Why I Write This Blog

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. This procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not very popular."
Carl Jung

In Jung's opinion, generally, the world was going to hell on a speeding train, and when people asked him if human kind had any hope at all of surviving, he said, only if we do our shadow work. In Jung's analysis, every person has a shadow, a part of the psyche that she rejects. And acknowledging that part is what he's talking about when he talks about shadow work. To extrapolate, the only way to be a decent parent is to expose your shadow parent--your dark side of the mom; the opposite of everything you saw on TV growing up. Because when you look at it, own it, even, occasionally, embrace the mother fucker (I use that term literally here), it doesn't knock you on your ass the same way it does if you're trying to pretend it isn't there and it shows up anyway, as it is wont to do. The idea is that you start to have a relationship with it. You see your shadow, and instead of hating yourself for having one, and trying to pretend you never threw that craaaazy tantrum when your kid wouldn't go to sleep that one night, you say, yes, I did. And you just sit with it. You look at it.

Sitting with it is different from indulging in it, and this is an important distinction. I question myself on this point, because I don't want badmommyla to turn into a vehicle through which I expose my bad behavior and then continue on with it, writing one humiliating/amusing post after another about how I lost it in the grocery store, or forgot to feed my child one day, or whatever madcap adventures we might associate with "badmommyla". That's not what I mean to be doing. What I mean to be doing--why I write this blog--is to share my experiences so that others will feel less alone. It is my mission to increase awareness and reduce shame and guilt. Because I believe that free of those things, we are freer, and better, mothers.

Sitting with it means neither repressing nor indulging. It means accepting. It means accepting not only that you are not perfect, but that you actually might be a little screwed up. I fantasize that there are mothers out there who don't do things they regret. Either they behave perfectly, a la Stepford Wives, or they are so at peace with their own darkness that they just accept themselves completely. Whatever the case, it ain't me, babe, no, no, no, it ain't me, babe. And if you're reading this post, it probably ain't you, either. Thank God we have each other!

The shadow side of motherhood is vast and sometimes downright terrifying. At the very darkest end of the spectrum, we have mothers who kill their children; a little further towards the light, mothers who chronically abuse their children; mothers who abandon their children. In Jung's opinion, this kind of acting out is the surest symptom of repressing the shadow. So maybe some of these truly "bad" mothers are trying so hard to be June Cleaver that the pressure not to be honest about how overwhelmed they are, or how much they sometimes resent their children, just completely overtakes them. Psychotherapist Robert Johnson explains, "The refused and unacceptable characteristics do not go away; they... collect in the dark corners of the personality. When they have been hidden long enough, they take on a life of their own--the shadow life... If it accumulates more energy than our ego, it erupts as an overpowering rage."

This is why I write this blog. I want to expose my shadow--the shadow of motherhood in general--to the light and create space for others to do so, in the hope that if we can look and laugh, and sometimes cry, and be honest, together, the gnarly beast of all that we don't want to be might be defeated, or tamed, or, at the very least, witnessed. Because I believe, as Jung did, that we can grow through our shadows into more enlightened human beings and, naturally, more enlightened mothers.

This Home is Not Broken

I'd like to file an informal complaint about Judith Wallerstein. For those of you who don’t know who Judith Wallerstein is, she has been the preeminent talking head in the US since the 1970s on the effect of divorce on children. And the answer as to why I am filing said complaint will also answer another question recently asked by badmommyla readers: “Where the hell have you been for the last nine months?”

The short reply would be: in the last nine months, I separated from my husband. I have my daughter with me five days per week; he has her for two. We are getting along as well as can possibly be expected, and I mean that literally-- we are kind to one another and we put our daughter first in all our choices and actions. She is doing well, as far as we can tell. Still, as you can imagine, there has been plenty of grist for the bad mommy mill—more reasons to feel bad!

