My dreams turned to memories long ago, as I rocked my baby girl to sleep in the heat of those summer nights. I remember it like it was yesterday, the yellow curtains fluttering in the warm breeze, as the old rattan rocker creaked to the thck-thck-thck rhythm of her gentle sucking. Her damp curls against my bare skin, one tiny hand clutched my finger, and the other opened and closed ever so gently as she slowly rubbed my side.
I’m often taken back to those summer nights on balmy evenings like this. I remember the scent of innocence that filled that small nursery, faint and fresh as my daughter's sweet breath. I couldn’t take my eyes off her ... the smooth plump of her unblemished skin ... the creaseless folds of her still uninitiated hands and feet.
Her birth was like a dream -- like my own. In a sense, it was my own. In those first days, maybe for the very first time in my life, I looked and – to my surprise ~ could actually see deep into the eyes of another human being. She seemed to glow, to change the very color of the world around us. Her upward gaze was wide awake, appreciative and accepting like none I could remember ever having met. She was unprejudiced and trusting in a way that is continually surprising, even now, since the world seems to be filled with everything but.
I had never known an unaffected human being before my daughter was born. They say each child comes with it’s own unique personality and predispositions, but one thing they all have in common is that they arrive uncorrupted, innocent, free of ill intentions or hidden agenda, as too many develop too soon. There, in the very beginning, before any action or reaction, any offense or defense, could make for hurt feelings or hurtful intentions, she was a trusting and good will, with no sense or reason to be otherwise. She was, as we all begin, pure and uncompromised innocence ~ a tender spirit with no reason or wish to cause harm ... at least, none yet.
I kissed her on the forehead and lay her gently in her crib. I loved to watch her sleep, and could stand for long hours over her, counting my blessings.
I felt full, indeed, grateful! I felt the need to pray…an unfamiliar feeling throughout most of my early years. I learned some years later that this is how Native Americans pray as well – not by asking for what they want, but saying thank you for all they have.
Since then, those precious crystalline moments have resonate throughout my lifetime, and sometimes come rushing back in waves that spill out in tears of pure joy.
If anything on this planet is truly magic, it is the soft warmth of a baby’s touch, the sweet expression of a newborn face, the twinkling wonder of a child’s eyes. Words can work an awesome magic, but they fail as truly when describing magic itself as ropes fail at tying up smoke. Still, they go a long way in this context, since what I felt as a young mother, and again with the birth of every grandchild since, is an experience shared implicitly by every human being who has ever loved a child – or for that matter, any other human being.
It is humankind's best hope that parenting, and love itself, is an experience that is as impossible to live through unchanged.
And yet, it is a challenge not without its full share of heartache.
I cried when I learned I was pregnant. Not because I didn't want a child ~ in fact, like most women fast approaching the limits of her maternal options (and probably most men as well), to be a parent was what I had most wished for all my life~ just as it was what I'd most feared. Dreams of loving and caring for this child who now straddled my lap had been with me at least since I'd first memorized those comforting images of motherhood playing with dolls on rainy afternoons long ago. Over the years, television and a few real-life models had polished off my shining sense of the kind of mother I would be ~ always cheerful, I would give my children everything they needed to be happy (which then meant something like ‘wholesome’ white bread, the latest toys, and of course the right kind of aspirin, because ~ as the commercial said ~ "Mothers are like that . . . yea, they are!")
It had been a beautiful dream, but I'd been around long enough by the time she was born to know how much wishful thinking my dreams were made of. Pregnant, with heartburn, morning sickness, a weak bladder, and a temperamental husband, I worried that I wouldn't have what it takes to be a ‘good mother.’ I did not worry that I couldn't love my child ... only that love might not be enough. In real life, so much is out of our control.
When my daughter was born into this anything but gentle world, where the birth of innocence begins its death, I was inspired to change, to learn, to grow – so to become the kind of parent I would have liked to have had. For this child in my arms was vulnerable in ways that others who had been significant to me had long since learned to hide. And I, vulnerable to them, had learned well enough along with them.
And yet now, here she was, ready or not, dream turned to reality, looking up at me with those deep dark eyes and asking the first of an endless stream of unspoken questions ~ Who are you? and Who is going to take care of me?
I took a glass of wine and a small joint out onto the deck, where I could hear her through the window if she cried. Such illuminating flashes of epiphany are fun, as Plato says, but they do no good if we don’t remember them. So I write, which fixes insights in my memory. And I feel lucky when, in my better moments, I can still hear the crickets on the breeze. I can smell the scent of honeysuckle, hear the waves lapping at the shore, and see the lightening bugs twinkling against the dark of the enchanted evening… even after all these years.
Such moments in life can change us forever, if we remember them. They can remind us of what is possible, and can cascade into others as the years go by, if we learn from them. The mood of that enchanted summer has echoed through all the days of my life ~ over all the crisp autumn mornings, the snowing winter evenings, the gentle spring rains ~ I am transport back to the memory of that summer, and falling in love with my baby girl, an began a journey I would never have experienced without her.
I think of it especially when I see my grandchildren smile and hear them laugh.
