by Anne Cushman
And as we made our way through the spices, we told each other stories. Running hot water into a jar of clumpy powdered garlic, I told her about how I tried to make cold cucumber-yogurt soup from my very first cookbook, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, when I’d just graduated from college. “It would have come out great, except that the recipe called for three cloves of garlic, and I didn’t know what a clove was. So I put in three entire heads. I served it to my boyfriend and we tried to eat it because we didn’t want to waste the money we had spent on yogurt and cucumbers.”
She told me about learning to cook in her roommate’s kitchen while she was doing her internship in Amsterdam—how her Dutch boyfriend had taught her how to make lasagna, and then the proper Dutch way to do the dishes afterward. “In kitchens in Holland, there are two kinds of towels—tea towels for drying dishes and hand towels for drying your hands. And people get really shocked and irritated if you use the wrong ones.”
Cleaning the spice rack was just one of a series of projects we embarked on together, each one bringing us closer. And over time, as we swapped stories, I had the sense—one that I often have with her—that we were fleshing out our histories for each other, as if we were handing each other coloring books filled with outlines of our past selves and then coloring them in together.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, she and Forest bonded over music—they huddled in front of their computers, playing each other their favorite songs. He inundated her with songs by his favorite band, Muse. She introduced him to Twenty One Pilots and they sang along to “Stressed Out” as they washed the dishes together.
Together, River and I watched the HBO series Girls, agreeing that we were comfortable enough with each other to sit through the graphic sex scenes. One day, when it was just the two of us for dinner, we went to the farmer’s market together and bought peaches, which I sautéed with butter and brown sugar. We poured them on top of ice cream and sat down to shovel our dessert into our mouths before the ice cream melted. When we both involuntarily began to moan with delight, we burst out laughing so hard we spattered ice cream and peach juice all over the table. It was the kind of mother-daughter moment I’d always imagined.
One evening when I was nervous about going to an event where I expected to see my ex-husband’s new wife, River helped me pick out an outfit that looked both sexy and maternal, and did my eye makeup. Then, before I left, she slipped a small, polished, heart-shaped stone into my hand.
“Carry this in your purse,” she said. “It’s to remind you that I am your rock. I’m with you always.”
For our first Mother’s Day together, she decorated the table with flowers, then she and Forest presented me with a handmade card and several handmade gifts. I have never doubted Forest’s love for me, but I am confident it was not his idea to shape little jewelry dishes out of modeling clay, paint them with gold hearts, flowers, and “We Love You,” and stay up late firing them in our kitchen oven.
That same night, River also made me a picture frame decorated with purple and turquoise tissue paper—my favorite colors—with a picture in it of the two of us, laughing, our arms around each other.
* * *
—
I had wanted a nuclear family—me, a husband, and a couple of children, all sitting around a table together. That’s what I finally had. It just hadn’t arrived the way I had planned.
It was as if I’d been sitting and waiting impatiently for the front doorbell to ring, looking at my watch, pacing from window to window watching the street, and, in the meantime, the family I was waiting for had already come in the back door, sliced apples, rolled out dough, and put a pie in the oven to bake. The sweet smell of cinnamon and apples was already permeating the house, just waiting for me to sit down at the table.
What I learned from finding family with Teja, River, and Forest is that what makes a family is something deeper than genetics. And what makes someone your child is not just that they grew inside you or got birthed through your body—or that you changed their diapers, and took them to their first day of kindergarten, or took their first lost tooth from under their pillow and replaced it with a quarter and a note from the tooth fairy. Yes, there is something unique in the slow accrual of family intimacy over years and decades of shared moments. But love can flow backward in time, so you can know someone in the present and come to love all the different people they were before you met them.
I loved a little girl before she was born, who died before I could hold her. And I love a little girl laughing with Christmas lights in her hair who grew up before I met her. I love a man who beams at me from a photo with that little girl in his arms—a man with brown, curly hair flowing past his shoulders that had turned short and gray by the time we met.
It wasn’t that River had replaced Sierra or that Teja had replaced my ex-husband. It was that together we had built a family out of the broken pieces of our past. And I knew that it was a beautiful, complete, and radiant thing, not a cobbled-together substitute.
* * *
—
Seventeen years after Sierra’s father and I scattered our baby’s ashes in a remote mountain lake, I am back there once again, this time with my new family.
Lake Ralston sits in a rocky cairn high above Echo Lake, where my ex-husband’s family still maintains their summer cabin. Forest and I still spend a couple of weeks there every summer, often inviting friends to come with us.
Every year, I’ve made the pilgrimage to Lake Ralston. I sit on a rocky ledge and gaze across at the ribbon of water splashing down the granite ledges and rockslides, then scrabble my way around the lake and sit at the base of the waterfall where we released Sierra’s ashes into the stream. I jump into the clear water, gasping at the cold, and then haul myself out and bake on a slab of sun-warmed granite. As the years have gone by, it has slowly become a place of bittersweet joy for me again, rather than a place of ragged mourning.