And if you want to feel bad about divorce, Judith Wallerstein would like to help you feel even worse. She speaks with authority, and gets loads of airtime in our popular media. She has credentials and a New York Times Best Seller. This is the case in spite of the fact that her research is seriously flawed. Wallerstein strongly discourages people from considering divorce, except in extreme cases, and she burdens those who have already made the decision to divorce with the following narrative:  you have now traumatized your children and condemned them to a lifetime of suffering--trust issues; broken relationships; an inability to commit. And this is where I have a problem with her work and her confidence in the story she tells based on her—let me say it again—flawed research.

I don't doubt that some children of divorce do struggle with the aforementioned issues, but I struggle with those issues and my parents have been married for over forty years. I see many of my clients and friends and family members, whose parents' marriages are intact, struggling with those same issues. And, conversely, I have seen others who, even as the product of divorced parents, somehow maintain satisfying and committed marriages. And yes, my evidence is anecdotal. Still, I can't ignore my own experience and the fact that it highlights the possibility of another story about divorce and the children of divorce.

And that possibility is: there is no predetermined story--no absolute truth--about any of it. The Greek philosopher Epictetus proclaimed that "we are disturbed not by what happens to us but by our thoughts about what happens." In light of this, when I feel myself in a negative emotional state, I stop and ask myself, what story am I telling myself right now? And I find that there always is a story. Sometimes it’s my own story; sometimes it’s Judith Wallerstein’s; sometimes it’s off the news or from the annals of my own family history. “I am ruining my daughter’s life,” for example. “I am traumatizing my daughter.” This is the kind of thought that makes my blood run cold. It makes me feel physically sick.

I am indebted to Byron Katie for her simple, direct process of inquiry, called The Work. Now I know how to find the thought I’m thinking--or the story Judith Wallerstein is spinning--and question it, hard. I take a really good look at it. Is the story--the thought, the belief--true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? No. I can’t. And so, why on earth accept it, especially if it causes me pain and hampers my ability to think straight, and be a good mother? Because the truth--which is both scary and liberating--is that I have no idea how any of this plays out, or ends up, and neither does Judith Wallerstein, or anyone else.

Trauma has been a fact of existence for living things since things started living. Things that don't tell stories about it, like animals and plants, and enlightened masters, recover relatively quickly from trauma. We humans, on the other hand, tell ourselves stories that keep the synapses in our brains firing along the same miserable pathways, reliving the past event and re-traumatizing ourselves long after the source of the trauma has passed. Mental health means stopping that. Continually replaying a tape--in your own head or via listening to a talking head--about how traumatized you and your children are is dangerous.

And yet, it’s challenging to let go of our stories, even our sad ones. Having a story is reassuring. At least then we know what support group to join and exactly how to flagellate ourselves, or who to blame. We know how to explain why we’re so fucked up, or why everyone else is. We can define ourselves as victims, or perpetrators, and have an identity. We humans like having an identity. I know I do, although in this current scenario I find it burdensome and limiting to think I know what’s going on and who I am in relation to it.

If I listen to the scary stories out there, I am the single mother of a traumatized child living in a broken home. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! I could trip on that story for hours. I have tripped on that story for hours, and yet even the most cursory inquiry into it reveals it as fiction, in no uncertain terms. I am not a single mother because my daughter's father is still a daily presence in our lives, and I am surrounded by people who love me and my daughter and want to help. My home is not broken. My daughter's father and I have two homes now, both of which are whole, so long as we believe they are. The bonds of a family are not always visible, but my experience is that they are always intact. Our family is not broken, although it is non-traditional.

If I l believe the thought that I, my home, my family, are broken, I feel awful--hopeless and exhausted—and that’s how I come off to my daughter. When I am able to let go of that thought, and just be open to what is actually happening--a transition, a transformation, a shift from the known to the unknown--I can breathe. I have room to create something new; or to let something new unfold.

If you find yourself in my position, do yourself a favor and watch your thoughts, and be very careful about what you let yourself believe. Question everything you hear, everything anyone tells you, about divorce. What you believe, and how your perceive yourself in the midst of this change is one hundred times more powerful--and more real--than statistics and research and stories concocted by talking heads will ever be.

