meditating is like flossing your teeth

Flossing

Meditation

I dislike anything to do with dentists. That’s dentists, hygienists, dental chairs, that swirly thing you spit in. All of the sounds. But after three back-to-back pregnancies and their affect on my teeth, I am vigilant about getting my teeth cleaned.

Yesterday, as I lay back in the chair getting them scaled and polished, a rhythmic mantra pecked around in my head, ricocheting to the scrape and tap of those sinister metal tools. It went like this: ‘Yep, this sucks. I hate this. Wow, this, I hate this. There is nothing pleasant about this.’ Repetitive, unhelpful and relentless, this cheery ditty droned on and on until the hygienist had finished.

Meditation can be like this.

I don’t skip down to it wearing a floaty silk kaftan, my obedient neurons all set to be plugged in to the universe. Often, I sit there and think: ‘Yep, this sucks. I hate this. Wow, this, I hate this. There is nothing pleasant about this.’ But I do it every day, and I don’t think much about the action itself anymore, otherwise it wouldn’t get done.

I leave the dentist with teeth that are cleaner, shinier. Whiter. And each time I finish meditating, I know that some cleaning has taken place, too. However unremarkable – like the absent-minded sweeping of fallen leaves – or monumental, like the grunting, sweaty pull of a gnarl of poison ivy, my brain feels different after I meditate.

Cleaner, shinier. Whiter. Ready to flash its new-found freshness onto the world.

being stable as a parent

Roots

Meditation, Motherhood

‘You, the unstable, must become a tree’

This is what we have to do as parents.

No matter what has happened in your life, no matter where you are, how often you have messed up, how many bad choices you have made, your roots come down when you have children. You stop letting the wind carry you here and carry you there. You stop looking over your shoulder.

You are the shoulder.

Before my three babies arrived, I was like a dandelion clock. I was fragile. I let life blow me around on its violent and gentle whims. I allowed my past to fully dictate my present, like a childish bully desperate for attention.

In the long months after my first son was born, as I clawed my way through a dark and stifling cloud of post-partum mental illness, I began to understand that I had to get stronger. A lot stronger.

I started to meditate.

By increments – and it took a few years – I started to see that the strength was already there. It is there in all of us. The tree had been planted. All I had to do was let it grow, let the good green leaves breathe in the cold fresh air. Sense its solid, immovable trunk. Observe its leaves fall and peek out again triumphantly, marking Spring. I already was the tree.

So are you.

Milked

Motherhood

The first feed after they are born. When they clamp on to your nipple like tiny crabs resurrected from the sand.

The endless (they end) feeds of the first six weeks, when they grow from minuscule buds into blossoming babies. The bleeding. The cracked nipples. The exquisite pain (it goes). The feeding when they are hungry, when they are tired, when they just want to be close. When you just want to be close.

The night feeds. Suckling milk all through the long night. Gulping, drinking. Growing. The exhaustion: Get off my boob I can not feed you for another second. The deep joy: I could feed you forever. Don’t grow.

The blind hunger of an infant. You can feel their primal urge. Come on! Feed me! Any breast will do! The older baby, looking up at you, catching your eye. Smiling. Trying to chat in their baby way between feeds. Love.

And my 18-month-old, my last baby. He’s weaning. The feeds are dropping rapidly. My body is folding back into itself, finally becoming mine again, its liquids flowing through intricate portals and vessels – easing back to nourishing one body, instead of two.

No more babies to feed. I’m milked.

The hum

Creativity

I listened to Elizabeth Gilbert this morning talking about The Curiosity-Driven Life, and it blew my mind a little. I didn’t run out to the world and shout Hallelujah, but something popped in me. A recognition.

The talk spun off a reader who had posted a comment on her Facebook page. Elizabeth had offered her inspirational call to arms on creativity, another urge to ‘follow your passion.’ And the reader was like, right, that’s it, I’ve had it with you passionate people talking about passion. Shut right up about passion! I don’t know what my passion is and it’s making me really distressed that all you passionate people do.

Elizabeth, being the magician that she is, was right on it. She totally got it. Put down the word passion, she said, and follow your curiosity. What a relief! Like that reader, all my life I have flitted from one thing to the next, feeling incredibly guilty about it. I always knew I would write but I became confused about the process. Where was the burning passion? Why wasn’t I leaping out of bed in the morning to pursue this passion? What exactly was the passion anyway?

I became fascinated with people who had a singular purpose. I sing. I’m a doctor. I’m a gardener. I’m a carpenter. I’m a lawyer. You meet these people who have never questioned what they are doing in life. They seem born to do it. They are at ease.