This year, my hike to Ralston is not alone. I’m going there with Forest, now age sixteen; with River, age twenty-four; and with Forest’s best friend, Vaughan, who has been coming up to Echo with us almost every year since the boys were eight and six.
We climb up the familiar white-granite trail with daypacks full of sandwiches. It’s River’s first time at Echo Lake, and we are all excited about introducing her to the land we love so much. We point out the junipers, the white pines, the red firs; the ground squirrels and marmots who poke their noses out between the boulders. We point out the Indian paints and asters.
Harder to point out are my memories, embedded at every turn of the trail: rowing across Echo in a canoe at age nineteen with the boy who would become Forest’s father, inhaling for the first time the distinctive mountain scent of pine and snowmelt; leaping naked off the rocks into the water in my twenties holding hands with that young man, both of us stoned and laughing; the two of us with one-year-old Forest between us, holding our hands as he waded into the shallows in his diaper.
And, of course, the two of us walking up this trail seventeen years earlier, carrying Sierra’s ashes in a little ceramic urn painted with flowers that had been a wedding gift meant to hold sugar.
We pause at a familiar bend in the trail, the twin ovals of upper and lower Echo Lake below shining like blue jewels in the valley. I snap a picture of River and Forest on the edge of a granite ledge, their arms around each other.
When we get to Lake Ralston, we sprawl on the slabs of sun-warmed granite at the edge of the water and eat our sandwiches. Forest and Vaughan play hacky sack. I slip away and sit down by a twisted old pine for a moment of meditation. River follows and sits down next to me. In silence, we look across the jewel-blue water.
“You see that waterfall over there?” I point across the lake to where a band of silver winds down the craggy granite. “That’s where we scattered Sierra’s ashes.”
She nods. “I know. Forest told me.
” She dissolves into tears. “I’m so sorry.”
She leans against me, and as I wrap my arms around her I marvel, as I often do, at her emotional attunement. It feels as if she is crying out the tears that are too painful for me to allow right now.
She says, “I will always hold Sierra in my heart as my sister. It’s like I can feel her presence here—that if we were just still enough, we might see her peeking around the side of a tree, a teenage girl. I’m so sad that she didn’t get to grow up with you as her mom.”
“Even with a loss this big…time passes, and the pain becomes less sharp,” I tell her. “Eventually, I think, all that remains is the love.”
As I say it, I know this is becoming true for me. The love I feel in that moment is big enough to fill the whole lake, the whole basin of granite rockslide and clear, blue-green water, reflecting the vast mountain sky. My children have carved a space in my heart the way the ancient glaciers carved cairns into the valley.
I wrap my arms around my daughter and say, “The pain recedes. The love goes on forever.”
Epilogue
AFTER TWO YEARS living at home with us, River moved to Portland to find a job and study art. Then Forest was a senior, filling out college applications. Blink: River was back with us again, working for a catering company and studying to be a web designer. Blink: Forest got accepted to a university on the East Coast.
Family life rubs your nose in the truth of anicca, impermanence. Because even if everything goes perfectly, you eventually lose everything. You lose the early mornings rocking your breastfeeding baby as the dawn brightens the sky. You lose snuggling together on a sofa reading aloud: “One berry, two berry, pick me a blueberry!” You lose riding a bike with an extra seat and an extra wheel screwed onto the back and a four-year-old pedaling furiously behind you to “give us some extra gas!” as you go up a hill. You lose a six-year-old singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” on the toilet, then you lose a seventeen-year-old belting out “Brain Damage” by Pink Floyd, also on the toilet. You lose a girl’s watercolor paintings strewn across the kitchen table, and the guitar riffs blasting from a teenage boy’s room at 1:00 a.m.
But along the way, you gain the whole world. Family life powers its way through your heart in a torrent of lost sweatshirts and runny noses, school concerts and school suspensions—and leaves it bigger, more tender, more vulnerable and alive and connected.
The end of the summer before Forest’s senior year, the four of us—me, Teja, Forest, and River—went on a camping trip around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. We rented a van with a pack of wolves painted on the side. We paddled kayaks around a mountain lake and roasted marshmallows for s’mores over a campfire. We pitched a tent on a windy bluff overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and on the banks of a river in the Hoh Rain Forest.
Near the end of our trip, we took a hike through the rain forest on a trail that wove through a lush tangle of massive roots under a dense green canopy of Sitka spruces, hemlocks, cedars, and Douglas firs dripping with moss. Signs along the way explained the ecosystem of this temperate rain forest: how massive trees capture the sunlight, while shade-loving mosses, mushrooms, and ferns carpet the forest floor.
