How Not to Be a Supermom

A question that often comes up for Zen mothers is: Can mothering be Zen practice ? Of course, it can. So can ordering takeout Chinese, buying the New York Times, or riding the F train. Can mothering be all that we need for practice ? No, I wouldn't say so. Changing diapers, getting up in the middle of the night with a crying child, or waiting up for a teenager with a new driver's license can't substitute for zazen and work with a teacher. It's through these elements of formal study that we learn to practice our lives. The ability to keep returning our awareness to our lives comes from formal practice.

Once those early months pass -- when we're mostly holding on by our fingernails -- it's time for parents to take up adult life again. As time passes, it becomes possible to duck out from under our responsibilities for awhile and pursue formal Zen practice again. True, it isn't the same as before, and it isn't easy. In fact, it requires endless planning and negotiating, logistics and iffy arrangements, patching together and working it out. Even then, perhaps more often that we'd like, our plans have to be pared down or even cancelled. But after the first hectic months, some formal practice is not only possible, it's necessary. Otherwise, we're probably just kidding ourselves about how much our parenting is actually practice. Parenting can be pracice, but without formal sitting and teaching it is hard for us to bring enough awareness to it so that it really works as practice.

Besides benefitting parents, taking time for formal practice and the other activities of adult life also makes for a sturdy guilt free ( mostly ) child. I feel nervous when parents speak too passionately about making their child their practice. I fear that what we often mean by that is some special way of bringing up a child and therefore some special result. As parents, we think we will be different -- calmer, wiser, better. We will be Zen parents ! We think we will have different, more well adjusted kids -- less prone to hitting other kids, wetting the bed, whining, or failing math. They will be Zen kids ! If that's what we mean by practicing parenting, forget it. Just another delusion. To make a child our project, even a Zen project, ends up placing all sorts of expectations on the child to be superior because we are giving all this excellent spiritual care and attention. Zen practitioners need to resist the notion of super-mom so prevalent in our culture. As we practice and really look honestly at this image, we find that it sets up a false expectation. So often the super-act is a cover for self doubt or guilt and a fear of our inevitable flawed humanness.

What actually happens with and to our children is always different from the expectations we hold. Buddhism teaches that life is endlessly fluid and surprising. But being human, when our expectations aren't fulfilled we become disappointed and angry. Finding our expectations thwarted in regard to our children can cause stress for them and us. We hobble our sons and daughters because we can't allow them to be as they are, but demand that they conform to our wishes in order to get our love. And we hobble our compassionate loving hearts. We can't freely feel the warmth and joy of loving our children, the pride of supporting them just the way they are, because our expectations get in the way.

For their part, our children end up feeling guilty and inadequate because they haven't been able to live up to our expectations. They also feel rebellious and angry because at the deepest level they know it is their birthright to be allowed to be only themselves without the imposition of anyone else's ideas about who they are. It's a dangerous and unhappy business all around to make parenting our practice, if what we mean is that we will somehow avoid all the messy, confusing, negative parts of partenting and thereby turn out superior offspring. This is not Zen partenting, but some spiritualized version of yuppie parenting where only winners are acceptable children.

If this special superior parenting isn't what we mean by practicing parenting, then just what do we mean ? What is practicing parenting when we have no special agenda ? It is, of course, like practicing anything else. It means letting everything in, not pushing anything away, being aware of the ever changing kaleidescope of feelings, memories, impulses, and avoidances that parenting brings up for us. It means taking an honest look at ourselves, knowing what we're experiencing while we're experienceing it, and making what we actually feel as a parent congruent with what we say and do.

There is something about being a parent -- if not all that's needed for our practice -- that is an effective Zen discipline. It is as relentless as the formal disciplines of Zen. It goes on and on day after day, year after year. And just when we think we can't handle another thing, our child presents us with something else to cope with. Parenting is uniquely designed to push all our buttons, plumb the depths of our character, and stretch our patience to the breaking point. It brings us face to face with ourselves, and if we're spiritually alive, we have to look at who we are under myriads of stressful circumstances. Sitting next to my small daughter at the dining table while she rhythmically kicks the wooden leg of the table -- with no malice, just enjoying the hollow knocks and getting rid of some nervous energy -- I realize the kicking is driving me crazy. When something like this happens, I'm forced to examine my big reaction to a small provocation. How interesting. What's all my emotion really about ? Parenting is filled with opportunities like this. That's why it's such a wonderful fuel for practice.

I would leave her crying and get into my car to drive to work with a knot in my stomach thinking I was feeling worried about her. One day doing zazen, experiencing this same knot, I realized that worry for my daughter was really a very small part of what I felt. Actually, that knot was a lethal mixture of anger and self doubt. Anger at my daughter for putting me through a scene every morning, when -- to my wishful eyes -- all the other children seemed to bid a cheerul farewell to their parents and go happily off to day care. Self doubt because my daughter's crying made me feel that perhaps I wasn't a very good mother since my idealized agenda for motherhood told me that a good mother would have a child who could separate easily.