The insights that illuminated the early days of her life remain beyond the reach of words. But Huston Smith expressed it as well as anyone ever has, I suppose:
“Understanding breeds love, [and] the reverse also holds. Love… brings understanding ~ the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand…for it is impossible to love another without hearing” them.[1]
I had thought, till then, that love was an emotion, and measured it by the intensity of my feelings. But with the birth of my daughter, I came to see that extreme emotions are only serendipitous side effects of love, not its essence, just the reward for doing it well (or perhaps the punishment for doing it poorly).
Instead, love turns out to be an opening of the heart that brings the other’s perspective, concerns, and interests into our own. It illuminates the world as seen through their eyes, as well as the good inside them. It brings to light the why of what they do, how they feel, who they are, and wish to be. And ideally, it governs how we act thereafter, how well we listen, how deeply we care.
If we are to take Smiths’ meaning, understanding and love are mutually reinforcing, each grows with the growth of the other, and both are bound up with thoughtful listening.
Perhaps this is what Socrates meant when he said, “Love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about.”
Becoming a parent is not the only experience that can illuminate this, of course, but it is probably the most effective…and enjoyable...and difficult. In only a few days, weeks, months after my daughter’s birth, I had become an entirely different person, at least from my own point of view. The very color, sound, scent, taste and feel of the world around me had changed. Making changes in one’s life, one’s habits, can take much longer, of course, but the insight and fresh perspective that loving a child can bring is a very good place to start.
For me, it began with her unspoken question, “Who are you?”
Who, indeed?
Before my baby girl came along, I was a person who smoked too much, was no fun on camping trips, couldn’t even spell intelligence, and worst of all, hard as I tried, could not seem to resolve so much senseless and ongoing conflict with my husband that had underscored my life. The thing is, when we fall in love with someone, it’s generally because we see the good inside them, which is still there, somewhere – the child inside. The problem is, this often turns out not to be the person we end up married to. For while we may think we’re marrying their divine potentials, we too often end up living with their demons.
How many of us carry unresolved conflicts from a lifelong habit of burying hurt feelings and ultimately bad conscience, only to take out that anger, even rage, on those we love and who love us most?
I too carried my own deep conflict. There was no where else to put it, and the world I lived in only cared about how I behaved, it seemed, not how I felt. So, like so many around me, I had managed to create the appearance of a good person, but until now, it hadn’t occurred to me my children wouldn’t care about the appearance - from me they would need the real thing.
Until now, I had managed to listen to many voices, other than my own. I'd internalize what was expected of me by so many external pressures, trusted that it was for the best to do so, and in the process, managed somehow to ignore my own inner voice. I bought into the idea that, left to my own devices, I would follow my instinct straight into trouble ~ original sin, and all that. Whatever impulse or inner will had moved me, I took to be evidence of my own internal corruption, proof that I needed the direction of culture and peers to keep me in order.
And though I questioned so many insensible rules incessantly, I hardly voiced this dissent. Indeed, questioning the rules and breaking from the norm is a highly discouraged practice almost everywhere one goes in this world ~ despite so many senseless rules and stifling expectations, even in so-called liberal democratic societies, where questioning the rules is liberally expounded in principle, while barely allowed in practice. In nearly every modern culture, not the least of which our own, there are things we simply don’t question ~ things we learn to play dumb to. And our children pay the highest price for this cowardice.
I learned only later that this is the difference in ethics and ethos. Ethos is the habitual normal of our culture, while ethics is that inner voice that corrects the ethos, for what is normal is not necessarily good or right. Ethics is the voice that our ethos so often tells us to ignore.
John Stuart Mill calls this heavy hand of public opinion the “tyranny of the majority,” or what comes off as a majority, at least, if only because this voice is so loud and insistent. And by fear of its harsh judgment, the hurt feelings, stigma, and alienation that follows from all this criticism and judgment, we are conditioned into behaving "properly" ~ sometimes no matter how morally improper such actions may actually be. As the saying goes, ‘Morality is doing what’s right, regardless of what you’re told. While obedience is doing what you’re told, regardless of what’s right.”
This social pressure succeeds, not because we don't care about the truth, but because the consequences for questioning the ethos of our culture can be most severe. And perhaps no one feels this judgment more directly than new mothers, for we are all too happy to blame parents for what goes wrong with their children ~ even when it is the world corrupting our young, and parents who are the only ones at least trying to do right by them.
And this is why what we are taught about our ‘human nature’ is so important, for whether we believe it is good or bad will largely determine which authority we listen to, that of the world around us, or our own inner voice. It’s easier to believe the world is good (the reason Huck Finn called this ethos his conscience, even though it taught him that slavery was right, and freeing slaves was wrong. That’s the problem with ethos – injustice has a long tradition…that only our inner voice can correct. But our inner voice will only tell us what not to do, as Socrates famously said, never what to do. What is the right thing to do, at the right time, and for the right reason, this is something we must figure out for ourselves. For there are a thousand ways to do a good thing well, as they say. How do we know what is right? By a process of elimination - for once we stop doing what our inner voices tells us not to, then everything else is right.