Elizabeth Gilbert calls them jackhammers – early on, they have identified what they are good at and they get about it like jackhammers. Newsflash: these people are fairly rare.

The rest of us, she says, are hummingbirds. We flit from one thing to another, weaving ideas here and there and, as she puts it so brilliantly, we end up cross-pollinating the world. Just like those blessed people who are sailing on their passion, we are blessed too – we have rich lives too.

We follow the hum of the universe, and we don’t feel bad about ourselves for doing it. We are the goddam hummingbirds!

The hidden poets

Meditation

I’ve been writing this blog for the time of dot in the infinity of the universe (that’s precisely four days) and already, it’s freed something in the ether.

Opening up in this infinitesimal way has lit up something for other people too. This tap on the shoulder from my soul has unconsciously touched at other people’s inner whispers.

In this time of pinpoint-on-a-dot, someone has given me their memoir to read (it’s electric), someone has given me their short stories to edit (they fizz) and someone else has shown me their poems (they are life, set to music).

This is not coincidence. This is what happens when you begin to open yourself up to the consciousness within. We are all connected to something so pure and so unsullied that when we even venture near it, in however small a way, our world starts to explosively bloom, like the first fierce flowers of spring.

Like bees to honey, people cannot help but be attracted to someone else who is connecting to their soul. They don’t know why they are giving up their glorious goods now, they don’t know why that now is the time to start telling people about their work and to start talking about it, but they feel compelled to. Gently.

The hidden poets come out. The people with stories they need to tell, the people whose music is being pulled into the universe.

Our songs to the world.

I’ve got no more brain left

Meditation

I’m referring to the 3-year-old again. This is what he says precipitating a meltdown, and I think it is a perfect way to describe how the adult brain feels pre-meltdown. Of course, as adults, we are not allowed to let it all go like this. Instead of releasing all that stress and confusion into a glorious, freeing tantrum, we have to swallow it back down again. Ugh.

It will come out somehow. Either immediately as a more decorous display than a toddler could throw up – some tears, a few words of rudeness to whoever is closest to us, two fingers up to the driver who wouldn’t let us in to the lane – or later, in those few glasses of wine we will pour ourselves or (if we are wiser) in that exercise class or solo run.

What I aim for now is not getting to the stage when I’ve Got No More Brain Left. I want to pass this on to my sons too. That doesn’t mean suppress anything, God, no! It means trying to let it out in the healthiest way possible. And for toddlers, that can be a tantrum, absolutely. That’s just what they do, and sometimes you have to let them at it – for a while anyway.

For me, it’s meditation. I’m working on doing that exercise class or run too, but for the last few years – since I began to take meditation seriously – I haven’t even touched the place where I’ve had no more brain left.

Before I started a meditation practice, I lived in that place. And it was painful.

You get what you get (and you don’t get upset)

Motherhood

This has been one of my three-year-old’s favourite sayings of late, nabbed cheerfully from his kindergarten teacher who has been using it a lot with him because when said tot gets what he gets, he pretty much always gets upset.

Apart from robbing the phrase and wheeling it out when my kids are, say, given an apple after dinner instead of a chocolate biscuit, I’ve been internally throwing it at things in my own life to see how my perspective changes – on the little stuff and the big stuff.

Chose the till at the supermarket where someone has just had a weird item scanned and the harassed check-out assistant has to ring a bell to get help and delay the whole queue for inifinity? You get what you get and you don’t get upset. You haven’t achieved what you wanted to with your life (yet) because something terrible happened to you? You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

See how it works? It’s not about pretending things aren’t happening or haven’t happened. It’s about acceptance.

You get what you get and you don’t get upset. Just don’t give me an apple instead of a chocolate biscuit.

Interdependence

Friendship, Mental health

I think all the time now about how dependent we are on each other. I’m not sure how clear that was to me before the emergence of Covid 19.

There’s the obvious thing we must rely upon each other for: keeping each other safe. We have to hope that others are taking the same precautions as us. We have to trust the people around us, in every situation. We have to rest on faith or a feeling that the majority of humanity wants their respective community to heal and look after each other, in less urgent times and also in the wider context of a pandemic.

Then we get into intangible territory. Like, you are me and I am you shit. We are all one. My actions have ripple effects on yours, and yours on mine. Your pain is not my pain and my pain is not yours – but pain is universal. We all tug at alternate strands of the same human pain at different times in our life. Nobody escapes. What do I mean? *shrugs shoulders.* I don’t know. I’m still working it out. The last rake of years have brought me to the point where I now deeply understand: I need community like I need air, food and water. I need to understand my place in the world, just like my children do. In fact, I think my understanding of my place in the world is integral to my children’s sense of belonging as well.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one who feels this way, but this whole stinking coronavirus shebang has made me question everything.

