The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  But there’s plenty of proof that there are no guarantees. Life is a free fall through an abyss in which everything and everyone we love is eventually guaranteed to disappear.

  In opening again to carrying a child inside me, I chose to step forward into this abyss. I chose to participate in bringing life into the world, knowing that every life is, in the words of the Diamond Sutra, “a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.” Knowing that one day it was not just possible but certain that I and the child I treasure will be separated by death.

  And that the only protection I would have is that my love would be large enough to hold even death in its arms.

  * * *

  —

  Imagine the Buddha’s mother’s story continuing:

  The queen longed to be home with her mother as her long-awaited child grew large inside her. But the monsoon rains that year were fierce, and they delayed her trip. When she was finally able to leave, the journey was plagued by disaster: rivers too swollen to ford, a damaged axle on the chariot that the young charioteer, distracted by the queen’s beauty, didn’t notice until it snapped and had to be replaced with a makeshift stick. So instead of being safe in her mother’s house as her time came near, the queen was traveling the jungle.

  The chariot jolted raggedly over the lumps and puddles, each lurch swaying her huge belly and sending jolts of pain searing through her back and down her legs. Sweat glued her sari to her back, matted her hair, trickled down the back of her neck. As night fell, she heard the coughing roar of a tiger and smelled the chariot driver’s metallic fear. Her sister-in-law Prajapati stroked her forehead as it rested in her lap. “Almost there,” she repeated over and over, till the words lost their meaning, became like the mantras chanted by the brahmin priests over their fires, prayers that hold the universe together. “Almost there.”

  * * *

  —

  My pregnancy with Sierra had been full of other activities—a writer’s residency, a wedding, a move to a new home.

  With this new baby, all I wanted to do was to grow a baby and deliver it alive. Everything else was in the way.

  I canceled teaching engagements that might require me to fly, including an invitation to teach at a yoga conference when I would be eight months pregnant. I turned down a contract to write a yoga coffee-table book. Instead, I read everything I could about pregnancy and birth.

  I opted out of pregnancy classes. Other pregnant women seemed unbelievably naive in their confidence that their future was laid out before them exactly as outlined in the What to Expect series of pregnancy books. They planned baby showers and listed the gifts they wanted on baby store websites. In the sixth month of pregnancy, they put their unborn children on preschool wait-lists.

  All I could think about were the thousands of things that could go wrong at every step of the way.

  Bean was a quieter baby than Sierra, more subdued, not as interactive with his kicks. He hiccupped a lot—a steady, rhythmic shaking different from anything Sierra had done. I had felt as if I had known Sierra from the beginning—her exuberance, her playfulness. Bean was more opaque to me. Was it because he was a boy? Was he more of an introvert? Or was it just because I was more guarded myself, more afraid to love? We chose a name for him, but I didn’t dare call him that, even in my mind.

  Whenever I woke up in the night and the baby was not moving, I’d poke my belly. I’d get up and shake my hips. I’d go down the hall to the refrigerator, chug a glass of orange juice, and stand there in my bare feet in the dark until I felt the baby wake up in response to the sugar.

  I worried about what it was like for my new baby, incarnating into a womb where so recently another baby had died. My husband’s mother, Joan, told me a story: A year before my husband’s older sister was born, Joan had given birth to a stillborn child with a malformed head. A few years later, when my husband’s big sister was a baby, a stranger had stopped Joan on the street. Joan told me, “He put his hand on my daughter’s head and said, ‘This baby has a double soul.’ ”

  “Will Beanie have a double soul?” I asked my husband.

  He put his arms around me. “He will have one soul,” he promised. “One wonderful, magnificent soul.”

  * * *

  —

  “We are almost to Lumbini,” Prajapati told her. “There is a guest house there where you will be safe.”

  Queen Maya moaned again. “Please, stop the chariot in the shade of these trees.”

  She got out, staggered toward a tree, and caught one of its branches to keep from falling as another wave of pain crashed. “My child will be born here. I can’t go any farther.”

  * * *

  —

  We had no fantasies about doing a home birth this time around. My mother-in-law actually suggested that I move into the hospital for the whole last month of my pregnancy for round-the-clock monitoring.

  Instead, I spent my third trimester going to the hospital twice a week for sonograms and nonstress tests. I listened to my baby’s heartbeat boom over wall-mounted speakers while a ticker tape recorded every fibrillation. The technician held a buzzer to my belly that emitted a sharp, high-pitched sound that woke Bean up. He thrashed and kicked, and the technician measured the response of the baby’s heartbeats to his own movements.

  Waking up Bean several times a week with a loud noise—this couldn’t be good for him, I thought. But the alternative was unthinkable. To get me through the time between appointments, I rented a Doppler and brought it home to listen to the baby’s heartbeat there.

  We did not plan a baby shower.

  We did not buy any clothes for a baby boy.

  We did not set up the crib, or pull the bassinet out of the basement, where it was stashed in a corner, wrapped in plastic bags.

