The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  Because here’s something I already knew for sure from my yoga practice: As soon as you have the idea of a “yoga pose” in your mind—say, for example, Triangle Pose—the idea also arises in your mind of “doing it wrong” and “doing it right.” You think that Triangle Pose is the way it’s pictured in Yoga Journal—the muscles rippling in the abs of the guy with no shirt on, the perky breasts and lithe waist of the yoga bunny. The feet are this far apart. The hips flex at this angle. The ribs roll this way, the gaze that way. You hold the image in your mind, and then you try to mold your own body into it—wishing you could snip off the parts that don’t fit, like the extra dough around the edges of a cookie cutter.

  But what happens to your yoga if you stop trying to fit your body into the mold of a pose and instead let it find its own unique expression, from the inside out? Your body is tight in some areas—you help it open. It’s weak in others—you encourage its strength.

  You come to understand that your body will not look like the body in the photo in the yoga book—because that photo is not alive and it’s not you.

  And gradually you come to see—every human body is a collection of gifts and challenges that are intimately related. The flexible spine that enables a deep backbend has a tendency to be unstable. The strong hamstrings from decades of cross-country running impede the ability to bend forward.

  Do you want to force your spine into a backbend that’s picture-perfect? Or you do want to find the freedom, the ease, the joy, that is available within the spine that you actually have?

  * * *

  —

  Forest: “If there is an earthquake will our house fall down?”

  Me: “You don’t need to worry about our house. It’s very solid.”

  Forest (eyes getting big): “Are some people’s houses liquid????”

  * * *

  —

  I began taking Forest to a twice-weekly social skills group that met at 8:30 in the morning at Parents Place in San Francisco, a forty-five-minute drive from our house.

  The first time at Parents Place, he disappeared into a playroom for a couple of hours while I traded stories with the other mothers in the waiting room: The freak-outs at birthday parties, the meltdowns at malls. One child wouldn’t speak at all. Another was a biter. Another had been kicked out of kindergarten. I felt guiltily encouraged when their stories were worse than mine.

  Then I opened my laptop and worked on the novel I was writing, disappearing into a fictional world that now seemed light-years from mine: a young woman traveling through India, with no child yet, no ex-husband, no neurological testing.

  Afterward, Forest emerged cheerful. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “We threw things at each other. Then we had cinnamon toast.”

  “What else?”

  “Just throwing things and toast,” he repeated, looking at me like, “Get a life of your own.”

  When I called the group leader to press her for more details, she told me she was teaching Forest to say “That’s too loud. It’s hurting my ears” when kids shouted. She was teaching him how to approach a group of children and ask, “Can I play?”

  “He just needs a little help learning the rules,” she told me optimistically. “Some kids figure it out more intuitively, from the bottom up. He has to learn it from his mind, from the top down. But once he practices it a little, it will become natural, and he won’t have to think about it anymore.”

  When I got off the phone, I found myself thinking, I want social skills coaching too!

  I want someone to teach me how to go to a party as a single mom and strike up a conversation with a single dad. How to put on eye shadow. How to order clothes that actually fit from a catalog and accessorize them with silk scarves and dangly earrings. How to have people over for dinner and talk to them without burning the soup and remember to offer them something to drink at the same time I am chopping veggies.

  I was realizing that I too had always needed “a little extra help learning the rules”—but generally, that help had not been available. As a teenager at boarding school, I hadn’t known that there were products that kept curly hair from frizzing, or who Fleetwood Mac or Pink Floyd were, or how to dance at a school dance, or that there was a difference between wide-wale straight-leg corduroys (the good kind) and narrow-wale bell-bottom corduroys (the kind I was wearing). In college, I hadn’t known that when a drunk guy made out with me at a party, it didn’t mean that he loved me and wanted to be my boyfriend. As an adult, I was only just figuring out what an individual retirement account is, and that if you got rid of the sheets stained with bong water that had been covering your futon since college, both your heart and your linen closet might have more space for something new.

  Forest, I began to understand, was a mirror for me.

  * * *

  —

  At the playground, Forest sits and watches the other children playing on the slide, like an anthropologist watching the activities of a tribe he finds intriguing but incomprehensible.

  “Go down the slide,” I urge him. “Show me that you know how to do it.”

  “I know how to do it!”

  “Then show me.”

  He pauses. “Do you know how to go down the slide?” he asks, cannily.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then why don’t you show me?”

  * * *

  —

  Shortly after Forest started social skills training, he and I were sitting on a grassy slope above a playground overlooking the San Francisco Bay—dotted with windsurfers, sailboats, and ferries carrying suburban commuters to and from their jobs in the financial district. Rollerbladers, bikers, and joggers flashed by on the wide, paved bike path behind us.

  As he pulled his peanut-butter sandwich out of his backpack, another mom sat down beside us, watching her daughter on the swing set below.

  “What are you having for lunch?” the mom asked Forest.

