Prenatal Talents

It takes me twenty minutes to read over, comment on, and grade three of a student's lab reports. It takes me 3-8 minutes to write a paragraph-long summary of that student's work over the four months of fall semester. I have always been a fast reader, but I think this means I write faster than I read!

This evening, I am delighted to be done with student reports. I had my exit interview at the school today. Barring any whining over semester grades on the part of students or their parents, I am done. It is time to focus on getting ready for the baby.

Baby Fingers, Dad's Thumb
Originally uploaded by footleg.

According to the authorities, the little already has a few hobbies: hiccuping, sucking, and squirming. The sucking reflex is so strong that infant (in and out of utero) will suck on anything, or nothing at all: hands, feet, wrists, your finger, a patch of exposed skin, a pacifier, or even a nipple. Unfortunately the sucking reflex is not accompanied by an innate opening-the-mouth reflex, which can be a problem when feeding time rolls around.

Hiccuping takes care of itself; I feel it about once a day, in the evening. I figure hiccuping is good practice for swallowing, another important skill we should all have perfected before birth.

Squirming is my favorite hobby du bebé. I mean, I enjoy watching and feeling the little one practice it. He is quiet during meditation, unless we're doing Tonglen. Today I prayed with each inhale and exhale:


Whatever fear or pain you may have brought with you
may it be let go.

Whatever unwholesome habits or predilections you may have,
may they be released.

Whatever anger, whatever issues, whatever distress you may bear,
may it dissolve away.

May you be happy and calm, wise and compassionate. May you have a joyful life and be a help to others.

let your light shine in
Originally uploaded by Sara Heinrichs (awfulsara).

And the baby squirmed and squirmed.

Other squirming stimulants are: the first taste of food when we've been hungry for a while, and the scary parts of movies. I thought I could watch the latest Harry Potter DVD without having an impact on the wee one, but it's already too late.

End In Sight, Apparently

I do not seem to know that in a week I will be done teaching. There are still the out-0f-control musings on how to best set up a lab experiment; there are still the dreams about students in various states of crisis and joy; there is, more than ever, the lingering worry about parental "feedback", which this semester has ranged from gentle inquiry to forceful high-volume opinion (shouting).

Depending on how well the little darlings are able to complete the last lab experiment, we have either one or two instructional days after today. Perhaps we'll have three. You never know with these kids--some of them have really abysmal physical skills. Ask them to mix warm and cold water, having first measured the temperatures, and then do another temperature reading? That'll cost you 25 minutes of instructional time, easy.

Yesterday one of the brightest students--who has always seemed a bit uncoordinated, in spite of being the only freshman in school history to start an after school rock-n-roll performance club--was handing off a test tube of Mysterious Solid. The tube hit the floor, and we got a closer look at its insides. Previous to this accident, I had no idea what substance it was, only that our mission (should we ever complete it) is to experimentally determine its specific heat.

Cleanup was delayed because I had forgotten about the accident, and the aftermath, entirely-- until someone pointed out the large white splash decorating the far end of the lab. I scraped at it. It did not have an odor; perhaps it was wax. I suspect that forgetting to attend to a prominent mess, and barely caring whether we take a day longer to finish, and not recognizing the end in sight are all part of the same story. That I'm tired. It's time to slow down. And sometime after the impossible milestone of next Tuesday, I will.

Next week, I will sleep and write and compose an impressive to-do list. I will stay home and gestate and hang some art around the flat. I will take myself to the antique mall in search of a dresser/changing table for the little one, since 100-year-old oak often costs less than newly-fabricated particleboard. I will do all these things slowly, in my own time. I will make soup, and clean my desk; I will stock up on 50c onesies at the thrift store, and sew some swaddling blankets. I will have more dreams about the baby, and fewer about lesson planning. Best of all, there will be only one set of parents to worry about.

This One

This one
shifts in the darkness
crosses and uncrosses his legs.

This one
I have not seen
hears a voice and is still.

This one
holds nothing
and rootless becomes the world.

