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This past Sunday morning, Father’s Day, while my son and I made breakfast and a dazzling homemade card for his father, I found myself thinking about and appreciating all the ways in which my partner is a present and devoted parent to our son.  And then I started wondering if I’d ever seen any representation of fathers like him in popular media or even in a TV commercial. I haven’t. On the contrary, I see lots and lots of commercials, television shows, movies, etc. that continue to portray fathers as well-meaning but hopeless buffoons when it comes to parenting.

If we were to believe the stereotypes we would accept that father’s cannot change diapers, get groceries, cook, clean, or fold laundry properly. And this is just the mundane stuff that, literally, a paid laborer could do. Which leaves out all the stuff that you cannot pay someone to do for your children; the real parenting stuff. Despite the fact that men everywhere are proving them wrong, why do stereotypes of men being incapable of nurturing and loving as well as mothers continue to thrive?

I recently read a blog post at Smithsonian.com about how fathers can recognize their babies’ cries just as well as mothers can if they have invested a similar amount of time caring for their child. That’s a big  IF because society is not set up in any way, shape or form for fathers to be able to do that.

The New York Times just published an interesting piece, The Unspoken Stigma of Workplace Flexibility, in which it discusses the fact that while many companies do have policies on the books for new parents to take advantage of, in terms of flexible work schedules and parental leave, it is understood that to take advantage of these policies is to accept the fact that you are likely to be seen as a less valuable  and dedicated player in your company. This is true for both men and women, but may be even more acute for men, since they are traditionally valued for working hard and providing for their families.

Don’t even get me started on how “working hard and providing for your family” should include things that nobody pays you for. Childrearing is hard work. Being present and available to your children is hard work. Providing a safe and peaceful environment for them to thrive, no matter how much money you make, is effing hard work. The NYTimes article rightly points out that if we want the work/life balance choices to be better for women, we have to make them so for men. It is an unfortunate function of the patriarchy that women only get what men get after they get it. As long as we allow the marginalization of men in parenting, we continue to feed the beast that makes it virtually impossible for women to have both satisfying parenting and working lives.

There’s one commercial in particular that really gets my goad. The one for Tide where the couple is sitting there folding their triplets’ laundry together talking about how buying the pricier detergent actually saves them money because it cleans better. The mother is refolding everything the father folds and in the end she just kind of grabs a shirt from him, as if even allowing him to continue to fold is a waste of time.

For me, this commercial perfectly encapsulates a huge problem. Okay, several problems. What is the value of perfectly folded laundry? I’ll tell you: there is none. If your laundry is folded well or folded poorly, it will still be clean and your clothes will still cover your body and provide you protection from the elements. You may have a few more wrinkles, but who cares? Yet, there are plenty of mothers who think it is important to fold laundry well. But why do they think that? Is it because they feel so marginalized and powerless in a society that doesn’t value mothering that they put immense pressure on themselves to do these things so well that somebody might find them valuable? Is a good mother one whose children have perfectly folded clothes and fewer wrinkles? Or is a good mother one who spends more time with her kids and less time worrying about perfectly folded clothes?

We could ask these questions about perfectly clean floors and tidy homes and beautifully presented meals. Women, either through internal or external pressure, feel the need to live up to IMPOSSIBLE standards of perfection and then we all get a good laugh about making fun of dads who just can’t seem to do it the way mom does. When really we should be asking ourselves, why is anybody in this family worrying about or interested in doing anything perfectly?

I must admit that I am the queen of “good enough”. Nobody could ever say of me that I allowed the “perfect to be the enemy of the good”. Just ask my darling husband. That said, I think I have a valid point here. Dad’s get shit on for not being “as good as mom” at any number of things that mom shouldn’t  really be focusing on doing with such precision.  I have often wondered if women, knowingly or not, as a reaction to being put into a box for so long and feeling so under-appreciated and stifled by the expectations heaped upon them, take a certain type of insidious enjoyment in making fathers feel like they are incapable of nurturing their children in the same way. It’s as if they’re saying “this is my box, you put me in here and now you have to let me rule the box”.