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “for solids, I am having a peanut-butter sandwich. For a liquid, I am going to have a juice box. Actually, of course, the box is solid. It’s what’s inside it that’s liquid.”

  The woman looked over at me with a kind of recognition, like one member of a secret society meeting another. I almost expected her to offer me the secret handshake. “He reminds me of my son Jake at that age. That’s just the kind of thing he would have said.”

  “Would your son go down the twisty tube slide?” I watched her daughter whirl down it, shouting with glee.

  “Are you kidding? I’d have to force him. He’d be wailing, and I’d be there on the slide with him in my lap, saying ‘This is fun!’ as I tried to get through the tubes without smashing my head.”

  “Forest would rather categorize by species the flowers next to the swing than actually sit on the swing,” I confessed.

  “Jake liked to count the bricks in the wall by the sandbox. You know what worked better than anything else? Sensory integration training. You do it with an OT—an occupational therapist. It just seemed to get him inside his own skin.”

  “How’s Jake doing now?”

  She laughed. “Oh—he’s fine. He’s in first grade. He has a best friend. He’s still way more into astronomy than T-ball, but who cares? Call Children’s Therapy Services in San Rafael. Ask for Teresa. She’s amazing. I think she could get a robot to dance and fall in love.”

  * * *

  —

  “Mommy? Is that a bench or a swing?”

  “It’s a bench swing.”

  “That’s not my right question. My question is, is it a bench OR a swing?”

  “Well, if I had to choose, I’d say a swing.”

  “Why a swing?”

  “Because it swings back and forth.”

  “Well, it looks like a bench. So I think it is a bench. But it moves back and forth. So I t
hink it is called a ‘momentum bench’!”

  “That’s a very good name for it.”

  “Do you want to go sit on the momentum bench with me?”

  * * *

  —

  I took Forest for evaluation to Teresa. As we were talking in her office, a baby began to cry in a room down the hall. I went on talking, but Forest froze, his head pivoting in the direction of the sound.

  “Do you see that?” Teresa said. “He has extra keen hearing. He can hear it from three rooms away. Most kids wouldn’t even register it.”

  She took Forest into the next room for a battery of sensory testing. When she returned—leaving Forest playing with blocks with her assistant—she told me, “Forest has all the characteristics of what we call sensory integration disorder. He has extra keen hearing, for one thing. His ears are very sensitive, not just to sound but also to pitch. So sounds that might be too quiet for you or me to hear are very obvious to him. And he can hear sounds that are of a much higher and lower register than you or I can. That’s what I suspected when I heard him register that baby crying three rooms away.”

  “Sometimes he complains that he can hear the electricity humming in the walls.”

  “Yes. Environments that may seem quiet to us can seem actually quite full of sound and stimulation to him. And noisy environments—like, for instance, a birthday party—can be excruciating.”

  “Ohhh.”

  “Also, his brain has difficulty screening out noises that are in the foreground from those that are in the background. For most people, that’s pretty easy. You can sit in a café with music playing and a hum of conversation all around you and the barista grinding coffee beans on the other side of the room, and you can still focus on the story someone sitting across from you is telling you about their breakup. For someone with Forest’s kind of brain, that’s not possible. To his brain, it all appears to be happening at basically the same volume and same level of intensity. It’s all in the foreground. That can make the world a pretty overwhelming place.”

  “Ohhh,” I said again. I felt as if my child were coming into focus for me. I remembered him as a toddler, shrieking “Go home!” when we walked into a crowded room. I remembered him as an infant, waking up at the click of the car seat he was snoozing in being lifted out of its base, or the unsnapping of my frontpack as I tried to ease him out of it.

  “And there’s another issue, which may or may not be related. His sense of balance—which, of course, relates to the inner ear—is off.”

  She explained one of the tests she had done. She stood Forest on a disk and spun him around and around. Then she watched his eyes to see how quickly they returned to focus. “With most people, the eyes settle and you recover your balance within a few seconds. For him, it can take up to a minute.”

  “So that’s why he doesn’t like playing on slides or swings?”

  “That’s right. He’s moving through a world where he’s perpetually off balance, where everything is literally swirling around him much of the time.” She looks at me. “I’m no psychologist, but I can imagine that that would affect the way you interact with people.”

  “And then I guess there’s a feedback loop—if you’re avoiding kids because you feel off balance, then you’re not learning how to relate to them.”

  “That’s right. And it’s not just his ears that are sensitive. It’s his whole body. He registers touch on the skin far more intensely than other people. Things such as scratchy shirts or tags might drive him crazy. The kind of touch that others might find soothing, he finds painful.”

  I flashed on infant Forest, tense as a board in my arms as I tried to swaddle him in blankets to calm him down. Even in the hospital, hours after his birth, a nurse had marveled that he was the first infant she had ever seen who had broken out of the swaddle she’d wrapped him in.