  As my thirty-ninth week of pregnancy began, my anxiety crescendoed. At thirty-eight weeks, a baby is considered full term. Forty weeks is the standard due date. With Sierra at thirty-nine weeks, I had been blissfully sure that everything would be fine—as I sailed into the home stretch, the biggest decision I thought I was facing was what kind of music to play during the birth. This time, with Bean, it seemed astonishing that anyone ever got born, given the number of things I now knew could go wrong. My doctors had assured me that there was no indication of any potential problem—but what did they know? There’d been no indication last time either.

  I went to the doctor for a checkup.

  “Your cervix is still shut tight. No dilation at all,” he told me. “You’re not having any contractions yet.”

  “He’s full term, right? Isn’t there anything I can do to get him out?”

  “Well, given your situation, we could induce labor. But since there’s no indication that anything is wrong, inducing labor actually increases the chances of a negative outcome.”

  I went home and lay down on my side on my yoga mat, struggling with impossible odds. I could feel my baby rolling under my hands, as perfect and complete as Sierra had been the night before she died. I could take him out, right now, and hold him in my arms by tomorrow! What if I didn’t do that and something went terribly, terribly wrong again? What if I woke up tomorrow and he was lying lifeless inside me?

  But what if I induced labor and ended up creating a complication that wasn’t there before?

  When my husband got home, I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him onto the couch. “We need to talk to Bean. We need to tell him that it’s time for him to come out.”

  So, seated in front of our television, with the remnants of our dinner scattered before us, we spoke to him—clearly, urgently. It was all we could think of to do.

  * * *

  —

  She pushed for hours, and no child came out.

  She forgot that she was the wife of a great chief, the queen of the Shakya clan
. She screamed and wept. She could not bear another child lost.

  Fearing he would be blamed for the death of the queen, the charioteer fled, leaving his sword for the women to protect themselves as best they could.

  The queen’s sister-in-law whispered in her ear, “The gates of your womb are open. But it is not a child’s head, but a foot that is emerging.”

  Maya tried to smile. “Trying to walk before he is born!”

  But Prajapati did not smile in return. “The baby is trapped between two worlds. He cannot live half in and half out. If he stays there, he will die—and likely, you will too.”

  “Is there nothing we can do?”

  She gazed into the queen’s eyes. “With the sword of the charioteer, I can slice open your side and release the child that way. And it can live.”

  “And I?”

  Prajapati shook her head.

  The queen did not hesitate. “Sister. Get the sword.”

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen minutes after our couch ritual, lying in my bed, surrounded and supported by pillows, I felt a sudden sharp movement—something butting up hard and low against the inside my cervix. Then a stabbing pain and a pop, like nothing I had ever felt before. I put my hand between my legs and felt for blood. Nothing. But then some wetness, and as I sat bolt upright, a gush of liquid, flooding the sheets. My water had broken. I shouted for my husband, who thundered up the stairs. “Get our bags,” I gasped. “We have to go to the hospital right away.”

  And then we were grabbing lists of phone numbers and tangerines and cell phones and bottles of Recharge, and I was clambering into the car with my pants soaking wet and amniotic fluid still pouring out of me. And all I wanted was to get to the hospital and get hooked up to a machine that would play me his heartbeat and let me know that he was still alive, that this time everything would be okay.

  An hour later we were back in the same familiar birthing rooms at the hospital in San Francisco where we’d delivered Sierra.

  Hooked up to the remote fetal monitor, I walked with my husband up and down the halls, pausing to lean on him and breathe as the contractions came in enormous waves. In the birthing room, a ticker tape was printing out my baby’s heartbeat, registering every contraction. I breathed into each contraction as if it were a particularly intense yoga pose. By 5:00 a.m., I was five centimeters dilated, and I was beginning to think that perhaps giving birth would be no big deal after all.

  But after four more hours of contractions—each one carrying me to the limit of pain I thought I could handle—I was only six centimeters dilated. Exhausted and discouraged, I lay down to take a rest. That was when Johanna blazed into the room—a bundle of power and intensity, a samurai warrior of labor and delivery.

  “You are afraid of feeling more pain,” she told me, as she studied my chart. “So you are stopping the labor. You want the baby to be born, but you don’t want the pain to get any worse. But in order for the baby to be born, the pain will have to increase. You will have to go past what you think is your limit.”

  I nodded. But inside I was thinking, I went past my limit over a year ago.

  Johanna and my husband peeled up my shirt and, one on each side of me, together began firmly twisting my nipples to encourage the release of oxytocin, the hormone that triggers labor. I was so far gone that this weirdly intimate activity didn’t cause me the slightest embarrassment. Within minutes, it worked. Powerful contractions kicked in, and with them, pain on a level I had never imagined.

  “Stop,” I moaned.

  Johanna looked at me sternly. “That is the last time you will use the word stop,” she said.

  “I’ve had too much pain,” I sobbed, catching at her hand. I was flashing back to Sierra’s birth—the epidural-dulled pushing, the dead baby girl who was placed in my arms. “I can’t handle any more.”

