WHO’S THE REAL WORKHORSE IN THE FAMILY?
If you find one thing wearisome, you will find everything wearisome.
—Dogen Zenji, “Guidelines for Studying the Way”
In the midst of my drudgery, I look up and wonder where the good times went.
When I walked away from my career to create a family, my colleagues kidded that I was “retiring to a life of cats and flowers.” So true, so true. And cat hair and pollen dust, fleas and weevils, stains and stink, sanitizing and deodorizing, boiling, wiping, scraping, scrubbing, loading, folding, mending, mounding, hounding, and work, work, work.
Funny, I felt the same way every day at the office.
We can walk away from our jobs yet leave hardly a thing behind, because we bring our discriminating mind with us—the mind that values and devalues, weighs and critiques, complains and compares. Now, as then, nearly every day I feel overwhelmed and out of time. Often I feel the work is beneath me. Often I feel the work is beyond me. It must be important to me to feel that way. It must be important to me to think of my life as hard work and myself as a workhorse. Sometimes it feels good to feel so bad; it feels high to feel so low.
Early in my Zen practice, I attended a retreat and was given the job of ringing a handheld bell as the priest entered the meditation hall to perform services, three times a day. The entry and exit ritual required that I ring this little bell fourteen times, blending with the rhythm of other bells and bows in the ceremony—a tricky bit of orchestration. As you might expect from what I’ve told you, this job was very hard work for me, and I worked hard at it. I didn’t just work at it the fourteen seconds during each service that my little bell was to sound; I worked at it all day and night. I worked at it in my head, in my sleep, and under my breath, working and reworking to arrive at the ideal beat, working and reworking in pursuit of the right ring. It was exhausting, but I never quit working at it.
Toward the end of the retreat, the teacher asked me if I was ready to advance my practice by moving into the study of koans, the ancient teaching stories used in my Zen tradition to deepen meditation. “I can’t possibly do that,” I answered sincerely, my mind ringing with chings. “I’m already doing the bell.”
He nodded in complete understanding.
“You seem to have a little problem with your work ethic,” he said. I didn’t follow, since I judged myself to be the hardest worker there ever was.
“You make everything work,” he said.
I do. Do you?
When you are scraping the crusted cereal from the wall with a chipped fingernail, do not think: For this I gave up a vice presidency. When you are folding a stack of late-night laundry, do not think: This is my sixth load this week and it’s only Monday. When you stand over a sink of three-day-old dishes, do not think: When, oh when, will I ever catch up? And while you’re at it, please don’t complain about the mindless nature of a mother’s work. The great transformative potential of a mother’s work is that it is mindless. No thinking of any kind is required.
Now you know when I got the hang of that bell.
Back in the wee months, when I faced up to the fact that Georgia would be drinking more from a bottle than from a breast, I called a girlfriend who had taken this route ahead of me and asked her how she did it. I was looking for a system, some way to streamline what loomed as an impossibly complicated and time-consuming ordeal. “Every night I boiled the bottles and the nipples, then boiled the water and mixed the powder and filled the bottles and stored them in the refrigerator for the next day,” she told me. You did? Every night? Twelve bottles? I could hardly believe it. This was more work than anything I’d heard of in my twenty-year career of intensely hard work. Where’s the technology? Where’s the automation? Where’s the one-touch activation? We lived in a world where you could clear your driving record in a single visit to the Web Traffic School, but moms were still boiling bottles past midnight? Where’s the twenty-first century? It didn’t occur to me that I was making work out of this teensy, repetitive, and even meditative motion, so important was it to me to do everything the hard way.
If you ever manage to stop working so hard, you might let your tired eyes alight on the real workhorse in the family. It will surprise and even delight you.
What children will accomplish from birth to age three is astounding. Try not to overlook this most amazing teaching. You’ll be inclined to, because children greet each day with glee and fearlessness. Their instinctive joy does not mean that the work of a child is easy or discountable. It does mean that life, as my teacher tried to tell me, is more fun than we sometimes make it.
Your child’s physical transformation alone is astounding, and their quest for physical mastery is inspiring. Imagine if you set out, in one year, to learn trapeze flying, downhill skiing, and ballet dancing. You would fall a lot. You would hurt yourself. You might cry. Would you never ever give up?
Far more daunting, I believe, are the cognitive and behavioral skills on the syllabus. Yes, it’s said that “two” is terrible, but can you consider the course load for a minute? Self-feeding and table skills, language, emotional management, toilet training, and social etiquette, for starters. And all occurring amid the frightening undertow toward separation and independence. Throw in weaning, the big bed, and assorted other traumatic transitions such as a new sibling, babysitter, or preschool, whenever they enter the picture. These kids are working in the coal mine!
And still your child will wake up each day, with only rare exceptions, beaming and eager. Unburdened by the weight of things she has yet to do, your child is never overwhelmed and never underequipped. There’s plenty of time for everything, even when there’s no tomorrow!
Me, I cling ferociously to my hurriedness and shorthandedness. The day is potholed from divots of despair I churn up and then trip over. Do you think that I could learn to keep from falling down?
In a year or so, when your child begins to play in earnest imitation of all your hard work washing, cleaning, and cooking, perhaps the point will come home.
Meanwhile, consider all of this as a way to conjure up more empathy on an ordinary day. Yes, we all have a load on our hands, but the heavy is in our heads. Set the heavy down and sweep aside the useless mental clutter. Don’t think of a single reason why you can’t go out for ice cream. Two scoops—who’s counting?
When you can do anything as though you work at nothing, you have the best days of your life.