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First Chapter
Why Jesus was a man…
I am a spiritual seeker. I am a mother. Are the two mutually exclusive? Can I be on the “path” to enlightenment and still yell at my kids for practically beating each other up on a daily basis? How do I approach such behavior from an enlightened standpoint? I spend my day juxtaposing my domestic mom duties with trying to fit in my own creative pursuits and spiritual exploration. Sometimes they seem extremely mutually exclusive.
I hear it everywhere I go – mothers discussing the topic of finding balance. In the cafes, on the playgrounds, at nursery, I hear and participate in conversation after conversation about how to find the balance between motherhood and “me”. It is not an easy balance to strike. Our children have many needs that out trump ours. My emotional needs can seem frivolous next to the need to feed and clothe a helpless infant.
At first, our needs don’t seem to matter so much. They are so helpless, fragile and vulnerable as tiny infants that it is easy to set our needs aside. We look in their tiny faces and see a miracle. It doesn’t take long before the sleepless nights start to take their toll. If only it were the exhaustion it wouldn’t be so bad. But, it’s not. Having children does not take away all the other aspects of our lives. We still have houses to run, other children to look after, and a whole range of other commitments and responsibilities that eat into our stores of time and patience.
It does not take long for our relationships with our children to become rather complicated affairs. They can bring out the best and the worst in us. We love and cherish them. We eat, sleep and breathe for them. We would gladly lay down our lives for them. Their safety and well being is our main concern. They make us laugh. They make us proud.
They also can bring out the devil inside us. They can frustrate, confound, anger. They are on their own time schedule and it’s often about six or seven paces behind ours (if not more!). My oldest boy William can and does do things that he knows full well he should not do. He will even tell me that he is doing them during the act. He will call out, “Mommy, I’m drawing on this wall,” “Mommy, I’m pouring water all over the bathroom floor,” “Mommy, I’m carrying Oliver over here to the other side of the room (even though I’m a little three year old and he’s a big one year old).”
His honesty is admirable. If I walk into the room and Oliver is crying, William is quick to say, “It was me” or “It wasn’t me.” Either way, I know he is telling the truth. He may be testing his boundaries in a loving and safe environment, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating or upsetting for me.
Where is the Divine in all this? Does God exist in the stir-fry? Can I find the peace of God even as my child cries desperately because I am not meeting his demands? I believe that ultimately the answer to that question is yes, but I’m still reading the books that tell me how to get there. Mothering very young children with a steady flow of patience and calm is a rare quality, but one I attempt to strive for every day. However, my patience is tested time and time again. Sometimes by the end of the day I am so frazzled I can hardly speak without my voice cracking to fight back the tears.
Is a modicum of balance even possible when you have small children running around your feet, tugging at your pant legs? There is a reason that Jesus Christ was a man. And Buddha. And Krishna. And Muhammad. And the Dalai Lama. Correct me if I am wrong, but the great avatars of history all seem to be men. How easy it must be to reach enlightenment if you don’t have little lungs screaming at you from the next room. I often think of those Tibetan monks in their mountain top monasteries, meditating and chanting from sun up to sun down. It is no wonder they are wise and enlightened beings. They have it easy.
I would like to see one of them come and trade places with me for a day and see how much inner peace they have retained after 12 hours of ninja fighting with a three year old while picking up and putting down a one year old about 57 million times. My guess is that it would take about four weeks back at the monastery to fully recover from his one day with my two little angels. However, I have read enough self help books to know that there is never going to be any balance in my life – not lasting balance, at any rate – as long as I see my children as impediments to personal growth.
We are in this together. We are wrapped up in a karmic dance and we will continue to play out the roles we came here to play out. Buttons pushed are opportunities to learn, to grow, to transcend what has previously brought us to our knees. Remembering that in the heat of the moment is another thing entirely, which is why it helps enormously to have some time set aside each day for reflection, for writing, for meditating, for giving all the frustrations and struggles over to a Higher Power. And then, like the turtle who eventually won the race, we realize that we are indeed conquering all that has previously held us back. Well, that is the intention anyway.
If I am going to make this “balance” thing work at all, I have to do it in tandem with my children and the day-to-day demands of motherhood. Just because they may seem like obstacles to my inner peace does not mean they are. Ultimately, the level of inner peace I feel in any given moment is a choice. How can that be so? Oliver just dumped a bag of sesame seeds in the foyer and took an orange marker and scribbled all over the stairs while I was focusing my attention on an important phone call. Breathe, Leta, breathe. What else can I do?
I was not born a man. I am a woman. I am a mother. I do not live in a monastery. I live in a big city with a lot of noise. I am bombarded on a daily basis with a thousand and one things that tell me who I should be and what I should be doing. None of these conditions, however, should mean that I do not have all the tools at my disposal to make my life work for me in a way that allows for happiness and fulfillment – at least for the majority of the time.
I am on a journey. So are my children. It is the same journey for a while, but not forever. And it is a journey, not an end goal. How can I ensure I do the least amount of damage before they head out into the big, wide world on their own? The issues I have are mine and are not necessarily things I want to pass down to my children. They learn by example. What will they remember about me when they are adults? Will they remember the yelling? Spiritual growth is having the courage to examine oneself, where one came from and then developing new strategies for living that serve us better. We can wallow in the frustration, the chaos (which I often do), and grasp for moments of pleasure, or we can search within ourselves to remove the blocks that are keeping the peace and happiness at bay.