Have I made the right choices in life? Have I contributed positively to society, to the people around me? Have my actions been purely for my own benefit, or have I had other people in mind also? I don’t mean my children. It’s pretty easy as a parent to act for the greater good of your children. Or at least, you instinctively try.

I really don’t think you can be happy (whatever the HELL that means) unless you are intrinsically engaged in making other people happy too.

In the past, I have, on occasion, stepped back from any offering of community. Honestly, I was suspicious of it. What is this thing where people do things for each other and expect nothing in return? What is this… this… interdependence?

What is it when you read or hear a story about someone who is suffering and you can feel their pain even though you do not know them or you have not met them?

It is – being human.

Amigos

Mental health, Motherhood

I’d thought that the ever-present stress that is the pandemic hadn’t affected my children at all. Yes, they had to wash their hands a lot more often; they saw me glued to the news for stretches of time, whereas before I’d diligently hidden my furtive information gathering, worried that the mere sight of a phone in my hand might somehow harm them.

[An aside – I’m writing this while my youngest, two, is lying on the floor yelling chocyat NOW, chocyat NOW! because we are on holidays in Wexford and I’ve been less precious about what they put in their mouths. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

Now that they are allowed more freedom to play in the park they come back with garbled stories – did I know that all rabbits had coronavirus? Did I know what would happen if coronavirus killed all the adults and all the children took over the world? (They’d rob banks and be allowed to drink coca-cola, that’s what). Did I know they weren’t really bothered about coronavirus apart from – apart from – we don’t want YOU to die Mama.

Yet something has changed for them. It is particularly noticeable with the eldest, who is six. He has a new friend, called Fang.

Fang is a big cuddly owl and my son has formed a strong attachment to him. He puts him down for naps. He feeds him at each mealtime, from his own plate: a forkful for him, a forkful for Fang. He cuddles him during TV time. He talks to him a lot, whispering stories about castles and ninjas and battles and storms. He sometimes talks through him, too: Mum, Fang wants a cuddle. Mum, Fang is tired now, he wants to sleep. Mum, Fang’s feeling sad right now.

[An aside – the chocyat chanting toddler is now hanging from my neck, perched at the top of my back, whispering rhythmically in my ear: bwing me chocyat, bwing me chocyat. Perhaps he’s hoping this gentler approach might work. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

My son won’t go to bed without Fang. He won’t go in the car without Fang. He takes such good care of him. Maybe inspired by their brother, the other two have found similar friends, and though the relationship isn’t quite as intense, it is there. The four-year-old has a dragon, called Peak, and the chocolate terrorist has a baby bull, called I. Where I see my three boys at home, I usually see Fang, Peak and I in tow, either under their little arms, or nearby, strewn on the floor but distinctly not lost.

I had always wondered about the cuddly toy thing, because no matter what stuffed toy I gave them previously – rabbit, teddy, lamb, dog, kangaroo – they had shown no interest whatsoever, even a sociopathic coldness towards them. I actually tried to force them to bond with plush, soft things – look! Here’s your teddy, aw, night night teddy but they would just look at me blankly, turning their backs as the sweetly staring creatures fell idly to the floor.

Now, and only since the pandemic hit, these three stuffed toys have shot to the top of the toy hierarchy. My eldest son cannot do without his new friend, who is providing something no-one else can. His ardent commitment to this relationship is no coincidence but a direct result of worry he’s absorbed about Covid-19. All three of them, even the two year old, have needed this extra crutch.

[An aside – my youngest, not short of attention all morning and the recipient of a fine big lunch, has resorted to hitting me. It’s hard to concentrate but I’ll keep going, otherwise it might be another month before I write one of these posts.]

They are so smart, these kids. They know stuff, just like we do. They can’t fully express it or really explain about how they are feeling but they absorb the mood around them. They bathe in the world, and they soak in stress. They can hear you when you complain. They internalise it. They piece together snippets of adult conversation. They hear bits of grim news, maybe on the radio when you are turning the dial to a different channel. They can tell something is wrong by the look on your face.

Only now, and specifically with the meteoric rise of Fang in the household (an owl to whom even I have become attached), can I see that this shift in the world’s axis has had a monumental affect on my three small boys. They have changed. They are different.