30 week fetus
Originally uploaded by borgia6.

A Very Little Cataclysm

Two nights ago, the rain poured down, and my normally-optimistic disposition gave way to all the worries that impending parenthood brings.

Breastfeeding will occupy 25% of my time.

Parenting a toddler requires boundless reserves of wisdom and compassion. You cannot punish a child for doing developmentally appropriate things. And yet you are exhausted, and perhaps impatient, with the repeated struggles.

In the light of day: this is the practice I opted for. This is the ripening of all kinds of karma.

And more to the point: this is a new little person. Who will have their own quirks and foibles and tendencies. Who will quickly outgrow whatever stage they are in, be it voracious breastfeeding or voracious house-trashing.

Not even in adolescence does the body change this quickly. Looking at how the loss of control affects me, at how desperate it makes me, I realize:

We cannot control what the body will do. It naturally swells with baby; it naturally accumulates an impressive layer of fat. One day it will naturally begin to fail; one day it will slowly turn toward death. There is very little you can do about these processes once you are in them.

The only hope for control, the only place where there is perhaps a choice, is in the realm of the mind. We might still panic, or judge, or react in some habitual way, but there is at least the option of recognizing that and attempting to accept the reality of things as they are. There is the possibility of turning the mind towards that which illuminates and calms. There is the possibility of finding some wisdom in the midst of the cataclysm.

Or not, depending on what you think life is all about. For me, I choose for it to have some meaning. No sense in going through all this, and not learning a damn thing.

Time Among the Horses

May I recommend this rumination on New Year's Eve by Verlyn Klinkenborg. (Now there's a name...)

The Sleeping Duo

Naps have become like food, as necessary and as perfunctory. In the course of a day, I might quietly lie down two or three times, slide into insensibility, and then then get up again as if nothing had happened.

Meditation is the most reliable trigger for a nap. I sit down, cross my legs, relax the mind into some semblance of receptivity and openness. There is the distinct sensation of energy moving down into the abdomen to nourish the being who grows there. A twenty-minute instant later, my eyelids begin to sink. It is so delicious to curl up right there, on the cushion. I come awake again to find the candle still burning.

I can't say what happens in the twenty minutes of sitting and thirty minutes of sleeping. But I choose to imagine that, in some very real way, life is being given to the child.

In Taoist thought, a woman loses qi by bearing children. Men lose qi with every seminal emission, and from that belief there arose an elaborate system for having a climax while avoiding ejaculation. If you're a pregnant woman, however, there's no way to have a baby without actually having a baby.

In yogic thought, prana, which is roughly the same life-force as qi, is transferred to the growing baby during the third trimester. This is the gift that everyone receives from her mother. Consciousness migrates from who-knows-where, but the vitality of life comes from a woman's blood and bones. And diet.

The pregnancy newsletter I receive ("You are now in the 30th week of pregnancy!") says,

Your baby is rapidly growing at this point. Obviously your baby is continuing to gain weight, and his/her head is also growing.... Because there is so much development and maturing going on, it is incredibly important to ensure that you are getting plenty of nutrients and rest.

No kidding.

I Am Two People

Expecting in the Kitchen
Originally uploaded by Shugetsu.

Perhaps it is presumptuous to imagine having a relationship with a person who doesn't know what they are yet.

But you know how it is: spending time being close with someone, especially in silence, gives you an idea of who they are. Whether it's correct or not is hardly important: there is the impression of relationship.

And so I feel that I get along well with the little one. He bustles about in response to his papa's voice; is quieted when I sing to him; rests when we meditate.

He would weigh 2.5 pounds, and open and close his eyes, if he were on the outside. But in the realm where he now resides, there is no reference for these things.

-

For me, being pregnant seems to precipitate recurring dreams. So I have dreamed the same dull dream every night for a week, just before I wake up: something doesn't measure up; there is some mild disappointment, and I make my way home from a building in Belfast.

Baby Name

To name something you have not seen seems presumptuous. How can a name be the only thing you know? It is a false conceptual handle on an unknown phenomenon.

