Letting Go in Motherhood

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, motherhood is not for the faint-hearted.

In my early twenties I lived in Central Asia working for the Peace Corps, and I was told that the Peace Corps would be the “toughest job you’ll ever love.”

They were wrong. 

Motherhood trumps Peace Corps any day of the week and twice on school nights right  after football practice.

This truth was exquisitely illustrated today when I dropped off my youngest, my baby, to her first day of Pre-School.

With her toddler-size white sandals and a bow in her curly hair, my daughter held my hand tight as we walked to her classroom in the back of the school.  And then, as nature would have it, she released my hand, and courageously walked toward her kind and smiling teacher, not looking back.

It was perfect.

As was the ache in my heart.

Letting go.  Non-attachment.  Non-grasping.  Radical acceptance.  Impermanence.  All elephants of a different color that today felt like impossible spiritual practices in the context of parenthood.

Yet in this moment, 3 ideas from the diverse realms of science, philosophy and poetry are like salve for a wound.

The first idea, from science, I heard in an interview with Matthieu Ricard, a French-Tibetan monk, author, humanitarian, and the Dalai Lama's French interpreter. 

His comment stemmed from a conversation he had  had with an astrophysicist that he documented in his book, The Quantum and the Lotus, of which Matthieu Ricard said:

The most fascinating thing I learned through this dialogue was precisely about something very deep about the nature of reality related to interdependence  and impermanence…

The fact that if one photon or particle split into two, and they shoot out at physically any distance in the universe, they still remain part of a whole.  So there's something there that is still not separate.  So that was a credible insight for me because interdependence is not just the fact that things are related, but also that, therefore, they are devoid of total autonomous, independent existence.

This morning, as my daughter “split off” and “shot out into the universe,” I took solace in knowing she and I “still remain part of a whole.”

The second idea was from philosophy.

In my effort to skillfully embrace this letting-go life stage milestone with my daughter, I sought out the council of Shunryu Suzuki from his classic book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. 

As a lay-person, I figured it was a no-brainer that he would have some sort of good advice about this topic of impermanence.

And voila!

In his chapter called “Attachment, Non-Attachment” he quotes Dogen-zenji (see we all seek council from some wise soul..) who said:

Although everything has Buddha nature, we love flowers, and we do not care for weeds…A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Of this, Shunryu Suzuki writes:

In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem…Happiness is sorrow; sorrow is happiness. There is happiness in difficulty; difficulty in happiness. Even though the ways we feel are different, they are not really different; in essence they are the same.

Reading this passage today somehow offered me permission to allow all the various (and contradictory) emotions of this parent-child milestone, knowing all of them arise and return to the same source.  And, that I should not be so quick to interpret the difficult emotions as some sort of “problem” or sign of grasping.

The third, and final, idea is from poetry.

Having previously read several of his poems, but having none of them “in my blood stream” (as translator Joanna Macy says of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke), I decided to look up a few of the poems of departed Irish poet John O’Donohue.

I remembered that to me his poems felt more like prayers, and today, as I first officially sent my baby girl off into the world, I certainly wanted to do it with a spirit of faith, love and blessing.

With that, I’ll close this entry with 2 poems from Mr. John O’Donohue: For a New Beginning and Beannacht.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Beannacht

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.