If we -society, employers, partners – give fathers the permission to be tender and nurturing with their children, they will be. They do not need to learn it, they only need to unlearn all the messages they’ve been receiving since birth; that to be masculine means to earn money, act tough, and accept that your wife will always be better at you with the children. How well a person does at parenting has less to do with gender and more to do with their experiences with their families of origin and the work they’ve done on themselves as grown-ups. Also their interest and commitment to being a parent. There’s that.

One of my favorite things in the whole world is to watch my husband and son play together. Their bond is secure and getting stronger every day, same as mine with our son. He’s not a perfect father, but I’m not a perfect mother. And it is this lesson – imperfections are not failures – that is among the highest on my list of priorities to teach our son. My hope is that when he grows up he can see the choices we made as parents to ensure that we both had as much time as possible with him in these early years, and feel something akin to appreciation. We both have made sacrifices to make parenting our priority and we have both reaped the benefits of an intimate and special bond with our son. He may not have a single picture of himself in tidy, unwrinkled clothes, and the background may always be a bit messy, but he is loved fiercely by two adults who are allowed to make mistakes and who are every day trying to shed society’s expectations and just focus on doing their best.

So, a belated Happy Father’s Day to all. Society may think you’re dumb, but I don’t (and I’m not alone).

I wouldn’t say that I was unaware of my inadequacies before I had a child, only that having a child really makes them very obvious and unavoidable. There is this sense that the stakes have never been higher – and they haven’t – so I better not fuck it up. I’m no longer a kid; I’m someone’s mother. I am the standard by which the whole world will be judged until my kid reaches the age where he realizes I’m actually just another person doing my best and that most, if not all, of what I’ve taught him can be taken or left as he sees fit. Some days, I long for him to reach that age, even as I fear his assessment of me as Mother.

Most days, though, I struggle to, if not embrace, at least sit with these feelings and make sure that I never veer into the territory of false humility. We all know the folks who put on a good show of being humble in hopes of camouflaging what are actually excuses for not trying. The trick with motherhood is to strike that delicate balance between not being too hard on yourself while being fully committed to improvement.

One of my greatest strengths as a human is that I know that I am just that:  human. I am not a unique and beautiful snowflake and as such my experiences on planet earth cannot be mine alone. Thinking that you are the only one who has ever felt or experienced something is very isolating and entirely unhelpful. Perhaps due to my tendency to share my feelings and deepest thoughts with friends and strangers alike, I’ve been made aware over and over again how completely un-unique my experiences are as a mother.

Those of us who are committed to seeing what is rather than what we would like to see will readily admit that motherhood, while exhilarating and miraculous and rewarding, is not unlike getting punched in the face over and over and over and over again. It’s painful and shocking and requires the ability to quickly get back on your feet and brace yourself for the next round.

Some days I pop right back up. Other days, I’m lying there on the mat, hearing the count in my head, face to face with all the other mothers who, like me, are bloodied and bruised and exhausted and digging deep to find the strength to stand back up. And then we do. We stand up, we smile, we breathe, and we tell ourselves it’s all worth it. We’re not perfect, but we’re adequate, and we refuse to let the  ’perfect be the enemy of the good’.

Because it is all worth it, right? Riiiiiiiiiight???

Loving must be as normal to us as living and breathing, day after day until our death.

-Mother Teresa

Choosing to love, day in and day out, is hard. If it weren’t, Mother Teresa’s above quote wouldn’t be so profound. As a yogi, this quote makes me ponder the connection between love and breathing. Breathing is something we do to stay alive each and every day and though we can do it mindlessly, the act of paying attention to the breath in our yoga practice transforms it into not only a means of survival but a tool for thriving.

