Karen Maezen Miller Interview from Kelly Dahl on Vimeo.
I had this lovely conversation with Kelly Dahl the other day about how to find fulfillment. Give yourself 20 minutes to find out by watching the video. Then pop over to her site and do something good: leave a comment on her post to win a copy of Momma Zen for yourself or to share with someone who really needs it. You will be full in no time.
Last week someone asked me what it meant to raise children the Buddhist way. I sent them this:
If you are reading this post in your email and cannot see the video, click here.
If you want to learn how to meditate, come to the Beginner’s Mind One-Day Meditation Retreat on Sept. 23.
I’m giving away a copy of the book, Preemie, by Kasey Mathews, because my daughter was born on August 12 and she will turn 13 in two weeks.
These facts were once inconceivable to me. Equally impossible for her to be born on that date, and for her to grow up so fast. Is there any parent yet who can believe his or her own eyes?
Georgia was born early. Not as extremely early as allowed by today’s medicine, but early enough for us to ask, in the haste of emergency intervention, whether or not she would be able to breathe at birth. The answer was, “Maybe.” Because of the steroids I’d been given, she did breathe, and we were lucky, and she was fine, eventually. We went home after a few weeks in the hospital, and figured out the rest one day at a time.
But there is a whole story I’ve left unsaid.
What brings this recollection near is that I’ve just finished reading Preemie by Kasey Mathews. Kasey’s daughter Andie was a micro-preemie born four months early. In impeccably etched detail, Mathews tells the whole unthinkable story of an implausible birth, the reality, the setbacks, the disbelief, denial, and fury. What she tells most courageously are those things that are so hard to say.
She was afraid of her baby.
She was afraid to look at her, to touch and tend her.
She was afraid of what she’d done wrong and what might yet go wrong, the hidden trapdoors, the other shoes.
She was afraid of what she knew and what she didn’t know, the permanent scars and looming catastrophes, the not-yets, the maybe-nevers.
She was afraid to love.
We share these fears no matter when or how we become parents, no matter how or when our children arrive, each of us unprepared, undefended and stripped naked of all our expectations.
Our babies survive our fear and failings. They outlast our ignorance, our desperate strivings, and the virulent certainty that we, and they, are somehow damaged or inadequate.
I don’t often address my daughter directly on this page, but it’s time to tell her the only thing I know for sure, the thing she’s known all along.
You have never been too early, too little, or too late. It’s only me who struggles to keep up, who labors at the pace, who resists the steady insistence of your momentous arrival.
I can hardly believe my eyes, but you’re here already!
Kasey Mathews is offering a signed copy of Preemie to a commenter on this post. No matter where you are in your parenting journey, how old or young your children, we are all about to be born into the inconceivable, a new day and stage, and we feel frightened and unprepared. Leave a comment by this Friday, August 3 and claim your early birthday gift.
We spent the day emptying drawers, sorting “keep” or “go,” hauling bags of trash and giveaways, swiping piles of dust. My husband and I have relented to buying my daughter a new bed, a bed entirely of her choosing, to match her self-image and sensibilities, a “teen” bed which will endure as the last blasted bed we buy her. It delivers tomorrow, and so today we cleaned out her room, meaning we cleaned out the most beloved 12 years of our lives. A day like this reminds me that all days are like this. I can’t say it any better than I did in Momma Zen:
“Form is emptiness,” Buddhism teaches. “And emptiness is form.” What could it possibly mean? It means this. It means I cried on the night of Georgia’s first birthday.
The bakery cake was ugly. She bawled in bewilderment at the crowd around the table. The presents didn’t interest her. She fled my arms to the cuddles of her babysitter. My shame was complete, but it was something else that brought me to tears. It was the finality. My baby was done with her first year. And despite my hurry, I was not. I had chosen this night to box up her baby clothes, refolding the tiny come-home things, sobbing at the poop and spit-up stains. They were already relics. How could it be over?
People will tell you so many things, passing on their hindsight and regrets. Love them when they are little. Cherish the early days. I would say it all again but I’m not sure you can hear it until you reach the other side, open your eyes and let the tears of recognition come. There is not one piece of life that you can grasp, contain or keep, not even the life you created and hold right now in your arms. I confess I never tried to slow it down, ever pushing forward to some imagined place of competence for me and independence for her. On this night, though, I could see how fast it all would go. How fast, how sad. Every happy day brimming with bittersweetness.
This is how it passes: no matter where we are we think of someplace else. The place before nighttime feedings, the place beyond twelve-a-day-diapers, the certain bliss that beckons from a distant shore. This is how we spend our lives; this is how we spend their lives, motoring past milestones as if collecting so many merit badges.
We can be forgiven for this tendency, in part, because childhood is full of tests and measures, percentiles and comparisons. Bring your baby to the doctor’s office and they will plot her as a dot on a growth chart. I inscribed these glyphs dutifully on my calendar – how many pounds now, how many inches now – satisfied that we were safely on course to get somewhere. Where is that somewhere? Where is that place that I can relax the tension on the reins, ease off the accelerator?
