WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN
Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.
—Dogen Zenji, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point”
If you are a good mother, a really good mother, nothing bad will ever happen to your child.
You will hold that floppy little neck just so and never let it loll. You will prop her to sleep only in the safe way and never let her roll. You will be a fierce guardian at the gate, keeping slobbery kids and dogs at a distance. When it is time, you will eradicate every risk and danger in the house, rig the drawers and cabinets, remove the pharmaceuticals and solvents, replace the untempered glass, fence off the stairs, bolt the toilet, bar the VCR, cushion everything hard and mean, because the world, it now seems, is such a menacing place, such a vicious and menacing place. But you’ve done your best; you have the proof in every latch and lock that you are a really good mother.
When that illusion cracks, when it slips and scuffs, when it falls and rips open, when you hold the broken tooth or the scalded finger, when an ice cube and a kiss don’t stop the blood, when you drive fast and hard into the night to the fluorescence of the nearest emergency room, when you hold and rock the pain and screams, that’s when you will know what mothering requires of you.
Oh, if it were only a matter of forethought, prevention, and a little hardware.
Most of us live endowed by good fortune and status: as though we will live forever. We live fiercely fortified by the illusion of inalienable rights, among them the right to perfection. So ingrained are these expectations that when something goes kablooie we judge it to be either (a) a faulty model or (b) a faulty operator, but definitely a fault. And for every fault there must be detection, prevention, and remedy, or wherefore the modern science of total quality management?
This is the absolutism, the certitude, with which we divide our view of the world. The either and or, the good and bad, the better and worse, the right and wrong, the sickness and health, the perfect and imperfect, the before and after, the flower and weed, the you and me. In Buddhism this is called dualism, the view of everything as part of a pair of opposites. The world, of course, does not really divide that way, only our egocentric views do. By good, we mean good for me. By wrong, we mean wrong to me. Ask your child to distinguish between a daisy and a dandelion to see that there is no distinction at all. We call it a weed because we don’t like it; we call it a flower because we do; we call it a tragedy because flowers fall. And so it is in life. So it is!
Georgia was nearly two when I called to her one evening from another room. “Bath time!” I sang out, knowing that it would unleash her body and soul into my command. At that age, she had such exuberance for the new, anything new, that just announcing the start of something new would send her rocketing forth. It was my way to get her to do what I wanted.
She came running down the hall toward the carpeted room where, smug with the success of this happy transition, I waited. She barreled in, stubbed her toe on the high pile underfoot, and fell forward against a metal bed frame. There was a pause before I heard the cry, unlike any other I’d yet heard, deep and full, powered by something other than oxygen. I grabbed her and held her close because I was too afraid to look at her precious, perfect face.
But I did. I did look at her face, and afterward, I did everything else I needed to do for my lovely, bleeding girl, to stay with and stand beside her, to reassure and strengthen her, to share the terrible fear and hurt of the awful ordeal that unfolds when accidents happen. We were so lucky to have, as a friend and neighbor, a doctor, a father himself, of Georgia’s playmate Emily. He answered the phone and came down the street in seconds, looked at the cut on her forehead that would not close, told us quickly I hate to tell you this, put us all in his confident hands, and drove us to his office to sew her up.
She was, for me, the first child ever to have endured what she did—the straitjacketed terror of having your head stitched up while your mommy pins you down in place. She was, in truth, one of the last, because soon after this, surgical glue would replace stitches for skin-deep cuts like hers.
We recovered. Of course we all recovered. She would point to her scar and tell the story with its happy baby-talk ending, “Emmy’s daddy fix it.” We got rid of the culprit metal-framed bed. Life went on, and we tucked the episode between the “before” and the “after.”
My mother’s first round of chemotherapy was successful, or so it seemed to us. She revived. Her hair sprouted. Her vigor returned and she went searching for something, anything, that could restore what she could no longer conjure up: feeling like she did before. Before chemo? Before surgery? Before the c word? Before carcinogens, cyclamates, hormone replacement therapy, or second-hand smoke? Before the first cell made its disastrous detour toward mutation? She tried acupuncture, herbs, juices, vitamins, music, laughter, meditation, and some of the old wives’ tales and remedies sent her way. I didn’t tell her there was no “before,” no place, no time, no single fixed point of certain health, certain safety, or certain anything. I didn’t tell her because I, too, wanted her to find it. Hope springs even as flowers fall.
When I went to Los Angeles to meditate with Maezumi Roshi for the first time, it was, by coincidence, the weekend of my thirty-seventh birthday. I told him the occasion, but otherwise I was covering up a lot that weekend, or so I thought—my heartache, my loneliness, my endless longing, and my fear of moving beyond. He gave me a handmade gift: a freshly inked calligraphy of the kanji Chinese characters for spring and fall.
“Would you like to see my inspiration?” he offered, and he pointed to a line of delicate print in a leather-bound volume, where I read: No matter how much the spring wind loves the peach blossoms, they still fall.
“Do you understand it?” He smiled.
“No”; I hid again. I understood it to the bone, just as he had understood me.
“Then let that be your koan,” he replied. Let that be your teaching; let that be your life. So it is, and it is sometimes sad.
There would be many more falls and hurts, health scares and panics. There would be dire test results and ominous CAT scans. There is so very much to learn about this life by its fragility. I could make my daughter safer, but I could not keep her safe. Nor could I do anything for my mother but love her, knowing fuller each day the things that love cannot overcome. Like gravity.
I let Georgia lie in my arms and wet my shoulder with her sobs. Wherever the pain and sorrow take her, I will go too. That’s what a momma’s for. That’s what it’s all about.