So too with how we love. We need a minimum amount of love to survive, but giving and receiving love that is mindful and also given and received without a second thought makes us thrive.

The kinds of love that is emphasized in our society – romantic and familial – is relatively easy to do without thinking about it. Though being in relationship is always challenging, we generally find it doesn’t require much effort to love our spouses and children and extended family. But how are we loving them?

I think sometimes we confuse “loving” with “not actively hating” or perhaps “tolerating” or “providing for”. But, it is an all-encompassing love of  ourselves and others, the very love that Mother Teresa so beautifully embodied throughout her life, that must be learned (or rather, re-learned, as I believe we possess this ability at birth).

The very heart of this love is profound and radical acceptance of what is. Loving with no conditions attached, no ifs or whens. We learn to do this by simply doing it, day after day, until we die. Choosing to accept, to forgive, to embrace, and to give without expectation of receiving anything in return. The more we do it, the easier it will become.

Like breathing, first we do it without thinking, then we focus our attention on how we’re doing it thus transforming the act entirely, and then we continue in this way until the habit is formed and we no longer need to think about it. It is when we reach this place that we can become a source of healing in this world.

- Dainin Katagiri, “Time Revisited”

My concept of time changed drastically after my son was born. Suddenly my eventual death seemed so near I could taste it, and while I have no fear of death in and of itself, I have a great fear of leaving my son before he is grown. I just need to live until he doesn’t need me anymore. Then I can go. This is my nightly prayer.

Time seems to move so slowly when you are young. Then you get older and it begins to feel like that cylindrical carnival ride that starts to spin faster and faster and faster until the floor drops away and you are pinned to the walls of the cylinder simply by centrifugal force.

When I had my son, I already had an established spiritual practice, so I can only guess how this shift in perspective would have felt to me pre-practice, but I imagine it would sound an awful lot like the oft-heard refrains of “oh, they grow so fast” and “life is short” and “there is never enough time”.

Sometimes when I’m in a mindless rut and not living in the moment, I feel these phrases leaping into my throat. When that happens I am reminded that Time and it’s passing is only of concern to us when we are not alive in the moment; when we are seeing past, present, and future as distinct rather than same. Time, like everything else, simply is and it is all happening now.

The election of a new pope has me thinking about this again, not because I think any big change is underway in the Catholic Church, but because there has been a lot of talk about the changes that people think need to happen, including the admission of women to the clergy and allowing clergy to marry. (not to mention the much broader social issues like the church’s stance on birth control and marriage equality, to name a few)

To me, the prohibition of priests to marry and the vows of celibacy often taken by monastics, while perhaps good for some, deprive these devotees of one of the keys to growth – relationship. So much, if not all, of our growth as humans happens in relation to others. Being in committed romantic relationships, having and raising children, learning to integrate into the extended family of another – all of these provide so much potential for emotional and spiritual learning.  I also have to wonder about the effects of denying parts of ourselves in the name of God or service. How can we model unconditional love and acceptance if we are denying our own very basic human needs and desires?

The following quote is from Robert Thurman’s “The Politics of Enlightenment”

“It is a misunderstanding to think that enlightenment is some sort of final escape from life and that the doctrine of the unsatisfactory nature of samsara obviates any need for involvement with other beings or social responsibility. Because nirvana is selfless, there is no self that enjoys a state of being beyond the world. Wisdom and compassion are ultimately inseparable, wisdom being the complete knowledge of ultimate selflessness and compassion being the selfless commitment to the happiness of others”

I really love how he so perfectly encapsulates the reality that the goal of spiritual enlightenment is not to exist beyond the world, but to be of service to the world.  If one is not selflessly committed to the happiness of others, one is not truly enlightened.

