Yesterday’s talk, if I’m honest, made me feel a sharp sliver of depression all over again, because it reminded me of that gruesome time: teens, 20s, early 30s, then post-natal mental illness too, all of it – and it made me briefly terrified that I’d have to go back to any of those places. I don’t want to ever go back but that is not how mental illness works. It is ruthless and can strike at any time.

Now from the vantage point of feeling (relatively) well, I know that vigilance on all fronts works to prevent a relapse. It means that you simply can’t let any area of your life slip for long. You have some leeway, but not much. Right now, there are behaviors in certain areas of my life that I will have to rein in otherwise the looming beast will be back. Once you are there, it is hard to get out of it. If you have fallen down the black pit, in the short-term, the only way to claw out of it is with medical help. Usually pills, and talking to someone who knows the workings of the mind. But if you are a fair distance from that hollow pit, you can still practice vigilance on all fronts. It should keep you away from the edge, and give you some safety rope if you do fall in.

For me, vigilance on all fronts is: getting enough sleep (*hysterical laughter in background), making sure I eat properly (though I’m not clear on what this is anymore), exercise (always on the to-do list, never done), not drinking too much, preferably nothing, listening to my kids, pursuing an activity of the soul (usually writing or reading, or walking on the beach), making sure I’ve had some nourishing conversations with friends, trying to listen to and understand my husband, that other entwined root of the precious tree that is my family, and finally, hands down – the big one, the one that I’ve found – for me – keeps my brain and my feet firmly out of that mire: meditating, every day.

Mud song

Motherhood

I was in the countryside yesterday, visiting a relative. There was a cherry tree. Pots and pots of muddy things, seedlings of vegetables like radishes, kale and carrots. Scallions stood in a row like soldiers, their tart green tops fading into pristine white bottoms, nestled smartly in the warm brown earth. There were large, unidentifiable tubs and old containers filled with stagnant rainwater, leaves, floating bits of moss and sticks. A toadstool. There was an ancient, discarded tractor, such a dignified old workhorse, resting proudly, a relic in the muddy field – its once-majestic utility long rusted over. Ghosts of past men who worked the land hovered around it, beckoning me to peek inside, use my imagination to see that where now stood wild daisies and tufted roots of grass, knotted hands once shifted the gears and turned the giant metal wheels, day in and day out.

While my other two boys ran free, I followed my one year old as he wobbled and toddled and fell with joy into the damp grass, one chubby baby hand clutching a sausage stolen from the stove. He watched the horses in the field, wide-eyed at their muscly, gentle beauty. The clouds shifted swiftly, revealing a cool June sun, shards of its rays streaming down into the land, catching the light on his blonde baby curls and the royal blue glint of tiny wellies on his feet.

All the while, in the sleepy, slow country morning, he kept emitting that very particular baby squeal of delight. It is the sound of how you feel when you are completely in the flow of nature, of the seasons, of the earth around you. It’s kind of an ‘Ah-ooo’ sound, with the ‘Ah’ higher than the ‘ooo’. It was the sound of him and the world, together, interchangeable.

A sound like this, uttered out loud, is something we forget as we grow. As adults we can only revel in its cadence second-hand, when we hear a child sing it like this, or an animal. But we absolutely still feel it. How could we not? We don’t make that ‘Ah-ooo’ sound, but we feel that deep joy, that contentment, often when we least expect it. We might feel it when we are sitting in the sun, or walking on the beach, or pottering in the garden, poking in the mud. Or in a moment when we catch the wind on our face and feel oh! so alive: there was a scent, a touch of the moving air, that brought you out of your head and back to yourself.

‘Ah-ooo’ is the child’s song to the universe, it’s like they are talking to nature itself. They are saying: You give me the cool grass under my feet, these big-lashed horses, these pink and purple and blue flowers, this outdoor soup, this mud with things that grow in it – and I howl thank you. ‘Ah-oo’. I am happy in this earth.

No time for dragons

Motherhood

‘Absolutely no time for dragons,’ I yelled this morning as I wrestled my middle child into his car seat. Absolutely no time for dragons, I snapped again, running back from the car and into the house to grab coats, bags, books and lots of other random stuff I needed for the order of the day.

I was still on the dragon rant five minutes later, after I’d hauled everything in the car, checked all children were there, picked my glasses off the dirty floor and wiped them on my scratchy top. Dragons! The cheek of him, thinking I’ve got time to crawl in behind the couch at 7.50am on a school day to find his teeny tiny purple-with-darker-purple-wings plastic dragon that was his latest toy du jour.