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Attach. Release. Repeat.

"Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world; it's accepting that they go away."
Shunryu Suzuki

I used to pride myself on being unattached to things. I liked to say that I could fit all my possessions into my car, and that's the way I liked it. I couldn't imagine that motherhood would change me into a thing collector, hanging onto ancient pacifiers and faded locks of hair. My humbling proceeded swiftly, when the day came that I had to admit, really admit, that my daughter had outgrown her first wardrobe—the truly tiny, surely no one is this small, hats and shoes, shirts and pants, dresses and pajamas. “We have to keep this one,” I said to my husband, clutching the giraffe sleeper I had put her in at the hospital. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. I felt almost sick. I couldn’t remember which of the white hospital shirts was the first one she had ever worn and I wanted to know because I wanted to keep that one.

As it turned out, I wanted to keep almost everything. I felt my attachment like a hot hand clutching the core of my being—the very same attachment that Jesus, the Buddha, Patanjali, and myriad other enlightened masters have clearly pegged as the source of all human suffering. Clinging to the material world creates pain because whatever you are clinging to will absolutely, positively, no two ways about it, change. Disappear. Transform into something different. Become obsolete. Case in point: the teeny tiny giraffe sleeper bag. And of course, it wasn’t the clothes I couldn’t bear to let go. What I couldn’t bear to let go was already irretrievably gone.

When you hold something beautiful and sublime in your hungry hands--your baby, your lover, a moment, a phase--you want to hold onto it forever. It's human nature. And yet, letting go, over and over and over again, is the only sane response. Being a mother seems to be all about this paradox, of needing to hold on and contain and attach profoundly to our children--that's the job--followed by the necessity of letting go, with some measure of confidence, but absolutely no guarantees--that's also the job. We have to do both. We have to embody, daily, these opposite impulses. It's not easy. This is why there's so much weeping at graduations and weddings and the first day of Kindergarten--the sadness of what is passing and the joy of what is coming to be arise simultaneously in equal and opposite measure and the next thing you know, your mascara is running down your face and your kids are embarrassed.

In the end, I kept two tiny hats and a pair of shoes, and you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers when I finally give up the ghost. They are symbols of the ego softening truth of impermanence and my own human frailty. And, I can fit them in my car, in my glove compartment, even. I'm still like, totally Zen, right?

The Buddha, the Babies, Saturn, and Suffering

“Life is suffering,” said the Buddha, upon attaining enlightenment. He chose that sentence as the First Noble Truth. Numero Uno. As a mother, I can tell you, infancy provides plenty of evidence for his theory. In many ways, there’s nothing cute about the lives of these small humans--colic, teething, gas, birth complications, difficulty breast feeding, difficulty pooping, and any number of injustices any mother can tell you about. To ask, “Why is it like this?” is probably to bark up the wrong tree. If you do and you’re like me, you’ll end up thinking it’s your fault somehow.

There is so much romanticizing of motherhood that I found it difficult to bear the flagrant contrast between the projected ideal and my reality. I mean, we had our moments of being the beatific mom with the sleeping baby, but more often, we were the harried, anxious mom with the baby who would not stop crying and could not be put down for one minute. In her early infancy, my daughter cried without stopping for hours at a time. We'll never know why. She got an ear infection even though I was doing everything “right”. She struggled with seemingly incurable gas; we tried physical exercises, homeopathy, gripe water, chamomile tea, all of it; nothing we could do took away her pain. And, as if it were not hard enough to have a screaming infant on my hands, my mind tormented me: "DO SOMETHING, YOU INADEQUATE FOOL! MAKE IT STOP! THAT'S YOUR JOB! AAAH!"