This is not to say that people who choose not to marry or have children cannot reach enlightenment or that they are not selflessly committed to the happiness of others.  Nor am I saying that romantic relationships are the only ones in which we grow and the only means by which we can serve others.  All relationships provide opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and the world. What I am saying is that  marriage and family provide ample opportunity to practice selfless service, compassion, empathy, kindness, and equanimity. As such these life choices should not automatically preclude a contemplative life.  It’s true that marriage and children require immense energy that cannot be directly devoted to study and prayer, but any mother will tell you that the moments she spends with her little one asleep against her bosom are some of the most Divine she will ever experience. Many married people will tell you that their earthly model for unconditional love is their spouse, who loves and accepts all of their flaws and errors.

These thoughts are not original to me. Greater mind and deeper intellects have been pondering these very things and there is a new monastic movement happening. People who feel called to a contemplative life are eschewing the age-old ideals of celibacy and separateness and instead choosing to live fully engaged lives full of purpose, meaning, and the day-to-day challenges that most people face. There are also many examples of contemplatives and monastics who have kept traditional vows while completely immersing themselves in service. Mother Theresa, Thomas Merton, Father Greg Boyle to name a very few.

The key is not whether or not our spiritual leaders are married, but how engaged they are with humanity. There was a great deal of what I will politely call “fuss” in the media about the fact that Pope Francis washed the feet of AIDS patients. While I am well aware of the significance of this act of humility, shouldn’t we instead have been asking why it is so noteworthy that a cardinal would do such a thing? Shouldn’t all cardinals be imitating Christ in this way? Shouldn’t such humble acts of service be, yes acknowledged and appreciated, but also expected?

Isolation in a monastery, a convent, a cave, or the Vatican can no longer be the answer to the spiritual needs of the world. Like the age-old question of a tree falling in a forest with no one near to hear it, if a person reaches enlightenment with no one to serve, even if it really happened, does it matter?

I loved this phrasing and couldn’t help but think of my own son who is so near the beginning of his life and therefore fresh from the Source, as I am nearing the middle of mine, which will perhaps be the furthest point I will ever be from God. I imagined my son and I, connected by a string as we travel along the circumference of the circle of life. He s nearly at the origination of the circle and I am nearing the diametric opposite.

My connection to him keeps me tethered to the Spirit as I edge towards the part of life that is consumed by taking care of others and building a career and finding personal and professional fulfillment. Anytime I get too wrapped up in these pursuits, I have my little Buddha at home, ready to remind me of what is important and how wondrous and beautiful the world is.

And then, as he enters middle age, I will be the one closer to the origination/end point and hopefully I will have uncovered the wisdom of the freshly born once again and will have done a good enough job parenting him to be able to be his reminder of what truly matters. He’ll have me on one end and perhaps his own children on the other end.

Then I imagine the mandala that forms within this circle when we add all the families connected through generations. The fabric and shape of the Universe reveals itself in this circle. And once again, I know for certain that all that matters in life, the only things, are the connections we make.

I’m not going to make any high-minded statements about how evil Facebook is, simply because others have said it better. Here’s a good example. And I’m not going to go on and on about how Facebook is destroying our ability to connect with other humans. It has certainly changed the way we do it, but I think every generation has something that does that. In the spirit of not going on and on I will say this one thing: Facebook (and all interaction that happens only online) does make it easier to dehumanize others and see them as separate from ourselves, and that, in my humble opinion, is a big problem. The things people say to each other via Facebook and Twitter and online forums are things that most folks would never in a million years say to another person if forced to interact face-to-face.

My misgivings about what Facebook is doing to the human race were not, however, my impetus for giving it the ol’ heave-ho. For me, it all boils down to the fact that it’s just not normal to have the goings-on of 250 people in your daily headspace. Granted, some people do just fine with it, love it even. I’ve just come to the realization that I’m not one of them. Clearing my mind of all the noise has been at the center of the last 10 years of my life. Learning to use my limited energy wisely has been a big part of that work. Facebook doesn’t fit in with either of those two pursuits for me at this time.

