by Anne Cushman
PRAISE FOR
the mama sutra
“The Mama Sutra is a deep, heartfelt journey into the steep canyons and peaks of motherhood—an often-undervalued Dharma path. Anne Cushman’s captivating writing takes you with her on this journey into the raw and challenging places only motherhood can take you. I treasure this book and will recommend it to others.”
—LAMA TSULTRIM ALLIONE, author of Wisdom Rising
“Reading The Mama Sutra, I realize that I’m doubly blessed. Blessed that Anne has taken us into her confidence and shared the raw, messy, beautiful details of her life—alternately heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny. And blessed that her courage to share such intimacies has encouraged me look tenderly at my own life.”
—LINDA SPARROWE, author of Yoga Mama
“With lush specificity, sparkling wit, and the courage to expose her own vulnerability, Anne Cushman explores the joys and sorrows of motherhood. She does so in a way that ultimately transcends its subject and becomes something much broader: an exploration of what it means to be a spiritual seeker who lives a passionately embodied life, inextricably connected to others—children, parents, lovers, friends—through the mystery of incarnation, the grief of loss, and the timeless nature of love.”
—NOELLE OXENHANDLER, author of The Wishing Year
“A mother’s unconditional love is often presented as a model of loving-kindness, but real mothers—’cursing in childbirth, leaking milk, kissing bruises, pounding a wall in the middle of the night so they didn’t pound their babies’—have never had a voice in spiritual literature. With courage and compassion, The Mama Sutra gives them that voice. Cushman’s tender, fierce, and beautiful memoir masterfully brings the lofty ideals of spiritual practice down to the messy, heartbreaking details of women’s lives, honoring the labor with which women give birth and nurture our families, our partners, our communities, and ourselves. Cushman’s powerful book shows us that the joys and sorrows of motherhood are not separate from the spiritual path but are the path itself. Finally!”
—LEZA LOWITZ, author of In Search of the Sun
Shambhala Publications, Inc.
4720 Walnut Street
Boulder, Colorado 80301
www.shambhala.com
© 2019 by Anne Cushman
This page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cushman, Anne, author.
Title: The mama sutra: a story of love, loss, and the path of motherhood / Anne Cushman.
Description: First edition. | Boulder: Shambhala, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035342 | ISBN 9781611804638 (pbk.: alk. paper)
eISBN 9780834842106
Subjects: LCSH: Cushman, Anne. | Motherhood. | Loss (Psychology) | Buddhism.
Classification: LCC HQ759 .C984 2019 | DDC 306.874/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035342
v5.4
a
For my mother
Nancy Troland Cushman
1924–2015
and my daughter
Sierra
May 9, 1999
Sutra is the Sanskrit name for a short spiritual teaching in the yogic and Buddhist tradition. It comes from the same root as the English word suture, a verb that means “to stitch.”
The stories in this book are not sutras in the traditional sense. They are an homage to the long threads that run through all human lives, stitching up what’s shredded in our hearts.
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
SUTRA 1
Letter to a Daughter Who Didn’t Live to Be Born
SUTRA 2
Into the Heart of Sorrow
SUTRA 3
Buddha’s Birthday
SUTRA 4
Notes from a Three-Month Baby Retreat
SUTRA 5
Butterfly Kiss for the Buddha
SUTRA 6
The Terrible Twos (Or, More Yuv and Happiness)
SUTRA 7
Beyond the Beyond
SUTRA 8
On the Spectrum
SUTRA 9
The Big Questions
SUTRA 10
Astronomy Lessons
SUTRA 11
A Passage Back to India
SUTRA 12
Adventures in Dharma Dating
SUTRA 13
The Best-Laid Plans
SUTRA 14
The Terrain in Spain
SUTRA 15
The Tempest: A Meditation Retreat
SUTRA 16
Singing My Mother to Sleep
SUTRA 17
Finding My Daughter
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Credits
About the Author
E-mail Sign-Up
Author’s Note
The stories in this book are crafted from the raw material of my life—as imperfectly preserved in my memory and my journals. To protect their privacy, I’ve sometimes omitted or changed people’s names or identifying details, including the names of my son, his father, and my partner’s daughter.
Introduction
If my baby daughter had lived past her birth she would have had her eighteenth birthday last Mother’s Day. I wonder what she would have been like. I picture her with skin still creamy and luminous, the dark hair she had as a newborn baby now grown long and shiny—maybe caught back in a ponytail, maybe cascading loose over her shoulders. I never saw her eyes—her lids were closed by the time I held her, already dead, in my arms—so I invent them: green, like mine, rather than golden brown like her younger brother’s. But they are light-filled and sparkling, like his.