I had a breakthrough one morning when I read an essay on the meaning of Saturn in Greek mythology. The author said that Saturn’s purpose is to teach us that life has a harsh side. Everyone has to deal with it; there are no exceptions. Through Saturn, we experience constriction, pain, powerlessness, and loss. These are human experiences, built in to the fact of being alive on planet earth. Suffering is as natural and unavoidable as breathing. It just is, man. Don't fight it. It's like trying to fight the sky. In spite of six years of meditating and studying Buddhism, I had somehow not really understood the First Noble Truth, not in terms of mothering anyway, and it was as if I were hearing it for the first time. I felt like a massive burden had been lifted from my chest. Life is harsh, I said to myself, and felt a strange enthusiasm rise up within me. "Life is harsh," I said again, out loud.

By the time my husband woke up, I was jumping around like a street corner prophet broadcasting The Truth: "Life is harsh! Life is harsh!" I handed him a cup of coffee and explained excitedly, “It’s not my fault that Elva got an ear infection and that she cries and nothing I do helps. It’s not my fault that she has gas. It’s not my fault that our birth plan didn't work out the way we planned it. Life is just like that sometimes. Being born is hard. Being a baby is hard. It’s not because I’m doing something wrong.” Apparently, he already knew this. For me, it was, and still is, news I can use. Every time I let go of feeling responsible for suffering I can't control, I have more energy to throw at the suffering I can control, or the things I can do to relieve the suffering that just is. And so, I'm very grateful for the bad news, and the good news, that my daughter will suffer and it will not be my fault and a lot of the time there's nothing I can do about it. It's just her birthright, along with joy, of course, and beauty, and love. All of which she's getting, and giving, in spades.

What It's Like

When my daughter was a toddler, my friend Dean asked me what it's like being a mother. I tried to think about how to describe it to him, a thirty five year old perennial bachelor, in terms that he could understand. I asked him if he had ever gotten stuck taking care of a friend at college who was really, really drunk and maybe tripping on acid, too. "That's what it's like," I said. At a social event, you turn your back for what seems like a moment and when you turn back around, your child is completely naked spreading yogurt dip on her private parts. And then eating it. At the park, where you turn away for just a second, one single second, you turn back around to find her chewing on a cigarette butt. And you spend a lot of time trying to reason with someone who is resisting you, uncoordinated, stumbling around. You talk in a loud voice, as if the problem is that they just can't hear you, saying things like, "I KNOW YOU DON'T LIKE THE CAR SEAT, BUT YOU HAVE TO GET IN THE CAR SEAT. IT'S THE LAW. I WILL GET YOU OUT OF THE CAR SEAT WHEN WE GET HOME. JUST LIKE WE ALWAYS DO. OKAY? I'M SORRY, I'M FORCING YOU INTO THE CAR SEAT NOW. IT'S OKAY." They are constantly falling down, hitting their heads, sobbing, getting back up again, falling down, hitting their heads, and... sobbing.

But just like your wasted college friend, they have these sublime moments of seemingly divine comprehension and connection. Waving their hand around in a sunny spot on the floor and laughing. Chasing pigeons as if they know what to do if they actually catch one. Rolling around in the grass with no thought, only the sheer joy of sensation. They will suddenly, when you don't expect it, give you a big hug, look you straight in the eye, and tell you they love you, so open hearted that your heart can only open in response. They are immersed in the moment in a way that's not possible if you're not drunk, enlightened, or under the age of five. And as nice as all that is, you still can't wait until they pass out for the evening so you can have a little time to yourself before you pass out, only to wake up and do it all over again the next day.

When your friend finally crashed, you may have taken a few photos to post online, or share with friends in some other format. The same is true when you have little children, only more so. My husband and I could not wait until our daughter was asleep--we were so exhausted--and then we would spend those few hours of potential "down" time looking at pictures of her on the computer. Unless your college friend was really hot, the comparison likely ends here. But up to this point, seriously, it's the same basic deal, only much more extreme. Your patience must extend considerably beyond a six hour odyssey holding the hand of someone who overdid it at a frat party. This is why nature makes little children so incredibly beautiful that it just doesn't feel right to abandon them.