We paused to read a sign by a fallen tree called a “nurse log.” Nurse logs, we read, are fallen trees—often massive evergreens that had lived up to five hundred years by the time they uprooted and tumbled. But you can’t really call them dead. In falling, they tear a hole in the canopy, letting in light that enables new seedlings to take root. As they decay—which may take another five hundred years—they teem with far more life inside them than they had when they were rooted. With the help of insects, microbes, and fungi, the log becomes an elevated bed of nutrient-rich, spongy soil that cradles the growth of new trees.
There’s a metaphor here about family, and love.
When Forest was six, he woke up sobbing from a nightmare in the middle of the night. I lay with him and sang him songs until he started to drift off to sleep again. As I stood up to slip away, he opened his eyes and said, “Love is the most powerful thing there is.”
“That’s right,” I told him.
“Do you want to know why it’s so powerful?”
“Yes, tell me why.”
“Because it goes on forever in all directions,” he told me. “No one ever started it. And no one can take it away from you.”
Acknowledgments
A book, like a child, is born from the vast, creative, mysterious generosity of life itself, so it’s hard to know where to begin saying “thank you.” Without my close family, there would have been no story—I’m deeply grateful for their love, support, patience, and willingness to let me write about them. Special thanks to my son for lighting up the past eighteen years with laughter and song—and for being the main character in so many of my tales. To his dad, for being the best father to him I could have imagined, even after we stopped living together. To my life partner, Teja, for healing my heart, awakening my body, and creating a home with me. To Teja’s daughter, who helped give this story a happy ending by becoming my daughter too.
My sister Kathleen is my lifelong confidant and writing mentor—many of these stories began as letters to her, and she held my hand through multiple drafts over many years. My writing coach Shoshana Alexander’s faith and wise edits kept me from collapsing before I reached the finish line. My dear friend Katy Butler is an exquisitely precise writer and editor—our semiregular manuscript exchanges and tea meetings made this into a far better book.
Never-ending hugs to my fellow moms and beloved friends—Rachael, Janice, Amy, and May. Again and again, as we raised our kids together, we kept each other from losing our marbles. Without our communal dinners, hikes and bikes, backpacking trips, laughing fits, and late-night phone consults and consolation, motherhood could have felt like a crazed and lonely journey.
My six brothers and sisters—and all their children and grandchildren—weave me in a web of family connection that sustains me every day. And finally, I’m grateful to my mother. Among her many gifts, she gave me her love of precise and beautiful language and her passion for good books. She never read most of these stories. But her heart and voice run through them all.
Credits
Earlier versions of some of these stories originally appeared in other publications. These essays have been revised, expanded, and retitled for The Mama Sutra. Grateful thanks to the following publications for their encouragement over the years and their blessing to include this material:
Sutra 2, originally published in Yoga Journal (March 2001) as “Into the Heart of Sorrow”
Sutra 5, originally published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (Summer 2003—Volume 12, Number 4) as “The Spice of Life”
Sutra 7, originally published in Lion’s Roar (September 2005) as “Will I Die Too? Will You?”
Sutra 9, originally published in Lion’s Roar (September 2006) as “The Big Questions”
Sutra 10, originally published in Lion’s Roar (May 2008) as “Astronomy Lessons”
Sutra 11, originally published in Perceptive Traveler (September 2008) as “A Passage Back to India”
Sutra 12, originally published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (Summer 2006—Volume 15, Number 4) as “Fifteen Weeks of Dharma Dating”
Sutra 13, originally published in Lion’s Roar (July 2011) as “The Best Laid Plans”
Sutra 14, originally published in Lion’s Roar (January 2013) as “Dancing in Foam”
About the Author
Anne Cushman is a writer and meditation teacher whose work focuses on the intersection between spiritual practice and the wild, messy, heartbreaking, and hilarious details of ordinary life. She is the author of the novel Enlightenment for Idiots (named by Booklist as one of the best first novels of its year), the India pilgrimage guide From Here to Nirvana, and the mindful yoga book Moving into Meditation. She
is a member of the Teachers Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she teaches regularly on retreats that emphasize embodiment, creativity, and women’s awakening. She is the Director of Mentoring for the international Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (from the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center at UC-Berkeley), and she offers individual mentoring sessions to students worldwide via video conferencing. Anne served as an editor and writer at both Yoga Journal and Tricycle, and her personal essays on contemplative practice in contemporary life have been widely published in venues that include the New York Times; the San Francisco Chronicle; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Lion’s Roar. Her work has also been anthologized in The Best Buddhist Writing 2004 and 2006, A Women’s Path: Women’s Best Spiritual Travel Writing, Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories, and other books. The mother of a teenage son and a twenty-something stepdaughter, she lives with her family in Fairfax, California. To learn more about the author, visit her website at www.annecushman.com.
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