MOMMY NEAREST

For most of last week, I was glued to my cell phone. My Maine goddaughter went through twelve hours of surgery in Boston, and among the too many stresses that led to Dana-Farber Cancer Center were the increasingly unreliable behavior and erratic whereabouts of her blood mother. Edie had been a model mom who cooked three meals a day, drove car pools and shared homework problems right through high school. She was always there for her children. But while her daughter tried to raise two children, run a demanding restaurant, sustain a relationship with a man who couldn’t get a job, and help her best friend also her business partner manage ovarian cancer until it killed her leaving an estate to be managed, Mother turned into a roaming cell phone signal that didn’t come in or gave only impenetrable static. I wanted to give the get well gift of steady access.

Before she left Maine for Mass General, my goddaughter swore to me it didn’t matter any more that her mother was somewhere in the Maine woods on yet another misadventure. “I’m okay with not having her in my life right now,” she said. “Having her around has become like having a third child to take care of.” I didn’t argue because she didn’t need more grief than she was about to face in surgery. But I was, and am, willing to bet everything she was deceiving herself. That's why I clung to the phone.

My theory of family relativity has two truths, which interact the way they do in Dharma. Say what you will, relative truth is never the absolute one, and often contradictory to it. You can bet the vodka in matters of Mother, the absolute truth is that blood is thicker than brains. Mommy is the matter over mind. All the insouciant declarations that Mom’s behavior doesn’t affect you inevitably get belied by a stomach churn, a less springy step, a heavy sigh, a fleeting pang of self-pity, too much dope or drink, the phantom nerve pain that comes from an amputated limb, some unhappiness that creates an energy block that sets up a playing field for the likes of cancerous mutation. I have seen the scenario too many times.

Except for complete enlightenment—and the absolute truth is I don’t know that at all, I do not know anything stronger than the primal force of Mommy. This is of course simply code for the basic human need to be cared for or cared about—specifically with compassion, described in the Dharma as removing the causes of suffering. Since so much suffering is caused by the stark feeling of loneliness, Mommy is the manifestation of desire to have somebody standing by, somebody seemingly stronger who will be there without question or judgment, somebody who, as the old Sinatra song sings, will love you all the way, “taller than the tallest tree is, that’s how it’s got to feel.”

Mommy is a tenacious and tremendous trope. It is the essence of Buddhism, which was designed to make all human beings behave toward all beings like a mother caring for her precious child. A bodhisattva gives all to prevent suffering, shining as endlessly and effortlessly as the sun. That’s the miracle of Mom, for you--and why the new Mom-in-chief Michelle Obama is far more popular than the "what, me make cookies?" Hillary Clinton ever was. Is it not the hope for unconditional love in this lean and mean world that drives the thriving house pet business?

It’s the nutshell for the whole idea of refuge. “A man don’t mind if the sun don’t shine, or the stars grow weary and dim," is the lyric of the poignant song Lost in the Stars, "just so long as the Lord God’s watching over him, keeping track how it all goes on.” That’s what people want or don’t from government too. That’s me glued to the cell phone. That's the comfort of karma, the yidam deities who see all suffering, and me praying continually to the Three Jewels for protection or guidance. I wouldn’t get through the day if I didn’t go through it mumbling: “Rinpoche” or “Guru Rinpoche” or “Karmapa, don’t leave me with this. Don’t leave me.” Remember the chilling words of the historic Jewish plea: “My God, why have you abandoned me?”

Because my mother died when I was 22, I learned first hand what a big deal that loss really is, even if I didn’t think so at the time. I still had my beloved great aunt who had no children of her own and had adopted my mother and then me to fiercely guard. Her death two year’s after my mother’s was the 8.0 earthquake that ripped open the landscape, tore away all shrubbery and shelter and left the scar of immense craters. Nobody rushed into the vacuum of that eerie, lonely and scorched lunar terrain where cries for help! or here!, or hear! just echoed and bounced back like boomerangs. I don’t wish the desperation on anyone.

Ten years later, my best friend died at 35, leaving three children between the ages of 3 and 12. I was the official godmother of the eldest, and because my friend was an only child, she made me solemnly promise that after she died, I would always be there for her kids. She confessed she was haunted by the memory of a fourth grade classmate who showed up in ragged, ill-fitting clothes because she was an orphan with no one to care about her.

I can’t count how many tedious 13 hour drives I made to where her children lived, for graduations, birthday parties, special school events and shopping needs. I took phone calls all hours of the day and night for prom protocol, sibling rivalries, cooking guidance, nightmares and outfit coordination. The absolute indelible memory I have of those dozen years comes from the summer after she died when I brought the children to my house for a week. I went up to tuck the three-year-old in and kiss him goodnight, and as I started to sit on the edge of the bed, he pushed me away with enough strength that I hit the floor. I picked myself up, understanding how much he could not bear to know, to experience, what he was going to be denied because he’d lost Mommy.

It has been, I now see, my life’s work to find this need and fill it. A few years ago at my teacher’s boarding school in the back of Kathmandu, the headmistress pointed out a very shy, little six year old for whom, it turned out, nobody came although he did have family. I “adopted” him. That year I simply took him out for pizza on Saturday and bought him a winter coat. It was enough for him to remember my name and eventually make me a drawing. So I made an effort to stay in touch and the headmistress wrote he was more engaged in activities and with others. When I showed up this past December asking for him, a bright nine-year-old came running with a huge grin to hug me unabashedly. “I’m so happy,” he said, “Now I am so happy.”

Yesterday I had to rush out to buy shoes for one of my teacher’s monks who lives here in America because, he confided, he needed a new pair. Last year I freaked out the young cashier at a Gap store by showing up at the register with 15 pairs of maroon men’s socks, all for visiting monks who sheepishly confessed that’s what they needed most. So few dharma students think of the monks as human men who might need little ordinary things, but someone years ago taught me to check up on their basics, so it has become my ritual. As a result, many monks call me “Ama-la”, dear mother. Even to my surprise, the two high ranking Bhutanese lamas who are traveling with the museum show of Bhutanese ritual art objects, because I had them to dinner and served them home made Bhutanese food. Mommy is very global. It's a thriving recession-proof business.

My business plan evolved from the advice of Isak Dinesen in an obscure essay written as an “Oration at a Bonfire, Fourteen Years Late.” It dates from 1953 and is about “a matter which is called feminism.” Trying to pinpoint the real, or what she calls the profoundly inspirational difference between the sexes, she says: “A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in life; a woman’s, in what she is. If one talks with a man about his parents, he will generally relate what his father has done in the world, saying My father. …And if then one asks about his mother, he replies, ‘Mother was lovely. …”

“The woman’s function is to expand her own being,” she goes on. “…A man who has accomplished nothing and created nothing is not held in much esteem. But I have known many women…who had no achievement to display, but who had possessed much power and exercised decisive influence and left their imprint on everything that surrounded them. …A man can assert himself in his lifetime and in history by a single deed. Columbus discovered America… . If in history we were told about a woman who had discovered America, we would probably exclaim, ‘What a madwoman!'”

And here’s where she speaks for me: “Out of deep personal conviction I wish to add that precisely our small society—in which human beings have achieved so much in what they are able to do and in the concrete results they can show—needs people who are. Indeed our own time can be said to need a revision of its ambition from doing to being. …I wish to insinuate into the minds of the women of our time, as well a those of the men, that they should meditate not only upon what they may accomplish but most profoundly upon what they are.”

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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