  “The pain of birth is not the same as the pain of death,” Johanna told me sharply. “Don’t confuse them.”

  * * *

  —

  In tribal cultures around the world, men have performed painful and bloody rituals to mark the transition from boy to man. Women have these built into our own life cycle. Blood comes every month. Labor and delivery call upon strength and courage and willpower we didn’t know we had. They demand that we surrender to a process that is fundamentally out of our control. They split us open, turn us inside out, yank off the ego masks that claim we are in control.

  Labor and delivery are wild and messy and animal and angry and bloody and painful. The transcendent act of giving birth is made up of the earthiest of elements: bodily fluids, a hospital gown stained with blood and excrement, the bruises left on a partner’s arm by the agonized grip of our fingers.

  We may find ourselves howling like cats; throwing up on the rug; emptying our bowels on the bedsheets; hurling curses at our dearest friends. We may get up off the delivery table in the middle of labor and announce to the doctors that we’re going home, that we’ve changed our minds and aren’t going to have a baby after all.

  And labor is just the beginning. These moments come again and again in every mother’s life—the times when we are asked to walk straight into our pain and fear, and in doing so, open up to a love that is greater than anything we ever could have imagined. Our hearts expand to embrace everything: life as beauty and wonder, life as things can break and go wrong. As mothers, we discover that we love our children in whatever form they are in: a kicking bulge in our womb; a baby sucking at our breast; a toddler leaving playdough crumbs on the couch; a pierced and tattooed teenager blasting rap music at midnight. We love them when they’re ill and when they’re damaged. We love them long after they have died. And in discovering this, we open to a kind of love that transcends form and time. It’s at the heart of our humanness, yet you could easily call it divine.

  Again and again, motherhood demands that we break through our limitations, that we split our hearts open to make room for something that may be more than we thought we could bear. In that sense, the labor with which we give birth is simply a rehearsal for something we mothers must do over and over: turn ourselves inside out, and then let go.

  * * *

  —

  This is something the men who tell this story will never include: Her baby was slippery with blood and vernix. He cried as they put him to the queen’s breast. As he sucked at her nipple, she could feel the rush of her milk letting down to give him strength, even as she felt the strength drain from her own body.

  The baby and the queen looked in each other’s eyes.

  In a moment, a lifetime of love can flow between two hearts. In the space of a breath, infinity can spread its wings.

  “You are my world-honored one,” the queen whispered, stroking his wet hair. And she closed her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  An earthquake rolled through my uterus. Johanna leaned close. “Use your rage,” she said, putting her hands on my heart.

  I had chosen natural childbirth because I wanted to feel every moment of my child coming into the world, wanted his mind and my mind unclouded by drugs as we looked into each other’s eyes for the first time. I had been a student of yoga and meditation for almost twenty years, and I thought there was no pain I couldn’t breathe into. “Breathe and smile,” Thich Nhat Hanh had always instructed. “Grin and bear it,” my mother used to say. Yet there I was, cursing, thrashing, growling like an animal, hitting the side of my hospital bed. “Goddamn it,” I screamed. “Get me the fucking epidural!”

  But by then it was too late for an epidural. A sudden urge blazed through me, a wave, a convulsion, my whole body clamping down in an involuntary push. I felt a ring of fire open between my legs. My husband was beside himself with excitement: “Here he is, he’s almost here!” But in that moment, I didn’t even care that I was having a baby. I just wanted the pain to go away.

 
Someone moved my hand down so I could feel my baby’s head. “Let it in,” I thought. “Let it out.”

  And then there was a heave and a great release, and a baby was crying; and my hands were reaching down and pulling a slippery, slithery bundle onto my chest.

  “Hello, Forest,” said my husband.

  And Forest, only seconds old, lifted his wobbly head off my chest and turned to look, with bleary, unfocused eyes, in the direction of his father’s voice.

  SUTRA 4

  Notes from a Three-Month Baby Retreat

  • • • • •

  IN THE ANCIENT scriptures of yoga and Buddhism, you won’t find any accounts of a woman beginning her spiritual journey by nursing a newborn baby.

  Babies are born, of course. The goddess Parvati—the consort of Shiva, the god of the yogis and master of death—gives birth to their elephant-headed son, the god Ganesh. The young Queen Maya gives birth to her son, Siddhartha, someday to become the Buddha.

  But in stories like these, the women are not the protagonists. It is the baby who is marked for future greatness, enlightenment, transformation. After Siddhartha’s mother dies giving birth to him, the infant prince is taken back to the palace and raised by his aunt, Prajapati. If her heart cracks open into enlightenment as she rocks him through the hot Indian nights, this is something the Buddhist sutras do not tell us. And how could they? The Buddha had a disciple with a prodigious memory, Ananda, who followed him everywhere and helped preserve his insights. No one did the same for Prajapati.

  The first few months of my son’s life—whenever I could grab a few moments to myself—I wrote in my journal. When I sent my notes off to the man who was then my agent, he was discouraging about the possibility of turning them into a book. “It all sounds pretty ordinary to me,” he said.