I had a bad morning the other day. Something unexpected happened, and in the span of five minutes, my future unraveled, my schemes died, and the only way forward seemed straight off a cliff. In other words, I had to change my plans. On the drive to school, I told my daughter what was going on and how it could affect her. I said this while I was driving in circles, making wrong turns and getting lost. She was quiet and let me be. At midday I got a text from her.
What are you going to do?
I don’t know, I replied.
Just do what you need to do. I will support you.
This is where I might congratulate myself for raising such a wise and compassionate child, with the emotional intelligence and resilience instilled by conscious parenting, who returns the unconditional love and acceptance I’ve given her.
Only she isn’t, because I don’t.
She doesn’t speak to me as I have spoken to her; she speaks to me as she wishes I would speak to her. She doesn’t mirror who I am, she shows me a person I can become. And if I am the slightest bit charitable in my recollections, I must concede that she has been doing this all along with clear-eyed consolations.
It’s not always going to be easy.
Everyone makes mistakes.
I never get mad when you don’t do your best.
Everything happens when you don’t expect it.
By fair assessment, I am only half the parent she is, and she is only half the child I perceive her to be. I can’t parcel the roles out one way or the other. I only know that in the midst of a dark and lonely trial, my pain is shattered by an innocent utterance, and life is born anew.
The life of a mother is the life of a child: you are two blossoms on a single branch. One more thing someone said to me once.
To my dear mother and all mothers before, to my daughter and all daughters to come, I leave this promise and conviction: Your babies will be okay. Together we find the way.
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Just in time, there are copies of Momma Zen on giveaway here.
You’ll just have to get used to this, Mom, because every teenage girl is like this.
I will confess to having an unhealthy fascination for the Lance Armstrong saga. I watched his interview on Oprah last week.
Dense fog covered the foothills this morning. It rolled over the ground in such billows I thought it might be fire. But it was love.
Zen is to deal with this very life – here now – as one’s own. We have to face the fact of this now, this here and this oneself. That’s what each of us is facing. That is the path. That is the Way. – Maezumi Roshi
I’ve pulled up one of those plastic stackable chairs alongside the humming hulk in the middle of the icy room. My daughter is lying inside the cylindrical chamber. We are both relieved that her head is peeking out at my eye level. A white fleece blanket covers her. Beneath it, she is holding a teddy bear handed to her at the last minute. She wears head phones tuned to Radio Disney. Her eyelids flutter.
It was the toothbrush that told me. Alone and overlooked in the emptied medicine chest, it was one of the few things my lover had left behind. When I found it, I knew with certainty what I’d been denying to myself for some time.
We never need to make our lives more difficult than they are, but of course we do. Then one day life itself rises up with an irrevocable force and we suddenly find that there is nothing we can do. Here is a message I received from Rose in Amsterdam not long ago. Since then, I’ve been 