All the boys fell silent as I adjusted the radio to a moody concerto from Lyric FM and got on my way in the bleak morning June rain. No time for dragons! June rain! echoed in my head on the short drive to drop my eldest son to school, and my middle son to preschool. But by the time I’d helped my five year old with his rucksack, and he’d stroked me on the hand to tell me two important things 1) He loved me and 2) Which Lego he wanted both for his birthday and his friend’s birthday, all my creaky morning edges had softened out and I got to thinking – ah now, does there really have to be such absolute no time for dragons?

That is obviously what childhood is all about. I looked at my remaining two sons in the rear view mirror. The dragon whisperer was subdued, the baby too. Perhaps he thought I’d really hammed up the dragon thing, like, had it really been too monumental a request to carry out for his beloved older brother, who shows him important things like how to jump off the windowsill and onto the couch without smashing his head off the floor, and how to choose a piece of Lego to put in his mouth that is large enough not to choke on?

I drop my second son off, and as I help him wriggle out of his coat I ask, where’s the dragon again? I say it with a serious enough tone that he knows I will make it a top priority when I get home, over picking cement-like Cheerios off the floor, over folding the laundry, and tackling the messy living-room. I want him to know that, despite my quick temper and dire organisational abilities in the morning, there will always be time for dragons in these glistening first years of his life.

You’re ok – I’m not ok

Mental health

‘I assert that life is beautiful in spite of everything!’ says Tchaikovsky in one of his letters which I read here, in an article written by the impeccable Maria Popova. Tchaikovsky had lapses of stinking depression, too. Maria notes that what was ‘most remarkable yet quintessentially human about his disposition was the ability to assure his loved ones of the very things he was unable to internalize himself.’

This is so true: how easy it is to comfort others but be ruthless towards ourselves. What a relief it is to give a rousing speech to a friend about how to ‘fix’ their life, while coldly ignoring our own needs. It soothes our existential wounds, helping others, diving deep into their problems while callously ignoring our own. We can do this with singular self-destructiveness, stubbornly deflecting the glare of our own troubles, rushing to the aid of everyone else. Listen, I know that’s nice for everybody else but if we do this we risk getting stuck in a brutal living hell; there’s an underlying, inescapable pulse in people who do this, a horror of facing their feelings, a bone-tired disinclination to come to their own rescue. Whole lives can go by and people can die without recognizing this.

Everybody deserves to be happy – trite but true, and we must assimilate this information as adults, if we haven’t done so as children. It’s our responsibility to make ourselves happy (yes, I know: newsflash! I have only recently discovered this.) Of course, making others happy is the one of the genuine great joys (and arguably ultimate purpose) of life but your cells will only recognize, and so be nourished by, that joy if you are doing it from a stable base of your own contentment.

You can help and help – giving parts of you away that you haven’t ever dared to give yourself – until you are so tired you suddenly don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. And it’s not physical fatigue, it’s the sort of tiredness spurred by the recognition and subsequent quashing of a small voice inside you that says: What about me? Is it it ok to help me, too?

Well, it’s not just ok to help yourself, it is essential to the evolution of the self, to the growth of your family, to the circle of people around you, and the city or town or country in which you live. And actually, all your descendants too, because all sorts of pain is sleepily passed down through generations, and you can stop it.

Here’s the story of Hercules and The Wagoner to clumsily hammer the point home. A farmer is stuck on a muddy road in the pissing rain, the wheel of his wagon wedged into the mud. He sits and swears and curses the mud and the wheel, shaking his fist at heaven. Come on Hercules, do me a solid here! Do fucking something! Eventually Hercules comes down, no doubt rolling his eyes, and says ‘Put your shoulder to the wheel, urge on your horses… I won’t help you unless you make some effort to help yourself.’ The wagoner gets it, stops giving out, starts to at least try to push the wheel and coax his horses on. Hercules readily helps. Everything shifts; everything changes.

Caveat: If you are so profoundly depressed that you can barely move or think or speak, and someone quotes Hercules and The Wagoner to you, tell them to fuck off.

What time is it, Mr Wolf?