So, overall, I do think Facebook is ethically  problematic for many (oh, so many) reasons. But honestly, this is a me problem, not a Facebook problem. And how do I feel after 3 days “sober”? Honestly? I feel great. I thought I’d be experiencing information withdrawals but instead I just feel incredibly free. Free from something that I should have never allowed to make me feel stuck in the first place.

So newsfeed be damned! I’m looking forward to a notification-free life.

During the interview, a scripture was quoted and it is one with which I am very familiar.  Proverbs 20:12: “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, God made them both.” This scripture came up in the context of a discussion about how the younger generation and the older generation do or do not connect.

Ms. Tippett made the observation that although it may not seem an obvious truth, the fact is that many thinking young people have a deep desire to
connect with and learn from their elders. Not because they will be able to tell us how to fix our current problems, but because by hearing their stories, we can apply their wisdom to our current circumstances and make our own stories.

As someone who regularly feels a deep longing to connect with my elders, I was so pleased to hear this observation voiced. However, my experience has been that outside of a religious framework there isn’t really a space for this relationship. Society has transformed so much in such a short time, that those of us who want these relationships and connections have to make an effort to seek them out.

Interestingly, the world has never been more chock-full of “role models” and experts and people offering advice. One could read one self-help book every day for their entire adult lives and still not exhaust the supply. All this to say that there is a plethora of information out there. There is a great deal of difference, though, between information and wisdom. It becomes a bit of a spiritual discipline, then, to have eyes that see and hears that hear true wisdom.

How do we cultivate this discipline? How do we train our eyes and ears to see and hear our elders? How do we learn how to communicate with, listen to, and exchange ideas between generations?

Dr. Harding addresses some of these questions during their conversation. I am continuing to ponder them. In the meantime, I highly recommend giving this program a listen. If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the changes that need to happen to help our country to achieve a more perfect union, or if you have ever felt hopeless when observing those in our society who receive the most attention, I promise that you will feel better about the state of things after listening. It’s easy to forget all the amazing folks who are working in big ways and small ways towards a more equitable future. This served as a much needed and much appreciated reminder.

There is one article in particular circulating all over social media today entitled “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother”.  In it, a mother details her struggles with her sometimes violent son who is clearly suffering from some sort of mental illness that eludes diagnosis and any clear path for how to live and deal with it. It is a powerful piece and her assertion that we need to start having serious discussions and action plans for how to deal with mental illness in our country is inarguably true. What we’re currently doing, which is essentially ignoring or locking up the mentally ill is not working. Something has to be done and until it is we will keep having these shocking episodes where somebody who always seemed “a little off” or “not quite right” surprises everyone by showing the world exactly what they were capable of. Would it have happened if Adam Lanza had gotten all of the help he needed? Perhaps. We’ll never know. My guess is probably not. What we do know for sure is that had he not had access to deadly assault weapons he simply could not have inflicted the damage he did in such a short period of time.

The thing this mother says in her article that  I cannot agree with is that while mental illness is a difficult conversation, gun control is not. She says it’s easy to talk about gun control. It is indeed easy to argue about gun control, to throw around statistics and to get worked up about it on both sides. But there have been no meaningful discussions surrounding gun control. There is always one side who says that there has to be limits and another side who claims infringement of their rights at even the suggestion that ordinary citizens should not have access to semi-automatic assault rifles.

Can anyone tell me of a single instance of an armed civilian stopping a mass shooting? I don’t know of any, but I’d love to be proven wrong. This idea that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun doesn’t hold any water. The only thing that stops someone intent on killing as many people as possible is limited access to the weapons that would allow such a slaughter. Some have brought up the attack on children in China that happened the day before the shootings in Connecticut as proof that there are crazy people everywhere. And it’s true, there are mentally unstable people everywhere. The difference is that some of them have access to guns and some of them only have access to knives. I’d much rather have a child that was injured in a knife attack than a child that was killed in a shooting assault, wouldn’t you?

