Jake started crying before I so much as moved toward the door to leave him at school this morning.
Real tears. Not the almost-obligatory yells of faux abandonment he would throw my way when I dropped him off at his old pre-preschool. No, these were the kind of tears that a parent feels right where her own tears start, a reminder of just how distressed her child is to be in a new place and feeling overwhelmed and without his mother to hold him.
In other words, the kind of tears that make me want to start crying all over again right now. As I have been doing intermittently in the half hour since blindly making my way to my car and numbly steering it toward home as I tried to decide what a good mother would have done.
A Reluctant Shift in Perspective
What made this morning particularly difficult — if you don’t count the four a.m. “discussion” we had about how angry it makes Mommy when Jake awakens her and won’t tell her what he needs, and I don’t count these discussions because they have become so frequent lately as to not merit my attention — was that I thought he had been doing so well.
There was, for example, that first day at Jake’s new school when he gave me a push toward the door and said, “Mommy, go work.” And the second day when he barely noticed me leaving because he was having too much fun rolling on the ground with his friends.
Sure, the last couple of days have been a bit rougher, as I no longer spend an hour or more awaiting his blow-off and instead quickly hand him to a teacher and make my way out the door. But I assumed he was merely continuing his pre-preschool ritual of crying just long enough to make me feel good and guilty before turning to the real business of having so much fun he’s reluctant to come home with me at the end of the day.
Then came yesterday’s daily report. “Today I felt OK.”
“OK?” I thought as I read it. “What does ‘OK’ mean?”
His teachers had both gone for the day, so I had only my own desire for ‘OK’ to mean, really, okay to convince myself it was so.
And maybe I should have left it at that. But, instead, this morning I asked, “What does ‘OK’ mean?”
“Oh, he’s doing much better,” his teachers assured me.
This was not, as they intended, reassuring.
“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound like one of those moms who can’t let go. Though if I think about it, I don’t see anything wrong with trying to help my two-year-old avoid unhappy moments. Except, maybe, that doing so would make me crazy, as two-year-olds are all about unhappy moments. That’s what tantrums are, after all. Mike and I are just now learning that even the most easygoing of toddlers has them. Frequently.
I continued, probing gently for some information that could stave the panic welling in my chest. “I figured it meant he had good moments and bad moments.”
Yeah, I really didn’t want that confirmed. Especially when most of the information it elicited was about the bad moments — particularly how Jake is really good at going to his cubby for his blanket and sitting on some pillows in a corner until he feels better. Is there any picture that could break a mother’s heart more neatly in two?
By the time my mind was starting to catch up to the idea that Jake has not, as I imagined, soared magically into a whole new school environment with nary a look back at the comfy, familiar days of the pre-preschool where he spent 14 months, Jake had started crying.
And I was left with nothing to do but surrender my boy who needed my hug as much as I was needing his to the arms of his teacher and to leave the room with a big, black cloud of knowing he was having a hard time riding even harder on my shoulders.
Why We Can’t Avoid the Bumps
A very basic part of parenthood seems to be trying to do things for your child that you have learned through many years of trying to do things for yourself can’t be done.
Like avoiding unhappiness.
We try. Our culture promotes it. Money doesn’t buy happiness, they tell us, before inundating us with slick advertisements showing really happy people surrounded by things that cost a lot of money — freshly waxed sports cars, Caribbean vacations, personal stylists just out of range of the camera. You, too, can be thinner, healthier, and, therefore, happier, we hear, if only you just work at it — get a gym membership, eat raw food, drink six gallons of water every day. Join the right meditation group, find the right partner, switch jobs — we’re a culture of fixing, a culture of control. And the not very well kept secret is that we’re still not particularly happy.
Buddha is not the only one who’s said it. Unhappiness is a part of life. And Buddha’s “solution” is one that brings me comfort. That is, don’t try to avoid the unhappiness.
At first glance, this makes no sense. If I have a chance to avoid my son’s tears, shouldn’t I? Doesn’t everything in my hormone-filled body scream for just such a plan of action?
Only as long as I hold out hope that somehow I can keep up this game of dodgeball with life. But, of course, I can’t. Maybe I can duck when one ball of unhappiness is winged at my head, but I’m certain to trip over another one in the next instant. In other words, there will always be something out there to make me unhappy, just as there are also many things that make me very happy indeed. It’s part of the mix, the yin and the yang, the give and take of life.
So even if I were to stay with Jake for hours every morning until he begged me to leave him alone already, I wouldn’t be stripping his life of unhappy moments, nor mine. He’d still encounter his first playground bully or be reprimanded for doing something he didn’t know was wrong or be dissed by one of his little friends as soon as I was gone. And in that moment he’d be unhappy.
