New Audio Excerpts
Read and recorded by the author in the stolen hours of a quiet night.
Just Love
Fresh Start
Momma Zen:
Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood
By Karen Maezen Miller
Chapter One
Other Mothers — Overwhelmed and uncertain: there’s no other kind.
At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
-Dogen Zenji, “Mountains and Waters Sutra”
This book took time. It took the first two years of my daughter’s life to arrive at the inspiration and motivation. It took another three years to write, in scattered, stolen hours of solitude. It took countless episodes of confusion, madness and exasperation to realize what I knew and what I would never know.
Just a few months after my daughter’s birth, I saw another new mother on the corner at the end of my block. We were both in mid-stroll, at mid-morning, with our bundled babies. We recognized in each other’s hollowed eyes and stringy hair the secret sign of kindreds. I haven’t slept in a month or bathed in a week. We walked together that day and many days after. Our daughters grew older and able and played together. We shared our never-ending doubts, our discoveries, our complaints and our whispered heartaches. Underlying our friendship was the sense, the certain fear, that all around us were better mothers who were thin and groomed, confident and competent. These mothers had resolved all the questions about feeding and sleeping, poop and potty training, preschool and playmates, teething and talking, paper or plastic, that kept us forever unsteady. They had happy, textbook, gifted babies. These were mothers with a method. They were doing all the right things. They were on all the right waiting lists. They could shower, style their hair and dress in their cute prepregnancy clothes everyday before breakfast.
They had birthed not just a child but a fully formed ideology of parenthood. It made things look easy, and it made things right.
We imagined legions of these supermothers and we admired them from a distance. Yet privately, we despised them. We had been blindsided by how difficult motherhood was. In our hushed confessions and brutal self-appraisals, we revealed how very different, diminished and isolated we thought we were. We were the Other Mothers, whose daily blunders and emotional upheavals qualified us for charter admission into the Other Mothers Club. In reality, of course, there was no such club, just a couple of Keystone moms admitting truths in exchange for consolation and understanding. I bribed her with Cheetos! I swatted her! He bit me! I don’t even like her right now! I can’t do this anymore! What have I gotten myself into? I want out!
What comfort there was in these admissions. And in the easy responses we gave to one another: Of course. I know. I understand. Me too.
These were reactions that we might not get from our own mothers or sisters, and would simply not suffice from our husbands. Sincere and patient, our spouses tried to help us out, and in that gesture alone revealed that they could never really understand. Help was temporary. Advice was merely topical. We needed a close and constant source of solidarity.
Although I was a latecomer to this particular abyss, I had free fallen before. Six years earlier, a sloppy heartbreak landed me at — of all the crazy places — a Zen Buddhist temple. In the silent stillness of these strange surroundings, I cried my eyes dry. Over more visits and with more meditation practice, I gradually wore out my restless and petty schemes, my frantic wishing, and my desperate daydreams of a life with a different ending. I learned to calm the mental conflagration consuming me. I stopped beating myself up. I stopped nearly everything. Sometimes, I would even stop thinking. Seconds later, I would start up again, but in the widening space between one blathering thought and the next, I found a pristine and beckoning peace from my pounding anxieties. I became a Zen Buddhist, a practice that again and again brought me back into full possession of my own life.
In the accidental good fortune that can rise up when you fall apart, I had wandered into one of the practice centers led by the late teacher Taizan Maezumi Roshi. This smiling man, slight, polite and ever so subtle, was one of the colossal figures in twentieth century Zen. He had arrived in Los Angeles in 1956 as one of the first Japanese teachers to bring Zen to the West. At the time I met him, he was living his last essential years as a seminal force in American Zen. He died in 1995.
Maezumi Roshi said many marvelous and inscrutable things, but one I remember most vividly is “Your life is your practice.” Like nearly everything I heard him say, I thought it meant something else. Something deep and beyond mere mortal comprehension. It does. But it also means just what it says. Your life is your practice. Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other than where you are. You are looking for answers, insight, and wisdom that you already possess. Live the life in front of you, be the life you are, and see what you find out for yourself.
Easier said than done, I realize today, a full ten years after hearing those words for the first time. Understanding it or not, I did get on with life, laughter, love, work, matrimony and the precipitous path of early motherhood. At this point, grasping for familiar ground, the words echoed back. Your life is your practice. Oh, you mean this life? This tripping up, breaking down, crying-out-loud life? This I’m-no-good-as-a-mother life? I turned the power of silent observation on the chaos within.
All of that grumbling about Other Mothers was what Zen calls “putting a head on your head,” conjuring up comparisons, judgments, ruminations and criticisms and, in the process, producing interminable suffering in my own mind. I was doing what we all do but precisely what I had been taught not to do. The events I describe in this book kept waking me up and making it clear. One head will do.
Motherhood is a spiritual practice. It is a crash course in wisdom. It is your spiritual legacy lying in wait for the taking. How else do you suppose mothers always end up knowing best? You do not have to mount a formal spiritual quest to uncover spiritual truths. I have, and it helps me. But you may not. As a mother, you have many priorities. Those priorities are nothing but your practice. If you allow it, being a mother is one of the most amazing, miraculous, mysterious, dignifying and illuminating things you will ever do. However the experience unfolds for you, my aim is to help you cut through to the nub of it and appreciate things as they are.
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