Not one bit of life is a weight or a measure, a list or a date, a tick or a tock. It is never a result or an outcome. What it is, is a continual marvel, a wondrous flow without distance or gap, a perpetual stream in which we bob and float. We are buffered from nothing and yet never quite fully immersed because our thinking mind keeps eyeing the banks, gauging the current, scoping for landmarks and striving for some kind of perfect, elusive destination. There isn’t a destination. Life keeps going. It keeps going within us; when we’re not attentive, it keeps going without us. read more
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. – The Beatles
I’ve just completed 13,000 miles of travel this fall. What’s the takeaway? A giveaway.
Go to Taslim’s blog this week to win a signed copy of Momma Zen. Go see Roos to win tokens of love. And here on my blog, leave as many comments as you like and I’ll be giving away a signed copy of Belly Button Bliss, a book of happy birth stories compiled by my generous friend Jennifer Derryberry Mann.
Enter often. Take all the love that comes. All contests end Friday, Oct. 28.
With love, Maezen.
The winner of Belly Button Bliss is Jim, who had the presence of mind to enter three times!
When you ask yourself “Why not?” you may find yourself in motion, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over impossible mountains and beyond the deep blue water’s edge, where you surprise yourself, once and for all, by getting wet. – Momma Zen
I’m flying over the ocean, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over immense peaks, impossible heights and unfathomable distance. I’m coming home from an island retreat, and although I didn’t quite take to the surf like some in my family did, I went far enough to get wet.
Our lives are always calling us to step out from an island retreat and into the water. Beyond our false and insular views of “me, my, I” and into the ocean of true reality, true connection. Farther than the familiar edge that halts us, and through the question that dissolves all fear: why not?
Initiative is what takes you everywhere. There is never an absence of information in our lives. There is as much inspiration as sand. But we are all plagued by a shortage of initiative, like surfers stuck on shore, waiting for waves that will never come far enough to transport them forward. read more
If you’ve read Hand Wash Cold or Momma Zen, unfurl your colors. Go to Amazon or Goodreads and enter a new rating or a review for either or both books, then come back here and leave me a comment telling me so. At the end of the week I’ll draw a winner from the comments here to receive two free signed copies. So you can have your flag and wave it too.
Edited to add: Winners of this giveaway are Shana and Jim. But the commenters have already given me the grand prize. Thank you, everyone!
Offered as a prayer of love and thanksgiving on this, what would have been my mother’s seventy-sixth birthday. Her silent ovation never ends.
Dear Karen,
Thank you so much for writing Momma Zen, or as the title is in Dutch: Zen Mama! I enjoyed every minute of it. You helped me so much with all kinds of struggles that I have had as a mother. Your book inspired me to look at life differently, to see all the beauty that is around me, in my children, in my marriage, in my work. I am kind of a hyperactive person some times and after the birth of my youngest daughter, I lost all my flexibility in life. I could no longer look at the bright side of life, felt so guilty towards my daughter at not being able to solve her problems and really fought hard to get myself back on track. Then I read about your book, ran to the bookstore, started reading and could not stop for a couple of hours. I think I never quoted a book so many times in conversations with my husband because you used the words in your book that I was looking for.
You have no idea what you did for me and my family. I am so happy at the moment, enjoying every minute of my two beautiful girls without doubting if I am a good mother. Thanks Karen for everything!
Every friend of mine that celebrates her birthday will receive your book for the coming years.
***
I have 27 pages of emails like this, 9500 words, from four continents. They are the world to me.
Now, give yourself two chances to win a signed copy of Momma Zen at the wishstudio or at Elissa Elliott’s Living the Questions blog. Visit both and be greedy! It’s a birthday.
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I just put a gawd awful button on the right side of the page over there so you can buy Momma Zen directly from me. Why this took me three years to accomplish I do not know. I’m slow getting out the door.
I kinda thought there were rules, or at least simple courtesies, about this sort of thing. Like that the publisher wanted to sell it. Or like bookstores would stock it. Nah, not so much. Lately the book has been in short supply everywhere I go. Last weekend I spoke to 400 people in Palo Alto but the Stanford bookstore supplied only 30 copies to sell to the hundreds of folks in line. What?! Heck, Georgia sold ten times as many boxes of Girl Scout cookies without a backward glance. Now I see that Amazon has sold out twice in the last month, making people wait two weeks to get it. So forgive my cluelessness, but I’m taking matters of the heart into my own grubby hands.
Ask and you shall find. Knock, and the good old US Post Office shall open your mailbox and pop one inside.
And to think I practice mindfulness. It’s always a good time to start.
A little feedback:
Mojo Mom Amy Tiemann is the wind at my back today. Click on her Quote of the Day before midnight tonight to see how she is counting down the days to the debut of the new edition of her book, which I can’t wait to read. Without expectation, maybe?
Over at A Room of Mama’s Own, everyone’s favorite pseudonym MPJ finally took a leap and overcame her dread of a dusty old book. Everyone, go cheer her on until she crash lands at a happy ending!
And good grief, the folks at Mutual of Omaha snagged some of my aha moments for the launch of their new feel good ad campaign. Find Cheerio Road on the lower right, bringing up the bottom. I especially like their timing, because we all know by now that the aha in the insurance industry isn’t me, it’s them.
Edited to add: Oops! Time’s up. My moment in Omaha is over. They ripped me off their website because they don’t like my sense of humor. And I don’t like their sense of theft. The ahas just keep on coming, don’t they? That’s okay. The only readers who were clicking through were, naturally, in Omaha.