In Defense of Regret

I’ve noticed a lot of people take pride in saying they have no regrets. It sounds great, but I’d just like to say a few words in defense of this humble feeling, because it has gotten me places I would never have gone without it. It’s interesting, dark, and rich; a great deal of art and literature flow forth from regret; and, it is as natural an accessory to motherhood as a diaper bag. Personally, I did not know the true meaning of the word until I had my daughter, who stirred in me a love so deep and powerful that I would not have to think before taking a bullet or throwing myself in front of a train for her. I had never felt that way about anyone before. And in light of this great love, I wanted to make no mistakes. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be The Best Mother EVER.

This is not rational. It is not reasonable. It is not possible. And it’s stressful as hell. But it’s what many mothers are dealing with and it has deepened my relationship to thoughts like, “If only I had known then what I know now!” and “If I could do that moment over again, I would do it so differently.” At their worst, these kinds of thoughts can make you so mad at yourself that you drain precious energy from your life force beating yourself up. This, I believe, is a misuse of regret. Used properly, regret can galvanize you to do things differently, to do it better, to make up for what you messed up. Used properly, regret can inspire you to actually change.

What I regret most when I look back on my early years as a mother is my lack of understanding, at times, that my daughter was developmentally incapable of doing what I wanted her to do. I also really struggled with my temper, and I regret every time I ever “lost it” with her. The depth of my regret over these mistakes inspired me to do some serious inner work and I have made more progress taming my anger than I ever have in my life. Now, when I start to get off track, usually my regret alarm goes off--a visceral nausea that reminds me, "Don't go there. You will regret it if you do." And 9 times out 10, I don't. The other times, I get a chance to say "I'm sorry" and model for my daughter how human beings can take responsibility for their mistakes, and how they can't be perfect, and how every moment is a chance to start over.

Listen To That Voice

I often feel I have two women living inside me--the Mother and the Artist--and they are always fighting. They fight over resources--time, money, energy, attention. They are philosophically at odds, one believing that serving another is of the highest value, the other believing that expressing the self is what it's all about. For the past five years, the Mother has been almost completely dominant, the Artist locked in a closet in the basement, and drugged. Now that my daughter is moving out of the super needy infant/toddler stage, the Artist is BACK, and boy is she pissed. She wants what she hasn't been getting these past four years, with interest. And for better or worse, she's not going to get it. She knows this, and it makes her moody and petulant, mean as a snake sometimes. She feels dangerous, like she might run off to Mexico without notice, or smoke a cigarette, or not go to bed until 3 in the morning, just to be BAD. Keeping her in check, while giving her enough of what she wants to prevent a total disaster, is a balancing act.

In some ways, the Artist is good for the Mother, and the child. She sets limits the Mother does not set. She admits she has needs beyond eating and bathing. She takes space from her children whether they like it or not (they never like it). I have a friend who's a father and a songwriter and he told me recently that he has always taught his children never to interrupt a songwriter at work. This may be the difference between mothers and fathers, I don't know, but I suddenly thought, Sweet Jesus, why didn't I think of that? We no longer live in a world where "Daddy does lots of interesting things, while Mommy is all about you," but, when I am stuck in the Mother role, I still play by those rules a lot of the time. Our children need a lot of love and undivided attention from us, true, but they also need us to model, at the appropriate time, independence, autonomy, and self-actualization. In the end, if I do so, I send my daughter an important message: If it's okay for me to stake out my personal space so that I can write songs and paint, it is okay for you to claim your space from those who would stand in your way when you want to make art, or jump out of planes, or meditate, or pursue your dreams in whatever way makes sense to you.

I know not all mothers are artists, but I think every mother, at a certain point, has one of those days when, suddenly, she looks up from the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she's making, or the child she's bathing, and thinks, This sucks. That voice is the voice of a self that has seen no time, no attention, no air, no light, nothing, for too long. That self needs you. I am here to urge you to listen to her. Give her a shot. Give her half an hour at the end of the day, or two days every month. The sooner you do, the safer you'll be from waking up three years from now in a cheap hotel in Tijuana not even caring if your kid got to school on time. If you're like me anyway.