During the last few weeks, my life seemed impossible. I was grumpy and sour. If life is equal to capacity minus demand, and demands far exceed capacity, it’s a strange challenge to equanimity. Most challenges to emotional strength involve loss, frustrated ambitions, separation, or discomfort, but life goes on. Surviving and finding happiness is only a matter of cultivating peace with the way of things. Loving. Not this challenge. I cannot sit still, or I’ll perish, but no amount of effort seems enough to ameliorate the threats to my survival. I understand now why being imprisoned in a box too narrow to lie down in is such torture. Single motherhood is like being poked with a stick every few minutes, around the clock for days on end, where days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, etc. I would like to enjoy everything on the other end of that stick, but I’m exhausted.
The worst part, however, has not been the fear of dying or losing my children. Well, the fear of losing my children, I can’t even think about it. The fear of dying, I don’t have it. Rather, the worst part is watching myself fall short, again and again, of loving and giving as much and as deeply as I want to love and give. That might sound self-aggrandizing or dreamy, but the love in one’s heart is the greatest nourishment, the flow that makes us conscious of the collective self. It comes from somewhere else, connects us to something else, and becomes the only thing that matters. Loving matters to me, and I’ve been falling flat on my face over and over again.
Case in point. I want to give my children everything they need. I am all they have, but I get exhausted, stressed, and terribly zoned out. The cognitive demands are enormous. When they need someone to watch them create, I wash the dishes. They want to tell me a long story, but all I can think about is how to find a job. When they need someone to hold them, I am scurrying to clean up whatever mess brought them sadness. Not always, of course. I accomplish a lot, but they deserve much more. One night, during the blizzard, I was so beyond coping that I went into my bedroom and sat in meditation while they watched some mindnumbing cartoon, and I spoke to that something else from which love comes. I received a response.
“You cannot give what you do not have.” Including, I was sad to realize, attention.
I remembered the ecstatic dance club that I struggled to make happen in my new city. The dance was my offering, my act of love. I wanted to offer a place where people could feel surrounded by the warmth and creativity of others. I wanted to offer a community, like the undulating flock of starlings that dance in the European evening sky. Few people ever came, and I felt as though I’d failed. But I did not have what I longed to give them. I am not a community.
I remembered the woman from Berkeley who wanted to help make the dance succeed, and I forgot to reimburse her for space rental, and even after watching me panic after suddenly realizing that I’d forgotten to reimburse someone else, wrote me a long email about how she felt used. Why would I use someone over thirty dollars? I would pay three hundred dollars to heal someone of feeling used. I did not have the perspicacity and memory she needed to feel cherished by me.
I remembered my Buddhist love, the one who longed to explore his passions for as many women as possible, and he shared his pain and suffering with me, the inner conflicts, the guilt. And he loved me very much. I wanted to give him my unconditional love, my presence, a shoulder to lean on, a listening ear, my non-judgmental companionship on the path. Being human is not easy. But we were romantically involved, and I was jealous beyond comprehension. I failed him. I knew what I signed up for, and I failed. Yet, I could not give him what I did not have. I did not have invulnerability, impartiality, or dispassion.
I’ve been applying for teaching positions, but the last time I helped teach university classes, my children and I were so frequently ill that I nearly lost my job. My last supervisor was a former single mother and very lenient. She invited me to her church. Twice I dreamed that if I asked her for a letter of recommendation, the response would be very negative, but I had no real reason to believe that. She was a great source of support and understanding. She served on my thesis committee and approved it, and she thought my teaching skills were superb. I asked her for a letter, and the response was negative. She “could not in good conscience” write a letter without mentioning my missed classes and lateness in grading. As though I’d slacked off. I thought about how hard I struggled to come through for her despite being sick, despite having little time to work, despite finding the course material retraumatizing (one lecture was all about rape and another on torture scenes in pornography, sheesh), and it was not enough. I was not enough!
Her reply crushed me. If I don’t have the capacity to teach, what do I do? I fell apart, overwhelmed by the powerlessness to be what others in the world need me to be. I let the powerlessness win, and in meditation, I said, “Okay, if I cannot give what everyone needs of me, WHAT CAN I GIVE???”
It is a question that opens the heart like a door to the universe. If I can’t give what I don’t have, what do I have? It’s a powerful shift in perspective. Instead of failure and helplessness, I feel giddy with possibility. It reminds me that the task is not to meet every demand that comes along, because some demands are simply too much. The task is to offer whatever is in my hands, in every moment. I can’t fail.