I imagine my daughter texting me from school like her teenage brother just did: “I just got cast as ‘Moist’ in ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog!’ ” “Mom, I’m not feeling so good, can you pick me up today?” I envision the way she would roll her eyes at my haphazard outfits, the clothes of a writer and meditator who works at home in sweatshirts and yoga pants—“God, Mom, can you at least put on matching socks before you leave the house?” (Her brother doesn’t even notice what I wear, but I’m sure she would.)
In these daydreams, my daughter is always dropped into the house that I am living in now. It is this honey-colored couch we are snuggling into together, reading Big Little Lies (me) and Twilight (her) in front of the fire as the fog rolls in over the mountain out the window. It is this kitchen where I’m scrambling eggs for her, her brother, and her stepsister in the morning, the sink still piled high with dishes from last night’s vegetable miso soup.
Of course, in this fantasy, her brother and stepsister are here too—how could they not be? The three of them are spotting jackrabbits and bobcats in the drought-baked hills above our house or arguing about whether to watch Bridesmaids or Star Wars on family movie night. The girls are singing along as their brother plays “Hysteria” by Muse on his electric guitar.
But, of course, that’s not the way it would be. Because if she had lived everything would have been different.
*
* *
—
This book is a collection of stories about motherhood as a path to awakening. I’ve been writing them for almost two decades. Some of them I have published before. Others have felt too raw to share past the confines of my journals. All of them together—I want to reassure you—culminate in a happy ending.
When I first found out I was going to have a baby, at age thirty-five, I started a journal of my pregnancy. I was a writer, an editor, and had been a practitioner of yoga and Buddhist meditation for almost sixteen years. I had just published From Here to Nirvana, a guidebook for modern pilgrims to spiritual sites in India. I thought recording my passage through pregnancy and birth would be like documenting another kind of pilgrimage—a journey of transformation and awakening, the deepest yoga of all. I had the arrogance, and ignorance, to think that I knew in advance how the story would go.
By that time, I’d spent months on meditation retreats where I sat cross-legged on a cushion for hours each day, walked back and forth in slow motion, and took ten minutes to savor a single raisin. I’d worn out a dozen yoga mats—the rubber scraped into holes by the pressure of my heels—as I breathed and sweated and bent my body into backbends, handstands, and splits.
I’d backpacked from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, my only outfits two baggy salwar kameez that I washed out every night in sinks in cheap hotels where the drain emptied straight onto the gritty clay floor. I’d meditated under the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya, on the very spot where the Buddha had attained enlightenment. Trapped by an unexpected Himalayan snowstorm while hiking to the source of the Ganges River, I’d spent the night shivering on the rocky floor of a hermit yogi’s cave, watching the rats scurry by and listening to avalanches crash as the yogi chanted, “Jai, Sita Ram!”
But when I sat cross-legged on my living room floor and watched a big pink plus sign appear at the tip of my pregnancy test stick, I suspected that I was setting off on a journey wilder, deeper, and more transformative than anything I had ever tasted before.
I was sure it would be a journey of love, adventure, and spiritual awakening. I didn’t know, yet, that it would also be a journey of heartbreak.
Hidden somewhere in my mind, unacknowledged, was the illusion that my yoga and meditation practice was a magic talisman that would protect me from disaster. I would eat organic food, do yoga every day, and have a virtually painless home birth that would be like a slightly more strenuous vinyasa practice. I would carry my baby with me everywhere in a sling, like the Mayans, and sleep with her in a family bed—and therefore she would not have colic, not cry all night, not even spit up. Parenthood would add a whole new spiritual dimension to my relationship with my baby’s father. Our days would be a festival of family meditations and pancake breakfasts, and after we tucked our little one into bed each night, we’d fall into each other’s arms in passionate gratitude for our good fortune.
When I was four months pregnant, I put on a little black dress with a stretchy waistband and trotted into the office of a New York editor to pitch her my new book idea.
“A Buddhist yoga mom’s journey into motherhood,” I told her. “A cross between Anne Lamott and the Dalai Lama.”
“It’s a great idea,” the editor told me, leaning back in her chair. She was in her sixties, with forty years of publishing experience and a couple of children of her own. Later, I would realize that she had probably seen plenty of book proposals—and lives—that didn’t go as planned. “Send me a draft when the baby is a year old.”
But the story I thought I was telling ended before that.
* * *
—
I tried a few years later to tell the story again.
By that time my one-year-old son was toddling through my house, clutching a blue baby blankie and a stuffed lion. My daughter’s footprints were framed on an altar beside his diaper changing table, next to a statue of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion who is said to hear the cries of the world.
I thought that this new story would be a transformational tale of death and rebirth. I would write about how yoga and meditation helped me transform grief into love and wisdom—and the tale would end with me and my husband and son living happily ever after together.
I wanted to use that story to highlight the power of mothering as a meditative practice in its own right. Since my son had been born, it had become achingly clear to me that the classical yogic and Buddhist canon didn’t have much to say about mothering—or intimate relationships in general. Over the centuries, meditation and yoga had primarily been paths for renunciate men. “How can a person who is attached to family life, with his senses uncontrolled and bound by strong ties of affection, liberate himself?” asked one ancient yoga text.