Every time I hear someone invoke the 2nd amendment to explain our right to carry assault rifles, I am reminded of the Pharisees who missed entirely the intent  and spirit of the law as they attempt to condemn Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat from the wheat fields on the sabbath. What is the intent or spirit of the 2nd amendment? There is much debate about that, though I think we can all agree that it had a lot to do with providing an assurance that the federal government would not be able to use the army to control its own citizens. It was also meant to allow a person to protect themselves in their own home.

I personally do not believe that any civilian citizens should have the right to own firearms. I also do not believe that police should carry firearms. Military personnel, excluding MPs, are not allowed to carry weapons unless deployed overseas or serving guard duty at military installations and the like. They are not permitted, as police officers are, to carry their weapons home with them. And the fact is, we could all be armed up to our eyeballs, but if the US military chose to attack its own citizens, we’d be helpless to stop them. Our military and our government, with plenty of blessing from its citizens, have developed weapons far more powerful than anyone could ever hope to thwart with an assault rifle. Owning or carrying a gun may make you feel that you are safe from the bad guys or from our own government, but it is just that – a feeling. It is simply not true. An armed society is not a safer society and when we cannot even send our children to school without worrying for their safety, are we truly free? If we are not free and we are not safe, what is the point?

The other issue I have with the invocation of the 2nd amendment is the inferred belief that the US Constitution and amendments are sacred. What’s to say that we shouldn’t take a second and a third and fourth look at these things to see if they need to be changed or updated? The constitution was adopted in 1787. Just four years later the first ten amendments were ratified. Clearly, our forefathers did not see the constitution as the unchangeable thing that we tend to see. The world has changed a lot since 1791. Science and technology have created more marvelous and terrifying things than the founders of our country could have ever imagined. Why shouldn’t the constitution change as the world changes? Perhaps our current interpretation of the 2nd amendment does not serve the cause of the greater good. Perhaps we are missing the intent and spirit of the law.

So yes, we need to have meaningful discussions in this country about guns and mental illness. We also need to have meaningful conversations about the media. This tragedy has once again highlighted how reckless and irresponsible the American media has become. In their quest for what – ratings? sensationalism? – they report what they hear before they have the facts to back it up. Journalism is not simply repeating here-say. That is called gossip. And much of what we heard in the first few hours after the shootings was just that – gossip. From reports of the shooter’s identity to reports that his mother was a teacher at the school to the completely unverified reports that continue into today that the shooter was diagnosed with Asperger’s . That has not been confirmed by anyone who would know and yet the media seems to have no trouble spreading this as if it were confirmed fact. Think of how horrifying this must be for the parents of children with Asperger’s and for the children themselves. There has never been any link proven between Asperger’s and violent acts and if the shooter did indeed have Asperger’s it was not the underlying cause of his incomprehensible actions. If anything, it may have made it more difficult for his mental illness to be recognized and treated. But we simply do not know.

What we do know are the names and ages of his victims. Why is the media continuing to print the shooter’s name and picture when they could instead be helping to ensure that none of us ever forget his victims? We should not be reinforcing the precedent that was set with the Columbine shootings in 1999 that the killers get more media attention than their victims. And yet, this is what American media does over and over. They repeat the name of the killer. They show his picture over and over again. They allow this person to live in infamy, thus giving the idea to any other mentally disturbed person who imagines that the only way to mean anything is to kill innocents that they too will live in infamy if they can pull off such an attack. The media’s stand in these cases should be to refuse to give any meaningful press to the perpetrator of such a horrifying attack. Instead, let us focus all of our attention on the victims, their families, and their community.

In a situation like this we are all left with one question: why? It is often this question that instead of getting answered, gets buried under accusations and arguments. How many more people have to die in this horrifying way before we gain the moral courage to face that question? We, as a nation, have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, why? Why does this keep happening? And what can we do to stop it? It is only when we answer that question that any of us can truly feel safe and free.