Spoiled Only Child

Serious business

There's something about kids that I don't think anyone understands until they have one. It's how serious they are about play. Things that sound completely ridiculous to grownups are life-and-death kind of important to kids. Things like which cartoon character is on the Pull-Up that they are putting on their ass. If the Pull-Up has Diego instead of Dora, and is blue instead of pink, there will be hell to pay. There will be crying and thrashing and howls of, "But it's not pink!!!" And no, the child will not understand that we were out of Pull-Ups, and Mommy ran to the store, and it was already bed time, and she was frazzled, and the store was out of Dora ones and the Disney Princess ones were not on sale. And Mommy will consider going to a different store at 9 p.m. to get Pull-Ups that have pink on them, because the meltdown will be nuclear.

Mia has this tiny pink stuffed poodle that my mother got her. It is probably 4 inches high and plays a very shrill version of "Happy Birthday" when squeezed. Every night this poodle has to be laid carefully atop a pillow in the hallway outside Mia's room, its head resting on a smaller pillow, its body tucked in to a miniature sleeping bag. It must also have an animal, a pony larger than the poodle itself, to keep it company. Now, this sounds funny, right? But if Mia were not allowed to tuck in her poodle, or if we moved the poodle from its spot, there would be a fit that would be no joke at all. We might all end up in tears.

Just last night, Mia got an Ariel sticker at the doctor's office. (Who's Ariel, you ask? The Little Mermaid, of course.) And it was sparkly and Ariel was wearing a pink dress, and Mia could have cared less that she just had stitches pulled out of her head, because she had the greatest sticker on earth!!! She was on top of the world. All night she was convinced that she was a princess, and she put on her long nightgown that brushes the floor just like Ariel's dress. (We see how well my attempts to shield her from the Disney Princesses are working.) We had to peel the sticker off her shirt and put it on the nightgown. And of course, it didn't stick very well and was lost in the bed just minutes after we turned out the light.

Before we know it, Mr. SOC is upstairs searching the room for a sparkly Ariel sticker while Mia stands in the bed, wailing pathetically, a full hour past her bed time. Soon he's yelling down to me, exasperated, "Do you know where the Ariel sticker is?" And then we are all on the hunt for the no-longer-sticky Ariel sticker. It is fast becoming a full-blown family crisis. Finally, the sticker is found, and stuck to a horse stuffed animal, after attempts to convince her that it would be safer on the bed frame failed miserably. We all breathe a sigh of relief.

But more than an hour later, I go upstairs, and find Mia wide awake in her room. As soon as I step into the room, she gives me a status update on the sticker. "I put the sticker on my pillow," she says, "because it wouldn't stick to the horsie." I nod solemnly, thanking my lucky stars that the sticker is accounted for. This parenting stuff is very serious business indeed.

What I learned in my meditation class

I couldn't sleep Friday night. Guess why? Because I was worried I wouldn't get enough sleep for my all-day meditation class on Saturday. If this is not proof of my insanity, I don't know what is. But, yeah, I took a 7-hour beginning meditation class on Saturday. It was hard, and my back hurt like hell after all that sitting, but I am so glad I did it. Something clicked for me there, and I think that if I keep working on this, I could learn to control the anxiety that keeps my mind always spinning, spinning, spinning with thoughts about tomorrow, next week, next year. I fear that I'll forget it all, so I'm going to write down some of it here. I apologize in advance if I start to sound like a self help author here, but I really do believe this shit.

Do you know what meditation is? I found out that I really didn't. It's being "present in the moment, aware of what is," according to my teacher. It doesn't mean that we are in a state of bliss or a state of non-thinking. It just means that we are willing to accept whatever is right now, whether that be pain, hunger, anxiety, anger, whatever--and that we don't allow ourselves to get caught up in our mind's stories about the future. For instance, our natural tendency, or at least mine, is to think, "My back hurts. What if it doesn't get better? What if I can't go hiking like I planned this weekend? My family will be so disappointed. Our whole weekend will be ruined." But in meditation, we don't get caught up in these stories about what might happen in the future. We just sit with the pain that is here right now. It is the stories, not the actual pain, that cause most of the suffering. The space between the present moment and where our mind is, that space is suffering. 

I have been so caught up in these stories. At night, when I lie down to go to sleep, I think, "What if I can't sleep tonight? What if I'm not able to do what I have to at work? What if I'm tired for this thing that I've been looking forward to for a long time? What if my weekend is ruined? What if, what if, what if?" I always thought the only way to work my way out of this fear was to somehow convince myself that things really would be OK tomorrow. That I would survive, that I would get to sleep again the next night, that it wouldn't suck as much as I was imagining. So I asked the teacher, how can you convince yourself that things are OK when you know in your heart that you're right, that you really are going to feel awful if you don't sleep? 

His answer was a revelation. He said it's not a matter of convincing yourself that tomorrow will be OK. You might feel awful tomorrow, but there's absolutely nothing you can do about it now. So let it go and focus on what's here and now. Right now I am anxious. Right now I feel pressure in my chest.  Right now I am not sleeping. Say to yourself, "I am aware of the tension; I smile to the tension. I am aware of the fear; I smile to the fear." Recognize when your mind starts to spin a story, rather than dealing with what's present in that moment, and refuse to get carried away in it. Bring the focus back to what is happening right now. When you acknowledge and even welcome what you feel in the moment, it somehow makes it more bearable. But when you allow your mind to run off into the future, you become powerless. You have no way to fix a what-if. That's when the real fear, the true suffering, creeps in. That has been my problem. I have been unable, until now, to separate the things happening in the moment from the stories I connected to them.

We are like the sky, he said. We are bright, shining, blue, completely open and still and peaceful. That is our essential nature. The clouds come along and cover that up. They roil the stillness with wind and rain and hail. They sometimes shut out the light completely. The key is not to think we are the clouds. We are always the sky. Our essential nature is unchanged, even in a hurricane. We just watch the clouds roll by, arising, becoming dominant, dissipating. Everything in this life changes — arises and dissipates— except for our essential nature.

At the end of the day, we were sitting in yet another meditation. My back was aching and I was so tired (I didn't sleep, remember?) that I had to keep my eyes open so I wouldn't fall asleep. I was staring at the scuffed tile floor, and my eyes kept finding shapes in it, which was incredibly distracting. One spot looked like a face, so I would shift my eyes somewhere else and see a tiger, then a fish. Dammit! I was thinking, "OK, I've had enough. I'm done. When is this going to end?" And then the teacher began to chant. He chanted these words over and over: "All I ask of you, is to remember me, for loving you." On and on he went, and somewhere in there, my back stopped hurting and I stopped seeing the shapes in the floor and I felt incredibly moved, totally peaceful. It was my first glimpse into that place beyond the clouds. I want more.