Intimate relationships were dangerous because they inflamed desire—“It is better that you enter the mouth of a hideous cobra or a pit of blazing coals than enter a woman,” Buddhist monks used to be warned. They could ensnare the practitioner in family life, leaving no time to meditate. The young prince who would become the Buddha named his son Rahula, meaning “fetter.” In order to pursue spiritual awakening, he had left both wife and son behind, slipping out of the house in the middle of the night and galloping off on horseback, apparently to avoid a nasty scene.
Early Buddhist nuns wrote poems about their lives, recounting how they’d turned to spiritual practice after their children were carried away by hawks, buried in mudslides, or swept away down rivers. Their poetry sings of the freedom that lay on the other side of unfathomable loss: “I have seen the jackals eating the flesh of my sons in the cemetery. My family destroyed, my husband dead, despised by everybody, I found what does not die.” Such texts offered me little guidance for how to find that profound awakening while still caring for children, or still grieving ones who had died, and nothing at all about negotiating the complex, ever-changing constellation of intimate relationships that make up a family.
Sure, the selfless compassion of a mother for her child was presented as the model for loving-kindness meditation. But that was a metaphor. Actual moms—cursing in childbirth, leaking milk, kissing bruises, pounding a wall in the middle of the night so they didn’t pound their babies—as spiritual practitioners? My search of the classical yoga and Buddhist sutras came up empty.
But those were the things I wanted to write about. I wanted to tell the story of a real mother, finding awakening with her shirt stained with peanut butter. I wanted to write about how the lofty ideals of spiritual practice intersected with the wild, chaotic, hilarious, heartbreaking details of everyday life. I filled my journal with notes about parenting.
But then my marriage went down in flames. Grief overtook my journals too.
I wanted to write a story that turned out well. So I set this one aside.
Instead, I published a novel about a young woman looking for love—and enlightenment—in all the wrong places. I enjoyed raising my son and hammered out a new and healthy relationship with his father. I published personal essays about parenting and spiritual practice in yoga and meditation magazines. I eventually taught mindfulness retreats and directed a yoga and meditation teacher training at a Buddhist meditation center. I fell in and out of lust and love.
I knew that my daughter’s life and death had not just shattered my heart, but they had also rebuilt it, wider and deeper and more tender than it had been before. I knew that the path I was walking with my growing son was opening me in ways that no meditation retreat or yoga practice ever had.
I wanted to write a book about mindfulness and parenting as a spiritual practice—but how could I reveal the ragged details of my own life? Surely someone truly mindful wouldn’t be screaming at her soon to be ex-husband and then kicking a wall so hard she broke her toe. An enlightened being wouldn’t have a tantrummy toddler whose first words to another child would be “go away.” She wouldn’t have a boyfriend who would climb through her window in a drunken rage
in the middle of the night, thinking she had been out carousing with another guy, when in fact she had been sipping chamomile tea at her former mother-in-law’s eighty-fifth birthday party.
I figured I better keep my mouth shut about this whole motherhood-as-spiritual-practice idea.
* * *
—
Now, years later, I finally understand—waiting for a happy ending isn’t the point of writing, or of life. Don’t misunderstand me. As I write this, my life is filled with joy. My son is a radiant high-school student with a pack of friends and a passion for environmental science, creative writing, and theater. I share my home and my heart with a beloved partner—a musician and martial artist who plays guitar with my son and teaches him to spar with wooden swords on our deck.
My son’s father is happily married to a beautiful, raven-haired woman whom I don’t know well but who I know loves my son. Last Father’s Day I helped my son pack up a picnic lunch of salmon salad and sparkling apple juice and sent the three of them all off for a walk around a nearby lake. Then I went on a different hike with my partner and his daughter, who has become my child too—a twenty-something artist with creamy, luminous skin, and long dark hair that cascades over her shoulders like a waterfall.
I know this happy moment is not the end of the story. If there’s one thing that my journey into motherhood taught me for sure, it’s that life swirls and eddies on and on like a river. Oceans evaporate into mist. Clouds rain into mountain streams. Streams sing their way back to the ocean again. Love always walks hand in hand with impermanence. All human stories of love are the stories of loss, eventually.
But here’s the other side of that truth—love doesn’t end when someone we love is gone.
Long before I got pregnant with my first baby, I was on a meditation retreat in the south of France. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh began a dharma talk one morning with these words: “She was just eighteen years old when I met her.” We retreatants were riveted as, over the course of our three-week retreat, he told us the story of how as a young novice monk he had fallen in love with a nun. He never touched her—“I didn’t even place my hand upon the top of her head.” The war swept them apart, and she eventually left the order of nuns. But that love changed the trajectory of his practice, his teachings, and his entire life.
