My First

Theo. I haven't talked much about him here yet. What an amazing bundle of being he is. Waldorf schoolers have a saying that you are your child's first teacher. I wonder if they say you can reverse that--quite sincerely I say that this child was my first teacher. Regarding the kind of lessons that require extreme self-inspection and bare-naked honesty, he was the one, he was first and he made me a mother, which as some of you know, is a completely different kind of creature from any other.
In pouring myself so completely into him, I caught a glimpse of what I might be capable of, and simultaneously what the cost of failure might be. In seeing and hoping what he could become, I started to understand the potential I would not have so easily extended to myself. Perhaps others mature into these realizations at an earlier age (or stage) of life, but it took becoming a mother to Theo and then to Dora and then some for me to start thinking this way.

This is the boy who was so alarmed by the sensory input of being in water that we struggled to find a way to wash his hair until, at the age of 6, we found a truly superlative swimming teacher. For the first three months of swimming lessons she broke the experience down into manageable pieces: look, you are doing so well to put your shoulder in the water, and then see what happens if you bend your knees and let the water come around your neck, then don't you want to see this funny wiggly fish toy?--put your goggles on and put just your face in, and then well, this magical bell can only be heard if your ear is under the water. Thank you, thank you Marilyn. Now look!

This morning was a microcosm of his life when, after refusing to compromise on the one tortilla left (half of it? with half a piece of toast?) he said "Nope. It's all or nothing with me." Well. At least he said it with a smile on his face! He can be reasonable (he is a libra) , and heartbreakingly empathetic (because he knows what it is to feel things deeply) but his first reaction to things is often "Nope. That's not what I had in mind." For a new mother who wants to give everything to her son, this is a very demanding, exhausting, stance for a child to present. On top of my own standards, it nearly flattened me.

At the same time, I understood it! I am quite particular too, and at various times run the spectrum between being overly flexible (read: trying to please) and completely self-centered (read: trying to sort out what I need to do from what the world out there is saying). Finding ways to learn to mediate between a vulnerable yet visionary child and the supersized, sense-exploding bustle of life was (is) a hauntingly steep learning curve.

And then, the JOY! when we navigate it . . . when I see him ride the boogie board with pure happiness on his face . . . when I take my newly learned meditation and awareness skills and take him through a bodyscan, as I did twice in the past two weeks when he came to me for help, and see him take deeper breaths, relax into the night, and release himself from the grip of his nightmarish thoughts to the peace of the moment.

Doing the bodyscan with myself has been to lift a massive weight off, but to do it with him was to see the unnecessary, arbitrary nature of the negative thought loop, to appreciate more fully how breaking it down into manageable pieces of inhalation, exhalation is the equivalent of turning the light on and opening the dreaded closet of monsters in a child's bedroom. Look in front of this thought, look behind it--there is nothing there! There are no shadows, no monsters, no THING except the moment, here, breathing, and look how peaceful it is.

Compared to what I used to do, which was to make all sorts of assurances about how safe he is, how comfortable, platitudes, in essence telling him what his experience ought to be, telling him to try to overlay forcefully happy thoughts over the scary ones, this opening of the closet door is like jumping on a quiet, clean, high speed train after dragging ourselves on foot through the mud. More than that, it feels true, and important, and real, because it is inside of him, it will always be there, and he can access it now. It is hard to express how powerful this is. How good.