Pretending you can avoid the unhappiness only, in the long run, makes it worse. Because then you not only have something bad happen, but you get to blame yourself for it. After all, if you think you are in charge enough to avoid unhappiness you’re probably liable to take the blame when you fail to do so.
Like right now, when I can’t stop feeling more than a little bit responsible for Jake’s bumpy transition to the Big Kids’ school.
Why Not Being Able to Avoid the Bumps Is a Blessing
So why on earth do I find it comforting to know that unhappiness is an unavoidable part of life?
Certainly, it makes it easier for me to look back on times when I was desperately unhappy and to know it wasn’t about me. There weren’t forces making my life much worse, much more difficult, much more unfair than the lives of the people I knew who were, oh, finding life partners before their late thirties, landing in fulfilling careers, less prone to anxiety attacks than I was. I was just experiencing life.
So, too, it is a comfort to let go of palliatives like shopping (how much better I used to feel trying on that new outfit in the dressing room and how fleeting the moment) or staying so busy I don’t have to face time alone (like those ten-mile runs that gave me permission to sprawl on the futon couch reading the Sunday Times for the rest of the day because I didn’t have the energy left to feel lonely). Turns out none of this stuff made me feel any better.
But mostly I think there is something lovely and energizing about seeing clearly the currents and eddies carrying my life forward. There is comfort to be had in taking a deep breath and acknowledging that I’m in the midst of some challenging Level 5 rapids right now but that if I sit tight and let them carry me, I’ll come out in calm waters ahead. (I am holding on to this knowledge particularly tightly at the moment because it also happens to describe what it’s like to be in labor, and, as with life, labor is a lot harder when you’re in it than when you’re merely talking about it.)
So can I apply this to my son’s own bouts of unhappiness? Sometimes.
Sometimes I can truly understand that a week or two of emotional days at school will bring him to a place where school is his favorite place to be, and take him there much more quickly than if I try to keep his tears at bay. One day, I tell myself, I will look back on this time much as I look back on his first weeks of pre-preschool when I would pick him up after just a few hours to find he had spent every one of them sitting stoically in a bouncy seat. Once those weeks were over, I was the only one who remembered them, and he was in his element.
Sometimes, too, I can understand that Jake just wants me to hold him in the middle of the night. That whatever has awakened him — a bad dream, a wet diaper, a passing pair of headlights flashing through his window — he needs to be wrapped in his mother’s arms rather than sitting alone in a quiet, dark room. These are the nights when we both get back to sleep much more easily.
And on the nights like last night when I feel the middle-of-the-night-”Mommy!”’s are becoming more of a habit than a true need, I can sometimes believe that my speaking not-at-all-kindly to him, telling him that I am not happy, demanding an explanation that I will never get because he is not able to provide it is what he needs. That it makes us both deeply unhappy at that moment but will be worth it when we reach another one of those sweet nights when we each get hours and hours and hours of uninterrupted sleep and awaken into a day of promise and lightness that only the well rested can feel.
In short, sometimes I do understand that my son and I both need to live through a little bit of unavoidable unhappiness. That we can’t eliminate it from our lives, only shift it somewhere else where we will have to wade through it perhaps a little more unprepared. I can even take a step back and tell myself that I simply will not be the first mother ever in all of time to do what we all wish desperately to do — provide my child with a trauma-free life.
And, sometimes, I don’t understand this at all and I cry as I steer my car homeward with the knowledge that my son is back at school crying for his mother.
Which, in the end, is a blessing. Because if I’ve got to feel unhappy at times anyhow, why not have them be about something I know will pass just as surely as one of Jake’s tortured tantrums, giving way within moments to one of the lovely and joyful distractions that is just as much a part of life?
The Art of Distraction — Lift Your Spirits By Turning Upside Down
It’s just gotta be. I can’t resist offering adho mukha vrksasana, or handstand here. I know it’s a challenge for many. I know it’s scary; it still is for me even years after conquering my inability to give it a try. But I also know it never fails to whip up a rush of adrenaline, a glimpse of childhood, and a big, huge reminder that we need to shake ourselves up every so often and stop taking ourselves so seriously.
For those who are still working their way toward full handstand, there’s Not Ready for Handstand Prep. While it doesn’t have the same playful quality, it does get you upside down, which is always a welcome change in perspective.
Or, hey, if even these admittedly tough asanas are more than you can take at the moment, you can always close the door and just jump around and dance like a toddler. Even better, dance with a toddler. I guarantee that’ll brighten your day right up.