Even so, there is a baby--or rather, there is a heartbeat, and a shadowy ultrasound image, a growing abdomen where he allegedly lives--and there is a baby's name. It is a boy's name that came to me early on, so unmistakably as to relieve one of the need for further brainstorming.

Now the baby's movement has is becoming apparent. It is extremely subtle. But now the name begins to denote something more real. There is evidence; there is someone this name applies to. Deep inside, someone devoid of concepts--a tiny being in a dream--is called something. Is named and measured and planned-for. I suppose it has always been this way. Knowing nothing, we are born into this world of speech, symbol, and meaning. It's not more valid than the void; it's just the law of this realm.

What I See Right Now

No camera could capture this.

Snow has begun to fall in thick flakes
and the sparrows cluster and flit around the feeder
that hangs across the way
in a maple still golden with autumn leaves.

New Favorite Book

In the past two days, I have read two books, which is more reading than I've accomplished in the past twelve months combined.

Paul Broks' Into the Silent Land is the new fave.

The other book, John Conroy's Belfast Diary, is perhaps too striking and too thought-provoking to be instantly liked. It would not make a good Christmas gift. It's something you read and mull over and don't necessarily foist upon your friends. How do humans manage to live in a the midst of a simmering conflict, of random sectarian violence and random official persecution? And what of the intimacy of the conflict? Your neighbors betray you; your foes are quirky, human, and deadly. It's hard to agree on a story, even, at the end of it all.

It's easier to retreat into the mind, the "silent land" of Broks' title. There's no easy answer here, either, but it's a Not Knowing with which I can easily agree.

Wouldn't it be absurd for an airline pilot to deny knowledge of the principles of flight, or for a physician to claim ignorance of the basics of human physiology and anatomy? Yet I, a neuropsychologist, can give no satisfactory account of how the brain generates conscious awareness (p 92).

So, does conscious awareness have a physical location: mine, here and now...precisely somewhere between my ears? Self-evidently, it seems. But then, go into the skull; visit the brain's interior workings and you will see that there is nothing much to see. Not a spark of colour or whisper of sound and no signs of intelligent life. As you wander through this silent land you can describe its geography adequately enough in the third person, but, quite obviously, not in the first.
From this vantage point it seems self-evidently true that consciousness does not have a physical location. ...We are embodied, but nowhere traceable within the physical structures of the body (p 95).

This point of view is all too rare, both in the popular press and among neurobiologists. Describing phenomena does not mean we understand them. And nobody does a very good job of locating, or even defining, consciousness. We are trying to define the universe from within the universe; any answer we find is a product of the system we are attempting to encircle with ideas.

A Little Dose of Faulty Understanding

I don’t really know what happened yesterday, but I feel better now than I have in weeks.

I was desperate. And I love Green Tara, the Tibetan goddess who became a Buddha. So I gritted my teeth and signed up for a one-day Tara retreat at the Maitripa Institute. It wasn’t cheap, but it cost far less than the ridiculous amount they charge for classes, say, or their not-very-modest gala dinners. It’s a different model, I tells myself. But I don’t need to pay big bucks to stick with something, or to value the Dharma, dammit. They don’t know what they’re losing, driving me away with their high prices. Or perhaps they do. They lose those who still have hope--and they attract those who, in a final act of desperation, are willing to pay.

I paid, and I was served lunch, and buckets of sweet milky tea, and I sat with people I did not know and did something completely new. It was lovely.

The jokhang, or hall, is floored with smooth bamboo-- the better for those full-body face-on-the-floor prostrations. Giant statues bedecked with gold and rugs and mysterious symbols are enshrined in the front, behind glass. The sitting arrangement is buckwheat zafu and modestly-sized zabuton.

To do a Tara puja you follow along in the book and chant the same thing over and over. When afternoon comes and you are still chanting the same thing, they make it more interesting by inviting you to circumambulate, or to lead the chant, or to make an offering on cue.

