Teaching What We Need to Learn

My son pulls out of the driveway, flashing two fingers and a grin as he heads back to school for his final semester. The sun’s blinding brilliance does nothing to move the temperature, which stays at a stubborn minus 11.

I grow increasingly restless as my mind jumps from the weather and road conditions to the list of things I need to get done—the list of things I can use to distract myself from this terrible knowing that each time my sons leave, my heart divides itself and lives uneasy. Fractured into pride and panic. Motherhood, for all its stretching and expanding, is also a lifetime sentence of farewells. I wasn’t prepared for this part; since the arrival of my oldest more than two decades ago, I am no longer autonomous. I live with the truths and possibilities of them in bones, blood, heartbeat.

I try to keep my thoughts grounded in the same space as my body, and I have to admit, it’s a bit of a street fight. While it is exciting to watch them unfurl their own adventures, I am not used to this new role in their outer orbits. I am no longer – nor should I be – central. My own mother used to cry every time we left the ranch where I grew up. Often, she still does, and another layer of understanding motherhood peels back, this time from her vantage, years and years later.

While I remain completely interested in my own life, it is a struggle today to watch one of my kids pull out of the driveway, about to cover miles I won’t share. There is something tricky about being a mother, separated from the people she can never actually be separate from. Perhaps there is a word for this in a language I don’t speak.

I decide to do all the things I tell other people to do in facing discomfort or imbalance. Interrupt thought patterns by noticing body sensations instead. Feel into things instead of thinking about them. Study intricate details in something beautiful. Send well wishes, love/kindness to self or someone. It doesn’t work. All I feel is tension, heavy-heartedness, overwhelming sense of… NO. I don’t want this. I don’t want this at all. I want my sons to be smaller and to wake up breathing down the hall from me. I want to share daily life with them, as I did for nearly two decades.

My tantrum against, well, life, goes on for some time. It doesn’t help.

I don’t know when I shift into something more skillful, but after some time, I notice I have been breathing into the places of tension and heaviness. I am aware of them easing up a bit, and also that I haven’t actually passed out or shriveled up from feeling something I hate feeling: sadness.

I decide to do another thing I often tell people to do and forget to do myself, because, let’s face it, it is much easier to give advice than to actually mind your own business, attend to your own needs. I make the commitment to let my thoughts and feelings be whatever they are going to be today, and the only thing I ask of myself is to take note of them by category. Whatever story I find going on in my mind, I will simply label: helpful, unhelpful, neutral.

I learned this from a mindfulness teacher in a book called Beyond Distraction: Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind. I keep digging into this practice, and I am reminded that I can manage the thoughts with skill if I notice what they are. How many of them reflect reality versus whatever dumpster fire my mind conjures up for me to suffer with, even though it’s not actually happening? I stop letting my mind ruminate on the separation from my kids, or, as the author puts it, I stop losing myself in thoughts of what might have been or should not be.

By afternoon, at the top of the tram, I take in my surroundings: Laughter from my ski partner, as he tightens his boots before we descend into Rendezvous Bowl’s frigid temperatures. Open, blazing blue sky, activity buzzing on the valley’s carpet below. Helpful, thinking about this beauty. Helpful, thinking about all the people doing what they have always done to move things along, deliver the food, the babies, the new part for the fireplace. Helpful, thinking about how many of them—teachers, friends, coaches, pets—have conspired to help shape my sons into these miraculous, interesting, sensitive men. Helpful. The “no” becomes less binary. It morphs into something more like “both”—both the sore spots and also the celebration of babies who grow up, walk steady, begin to find ways to be part of something bigger than themselves.

I point my skis downhill, feel my body come to balance and let myself fully experience the ride.