So we face this moral dilemma when our children come along and look at us, not from outside-in, but from the inside-out. They don’t care about, indeed, can’t even see the images we present to others. They are too close for that ~ only later will they see the person we are from outside-looking-in. Only later will they learn to look through other's eyes, to look at our surface as we present it to the world, and perhaps to judge us as harshly. In the beginning, they read us directly, and know the same about us that we know about ourselves.
The deep communication between parent and child is direct and immediate. They understand us as we really are, often better than we understand ourselves. Like animals and those we sometimes call ‘primitives,’ babies have that superior inability to understand a lie. Indeed, it is easier to lie to oneself than to one's children. And for this reason alone, children behoove our self-reflection, self-improvement, self-actualization. They deserve better than the mere appearance of a good parent ~ they deserve the real thing.
Through my daughter's brand new eyes all was fresh and undefined. At birth there are no givens, no assumptions or expectations, not even any world outside oneself. She watches, listens, tastes, smells, and feels her place in the world. Things flow together. No objects can be differentiated from any others, and mother cannot be separated from self. Where one ends and the other begins is a matter not even mother knows. She reaches out and I am there; she cries and I pick her up; she is hungry and I feed her. Almost mystically, I feel through her skin and see through her eyes. Only when her needs are met can I be content.
Ideally, the symbiotic connection is complete, but mine was not an ideal world. Yet she rules it by her will to survive; powerlessness will set in some time later. For now, when she needs, I respond. She must be able to trust this; if not, she will be swallowed by fear and insecurity, and I will have failed us both. Her safety, security, and well-being are truly my own. She has taught me already that this is what love means.
We all need at least one good parent... As long as children can trust someone, they can feel safe. But if a child cannot trust anyone, life will never be without that deep sense of anxiety and inner conflict that inclines us to grow up into adults that take our anger out on others.
So I resolved to do my best at this, whatever that would ultimately mean. For those who face the challenge of nurturing, in any of its many forms, it is the only way to self-respect.
But such devotion did not come easily or automatically, at least not to me. I had grown into a kind of person to whom all this gentle warmth seemed quite alien. I was unaccustomed to these softer feelings and the give and take of such total trust. I'd managed over the years not to spend too much time and energy looking or listening inward ~ not to pay attention to that inner voice, that too often told me to do what others told me not to, and not to do what I was told.
Seldom had my communication expressed my deepest thoughts and feelings ~ a self that perhaps did not yet even exist yet, until now. I'd managed well enough all these years to look from outside-in at myself, as at others, and learned to consider my behavior the important thing, up against which, my inner world was irrelevant. I was a surface even in my own eyes. I struggled to contain the troublesome feelings, to ignore the active impulses of my own instinct, and to manage my moods, which seemed in constant flux. I maintained control. And I was proud when I could do it…but then it was everything I could do. I had almost nothing left over for caring about anyone or anything else. So preoccupied with meeting the world out there, I had little attention left over for knowing myself, in here, let alone others, inside.
If I had a view of my own, I was reluctant to share it, either because I did not want others to know me, or more likely, to know how I felt about them. I was too smart, I thought with foolish pride, than to make myself vulnerable. I became calloused, in places scared, and always guarded after years of abrasion, uncertain anymore whether that wall between the real me and the real world was meant to hold something in or something out. I only knew that, at times, I felt the need to not feel.
So now, when I would hear her tiny cry, I found that I could barely comprehend what this child I'd created was asking of me, indeed, expected and deserved. How could I help her keep that sensitivity she was born with, when I had not been able to keep my own?
So is this insensitive person really who I am, I wondered? Or simply who I learned to be? For surely I had been that innocent once too…before I grew up reacting to those around me. Is this my nature, or just a collection of bad habits I’d developed, like so many others around me?
I didn’t know the answers to these questions yet, but I did know that she would see me, at least for now, only from the inside-looking-out. Though someday she may also know the more cumulative me, but for now she knows only how quickly I come when she cries. For years to come, in fact, everything in her world would depend upon the quality of my responses. This is where appearances break down, in whether I would help relieve her distress, or would add to it. And while she would certainly not determine her identity by mine alone, the person I would become would impact upon her immeasurably, one way or the other.
Such is the awesome and irrevocable power and responsibility of being a parent – just as it is life's greatest opportunity. But why are we are so alone in this endeavor? And why is there so much working against us?
Before my daughter was born, I’d never considered myself particularly intelligent, since I seemed to have more questions than answers. But I came to see, in raising her, that intelligence grows with understanding, and understanding grows in question and answer relationships. In fact, questions are quieted only with understanding. As Socrates once said, “nothing is an answer if you haven’t asked the question.”
It seems to me now that my intelligence began to grow only as my heart did, with my daughter’s many questions. And she answered my questions as she grew… Beginning with, what does it mean to love? To learn? And what is my purpose in life?
I soon came to see that love and learning are not actually different things – just different manifestations of the same thing…the same process, applied to different matters.
(Continue this thread here...On Love, Learning & Understanding *)
[1] (Huston Smith, Illustrated World’s Religions, p.249)