The cue comes from the rinpoche. He sits even during the breaks, a young coarsely-built Tibetan of sterling reputation. He gives instruction and offers bits of insight in a monotone, rocking back and forth while addressing the lectern. His smile is colossal, his humor comes easily, and he takes the proceedings seriously. We are all there because we need something, and he knows this.

What we do together brings a goddess into the room.

Near the end, he takes the Tara image off the altar and blesses us. The gold statue is heavy and reassuring on top of my head. But it is the hours of chanting to the One who dispels conflict that has an effect: I realize the inner conflict is of a piece with the outer. Feeding one gives rise to the other. And really, no one wants conflict. We want to be understood and appreciated. We want it to be OK--in our way, on our terms. That modest little impossibility, “it has to be this way,” is our undoing. Seeing the conventional world clearly, a Buddha feels compassion. Seeing the ultimate aspect clearly, she knows the wisdom of the emptiness of phenomena.

I have been undone too often these last three weeks. I have not been happy. And yet now, life is not a problem. This part of it--this part where I work hard for little money and lots of faultfinding--is both an integral result of all that has come before, and a key component of what the future must become.

When we are finished, we stand, and then the rinpoche is in front of me, holding out his hands. I take them. They are huge and fleshy, and feel as if they’re made of nothing at all. He looks in my eyes.

“Thank you,” he says. I squeeze the nonexistent flesh in reply.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

OM TARE TUTTARE TURE SVAHA

What a Parent Should Do

I was inspired by a talk given by PSU psychology professor Leslie B. Hammer at the Pacific NW Association of Independent Schools conference, held at Catlin Gabel School on October 12. My notes follow.

When anxiety takes hold, the cognitive field narrows, the world collapses into good and evil, and it becomes impossible to evaluate relative risk. In this state, a B- on a child’s paper evokes a similiar response to the child being attacked.

There is a correlation between kids gone awry--kids stuck in a swirl of depression, sex, drugs or delinquency--academic pressure from parents, family disengagement, and elite schools. In fact elite schools have higher rates of teen dysfunction than poor schools. (This sounds incredible, and I wonder if the studies corrected for the fact that students in poor schools often self-select themselves out of school.) But even so, the more affluent, the more pressure, the more messed up the kids are. Correlations can be tricky: they don’t say anything about causes. So it’s not that grade-obsessed parents necessarily cause teenage misbehavior. Rather, parental response focuses on the concrete readout of a life in crisis, without focusing the underlying causes, without addressing the kid’s social and emotional experience.

Family life is about enjoying one another. Period. You need unstructured time; you can’t arrange to bond. Kids and everyone need unstructured time to allow imagination and creativity to flow.

Happiness, and the Causes of Happiness, consist of: giving and receiving love; finding and using your gifts; and living a meaningful life. Period. Once basic subsistence needs have been met--not “middle class” needs, but subsistence needs--there is no longer a correlation between money and happiness. With increasing wealth, proxy variables start to stand in for satisfaction: a new car; the college sticker on the car; building your kid into a designer package that will win admittance into a selective school, rather than the best fit for that person’s needs and growth. There is a dissatisfaction that sets in with progressive material status

Studies on the introduction of the internet to homes show an increase in depression and alienation, and a decrease in family time, once a household becomes wired. Screens do not develop relationships; people do.

Relationships are not a frill. They are critical to personal health, proper development, and success in life. There is this focus on academic “basics”, but studies clearly show that emotional health is crucial to educational success at all levels: when kids feel safe at school, they learn better and do not drop out. At all developmental stages, “Secure Attachment” is a result, and a cause of, attunement and responsiveness.

There is plenty of literature on Secure Attachment in early life, but what does it look like for a teen? If your kid can offer a strong “YES” in agreement with the following five statements, that’s a tremendous predictor of future success and well-being.

• My parents accept me for who I am.
• My parents respect me.
• My parents want to know my opinion about things.
• I want to know my parents’ opinion about things.
• When I’m worried about something, my parents are there for me.

This session ended up being about parenting, and what sort of relationship I want to have with the child growing inside me.