I never would have untangled this knot without the non-judgmental openness of zazen. What difference did it make to know ? For one thing, I now knew more about myself, about the unpretty, unsentimental aspects of my mothering, about the unrealistic standards I had for being a good mother. I now had an understanding for the irrational qualities of my responses around this issue. After this, I think, in some way I gave my daughter fewer mixed messages about her behavior at parting. I knew I was basically thinking about me, not her on those mornings. So even though I did not become a paragon of selfless concern and compassion, in some way I allowed her to know that my responses were more about me, than about her behavior. Because I was more clear about my own feelings, I think, things were less confusing for my daughter, and I was better able to allow her to accept her fears and sadness and to distinguish between her feelings and my responses to them.

There were many other instances over the years when Zen practice allowed me to see more clearly. I remember a pediatrician appointment when my daughter was about four. She was going to get an immunization -- shots being something she hated and always made a big fuss about. Sensitive and fearful, that's what she was like. That's my girl ! So off to the pediatrician we went, armed with apple juice. Throughout early childhood, apple juice in a baby bottle was her consolation and comfort, her zazen and Zoloft. Knowing the appointment would be upsetting, we took the bottle along.

The pediatrician went into a whole explanation about rotten tooth syndrome from baby bottles. But I did not take the bottle away from her then or later, even though I definitely knew that what he said was true. I had seen many instances in Head Start of children whose front teeth -- top and bottom -- had been completely destroyed in this way. But I also knew my daughter would be all right. She didn't sleep with the bottle in her mouth as many children did. It was this, I knew, the prolonged contact of the sweet acidic fluid with the teeth that caused the damage. I also knew she craved the comfort of a bottle for whatever reasons, neurotic or normal, and you can bet I spent a lot of useless time fruitlessly asking what the reasons were.

I finally decided it was necessary to wean her completely from her bottle the summer before first grade. She didn't take the bottle much by then, but had shown no inclination to give it up entirely. I was afraid she would mention her bottle at school and that the other kids would make fun of her. She was not happy about giving up the bottle, but she did it without too much obvious trauma. The truth I came to realize at this time was that the bottle had been for me, as much as for her. It was an easy way to comfort her, to ease her fears and tears so that I didn't have to cope with them in more demanding ways. A way of avoiding mutual pain, that bottle was my security as well as hers.

Was this information about the less ennobling aspects of my mothering useful ? It was important to know that I liked to take short cuts in soothing my daughter, that I didn't always want to allow her messier emotions. Knowing this helped me be less self-righteous about those mothers who shoved cookies and chips at their kids to shut them up -- something I didn't do because I was a healthy food, no junk, kind of mother.

What is necessary in practicing parenting is to look at everything, especially what we don't want to see. When we do this, we find a lot of stuff that's not so flattering, that doesnt' promote our image as super-mom. How does this help ? After all, it seems rather negative and more than a little uncomfortable. After all it is easy to turn this kind of insight into beating ourselves up or trying to fix ourselves. So that we need to extend compassion to ourselves and stay grounded in our imperfect humanness, knowing that our best is good enough. It is this kind of practice that helps us reject the image of super-mom. At the same time, it helps us stay honest with ourselves, and to accept the complexity of being a parent as we actually live it moment to moment. And here's the clincher: If we can look at and live with the mixed bag that is our own experience, we can allow our children to live comfortably with theirs. When we acknowledge our own anger, then it's not such a big deal when our child gets angry. When we can acknowledge our own fears and inadequacies, then when our children feel insecure we can offer comfort with judging them as hopeless losers. We become larger, more permissive, more at ease with our feelings and with theirs. We can then -- sometimes, not all the time -- allow our children to experience difficult feelings and respond with anger, fuss, or shock that they should feel such things. We can give up trying to suppress or make everything better for our children because we realize we still have all those feelings as well. We are able to see ambivalent, negative, or vulnerable feelings in our children, not as a sign of failure and dysfunction, but as part of being human, part of every life. Isn't this being one with our child ?

Another contribution Buddhism can make to parenting is the appreciation of karma. If there's one place where the heavy hand of karma can be immediately and personally observed, where the vastness and mystery of the universe operates, it's in family karma. To contemplate the twisted parth of genes, family patterns and history, then add to that mix the myriad influences of friends, neighborhoods, culture, and historical period, on the life of a child -- all this is so mind boggling as to help us see the reach of karma. It stretches out endlessly across space and reaches endlessly backward and forward in time. It truly reflects that vast net of many jewels that is the wholeness and interconnedtedness of the universe. It's this that gives Buddhist child rearing its sense ( to borrow a Christian phrase ) of being sub specie eternitas, the sense that what we do as parents will ripple through all time and space. This induces a sobering but healthy sense of responsibility. We should parent as though what we do has infinite consequences, because it does.

On the other hand -- since the knowledge of karma tells us just how wide and uncontrollable are the circumstances that form each life -- it can help us hold more lightly and less guiltily to our responsibilties as parents. The formation of each child's life is in many ways out of parental control. How our children turn out is not wholly the result of what we did or didn't do. We need to let go and allow the karma of our child's life to flow. We need to accept as best we can the particular child right in front of us whether we know how she got that way or not. Then, moment to moment, be present to our children and to our experience as parents.