  “Given this sensory overload, it would only be natural to disconnect from your body and live in the world of your head. The good news is, there’s a lot we can do, especially at this age,” she said. “The brain can be retrained very easily. It’s highly neuroplastic. We can teach his brain to distinguish between foreground and background noise. We can teach his brain to find balance even when the inner ear is disturbed.”

  “How do we do that?”

  She smiled. “Just bring him to me.”

  * * *

  —

  I started taking Forest to Teresa two mornings a week. Sometimes she put headphones on him, playing tones and sounds to teach his brain to sort out foreground and background noises. She wrapped him in yards of bright Lycra cloth and spun him in a trapeze-like swing, bouncing him from one place to another. She taught him to hop on one foot and to walk in a figure eight while calling out letters and numbers on cards she held up in his peripheral vision.

  After one of the early sessions, she showed me a “self-portrait” he had drawn: himself with a tiny, sticklike body, an enormous head, and four brains. “This is how he experiences himself. He is disconnected from his body, and it’s no wonder. His body is an overwhelming place to be.”

  She gave me a soft bristle brush. “I want you to brush him all over, from his head to his toes, a few times a day. The more often, the better—but at the very least, do it when he first gets up in the morning and just before he goes to bed at night.”

  “What does this do?”

  “What I say to him is ‘it gets the tickles out.’ It’s getting his nervous system used to stimulation so he can tolerate it better. More important, though, it’s wiring his body up with his brain. It’s giving him a kinesthetic sense of his body in space.”

  I wish someone would brush me from head to foot every night! I thought as I brushed Forest down that night.

  I shared his sensitivities. I can’t converse in a noisy restaurant or make dinner with a TV on in the background. My idea of a relaxing vacation is a silent meditation retreat. An astrologer once told me, “You are like a satellite dish tuned to receive signals from the farthest edges of the universe—that has been set down in the middle of New York City.”

  When I came to yoga, I too felt like a stick-figure body with four brains. I remember a moment when I was in boarding school, studying in my library carrel, surrounded by books: AP biology. AP American history. AP French. I was sixteen years old, had never had a boyfriend, had never kissed a boy or even held hands in a movie. I remember lifting my head from my books, gazing around the library and thinking, I am nothing but a disembodied brain. I am not male or female. I am just a mind.

  For me, in my twenties, yoga had been the way I had slowly, slowly reinhabited my body. Moving and breathing at first had been like breaking concrete with a backhoe. I could barely feel anything below my neck—or if I did, it was broad strokes: Shoulder. Leg. I was looking in at my body from the outside. But gradually the concrete had broken up. My body had come alive and begun to sing.

  Forest was coming home to his body a good twenty years earlier in his life than I had. I hoped it would spare him some of the suffering I had experienced.

  * * *

  —

  Yesterday Forest wanted to play Rolie Polie Olie on the computer. I said I would set him up and he could play while I was changing my clothes and getting ready to go. He said, “But I want you to keep me company. My mind works better when you are there.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting.”

  “And when you aren’t there my belly feels all funny. It doesn’t feel good in here.” He puts his hand on his stomach. “And when you aren’t there my mind changes. It feels different. And it doesn’t feel good here.” He puts his hand on his chest. “Here, in my belly!”

  * * *

  —

  “This is yummy rice,” three-year-old Sonya tells Forest, who is now almost five. They are sitting across from each other at a kid-sized table in her dining room, eating cheesy broccoli.

 
“That’s not rice,” Forest corrects her. “It’s broccoli.”

  “No,” she says smugly. “It’s rice.”

  It’s the summer after Forest finished preschool, and we’ve moved from the house I used to share with Forest’s dad to a nearby town where two of my best friends live with their children. We’ve begun raising our kids together as a tribe, playing together as naturally as puppies tumbling in the grass.

  But playing together involves a certain amount of conflict. Right now, Forest looks like his head is about explode. “No!” Tears start to run down his face as he expounds the logic: “Rice is brown, this is green! Rice is little grains. This is big pieces shaped like trees! It’s broccoli.”

  “No,” Sonya says with sweet finality. “It’s rice.”

  As Forest freaks out, I take him aside. “What’s important is that you know it’s broccoli,” I tell him, feeling as if I am offering a primer on relationships that many adults could benefit from. “You don’t need to convince her that it’s broccoli.”

  The older Forest gets, the easier these lessons and negotiations have become. For instance, I’ve been able to explain to him the difference, when listening to music, between “focused listening” and “casual listening.” Focused listening is the kind he likes to do, where he sits at his computer listening to iTunes songs over and over while tracking the seconds that flicker at the top of the screen. (“Mom! The electric guitar starts at two minutes and thirty-three seconds!”) Casual listening is the kind that it seems most other people enjoy, where music is on in the background but you still carry on conversations, eat dinner, or play Go Fish. Together, we work out a way to know whether—and when—we’re doing casual or focused listening. We even have a time-out hand signal he can flash me so I don’t interrupt at the wrong time.