Mental health, Motherhood

I’ve just finished Dolly Alderton’s book Everything I Know About Love, a beautifully honest, funny love song to her 20s and to her coterie of female friends. It wasn’t one of those happy, jaunty love songs though – rather a gritty raw one; she suffered, she shagged, she loved, she got dumped, she drank, she worked her butt off. She says near the end, as she approaches her 30th birthday, how it’s the ultimate cliche – but she didn’t think aging would happen to her.

I am more than a decade down the line, and yes, I didn’t think it would happen to me either. Jennifer O’Connell wrote a great piece in the Irish Times the other day; it made me laugh. She mentions the ten-year chasm between her imagined self (32) and her actual self, around my age. And I reckon many of us – not just deluded middle-aged men – spend a lot of time feeling aged 17 or whatever age cut us most on the inside, no matter what we look like on the outside; no matter what age we are. Perhaps we feel like a child whose toy has been snatched away, or a teenager sneaking a thrilling fag when we hear a heady, resonant song from our youth. Or we might feel full of the perfect, arrogant daring of our early 20s, when we were pretty sure we were going to change the world.

As old man time ticks on, women are left in a wondrous pickle because we all, inside, fucking love getting older – and mostly, outside, hate getting older. I’m expecting a knotty, vastly irritating wrestle with aging because I have always looked younger than I am. I hated it in my teens and 20s. I was never taken seriously, always asked for ID, always treated like the baby of the group – a role I played up to without realizing that it was retarding my development into womanhood. Men tended to speak to me as if I were a child, and if they fancied me it made me a little suspicious because I wasn’t womanly, only girlish. In my 30s, looking young was a badge of honour – people looked twice when I said I was 35 or 36, saying I looked about 22. My childlike personality, its resolute static, added to the whole effect.

Really, I was just terrified of claiming adulthood. I thought it was for other people. Older people. Now, I’ve entirely skipped a significant portion of adulthood and moved directly into middle age. I’m kind of ok with it. Definitely great to be alive, yep. After three children, all the accompanying sleepless nights, and some bloody shocking health shocks along the way, I look every single one of my nearly 43 years. I love to feel my age but yes, there is, shall we say, a small (and it is small) dissatisfaction with actually looking my age. It’s damn hard for any woman to be all pioneering, marching to the mantra of ‘Yeh, alright, I’m wearing my grey hair with pride, even on my vagina,’ and there are women who are doing that and I totally want to be them. Honestly.

In front of my nieces at the weekend, I kept adjusting my language. They were obsessed with my boobs and belly and breastfeeding, pointing and poking and prodding – and I really had to counsel myself to not say anything negative about my aging body. I want them to think it’s all great. Even though I don’t necessarily think it’s all great.

I want to. But I don’t.

What do you know?

Meditation, Motherhood

‘My mind is back now,’ said one of my boys last night, bounding up the stairs after a lengthy tantrum because I’d switched the TV off. Interesting, I thought. How the hell did you know that you’d lost your mind when you went to that electric, crimson place of no reason? Then I just said, ‘I’m glad it’s back,’ and I continued feeding my one year old, one eye to my mono-milkable boob with its steadily dropping supply.

So you know that you had lost your mind, here, in the murky, marvellous waters of early childhood? And, of course, you don’t know yet that the ability to cognize such a deep and sensible thing will totally disappear on you, to resurface well into adulthood. If you are lucky.

Wow. How many other things do we ‘know’ at one, two, at three, four, five – then lose completely as we grow, as we learn to cue and curb our behaviours and cater to what we think people want from us? Do we know that we are whole – that we are born this way? It’s plain to see, I’ve seen it in all my babies: they are whole. We were whole, then perhaps our psyches split into hundreds of shards, different personalities we try out, different ways of being. Do we know that we are good? Because there can be no intention to be ‘bad’ when you are so young you remember the sound of your mother’s heart in the womb. Do we know that time is not linear but spherical, always now, never then and never tomorrow?

What do we know about love? Do we know that we are love, until someone unwittingly dismantles that reality, for some children much sooner than others? And do we know about belonging? That every single one of us was born with the same right to be here, with the same potential in our tiny sacred souls and with equal importance to the unfurling of the planet?

We know, we know, we know… in infancy we know so much. Right now I’m thinking it’s absurd that I meditate, that I desperately search for slivers of day so I can be still, because essentially what it is I’m learning is how to be an infant again. To know I’m whole, to know I’m good, to fall into the whirl of time and just be in it – to love – and to belong.