The Mama Sutra Read online

  At the end of the retreat, a woman raised her hand and asked, “Did you ever see her again?”

  “Have you not understood what I have been telling you?” Thich Nhat Hanh asked. “She is here in the room with us. I see her every moment of every day. You hear her whenever I speak.”

  SUTRA 1

  Letter to a Daughter Who Didn’t Live to Be Born

  • • • • •

  DEAR SIERRA,

  I thought we would have more time together.

  I thought there would be diaper pails, and mobiles, and breastfeeding at midnight in a rocking chair upholstered in stars and moons. I thought there would be Goodnight Moon, and Winnie the Pooh, and Misty of Chincoteague, and Harriet the Spy. I thought there would be braces, bikes, spaghetti, tampons, arguments about cleaning your room. And that sometime in the faraway future I’d be hugging you goodbye in a college dorm and crying, even though I’d know you’d be home for Thanksgiving.

  But as it turned out, the time that you lived inside my body was the only time we had. So I want to tell you some pieces of the story of your life and what you taught me. Because your story is one of the ways you stay alive, even as I let you go.

  * * *

  —

  Who knows when any story begins? Tug on the dangling thread of any moment and the whole universe begins to unspool. The present is the fruit of the past and the seed of the future. Look into a young girl’s eyes and you see a great-grandmother gazing back at you. In a boy’s hello, you might hear the echo of his father’s voice—just as it sounded the first time he said your name.

  Where does a story begin? Here’s one place I might begin yours, Sierra: the day I met your dad, the first day of freshman week at Princeton University, eighteen years before you were born.

  Just hours before, I’d said goodbye to my parents, watched them drive away, and set out to explore my new dorm. I wound my way through a maze of empty corridors in a dorm that smelled like years of stale pizza and spilled beer. In front of a door with music playing behind it, I paused.

  As I was lifting my hand to knock, I heard a voice. “Are you looking for me?”

  I turned to see your half-naked dad walking toward me, dark, curly hair still wet from the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist.

  I had just spent four years in a barely coed boarding school where the girls’ campus was on the top of a mountain, a five-mile bus ride from the boys’ campus in the valley, and where being caught in a boy’s bedroom was grounds for expulsion. I was a brainy high-school-newspaper editor who’d only recently traded her thick glasses for contact lenses.

  I had never been this close to a guy with no clothes on.

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  He invited me into the room whose door I’d been about to knock on. The walls were hung with madras-print bedspreads; the single twin bed had been replaced with a queen-size air mattress. In one corner was a homemade water-balloon bazooka for firing into the courtyard below. In another corner were piled the disassembled parts for an automatic plant-watering machine he was inventing.

  We stayed up most of the night together, roaming the campus and comparing notes about our lives.

  I was a seventeen-year-old freshman from a Connecticut prep school renowned for its demanding international baccalaureate program. He was a nineteen-year-old junior from a California beach school renowned for its popular P.E. class, “Bike and Surf.”

  I was the daughter of a Catholic three-star Army general whose Puritan ancestors were on the Mayflower. When I was ten years old, our family car had a bumper sticker on it that read “We Do Things Right,” which was the slogan my father had coined for the 101st Airborne Division when he was its commander.

  He was descended, he said, “from a long line of atheists, conscientious objectors, and horse thieves.” He had been raised by his single mother, who had refused to let him join the Boy Scouts on the grounds that it was the training ground for a paramilitary organization.

  He’d had his first live-in girlfriend when he was sixteen. He was philosophically opposed to monogamy and said that the only interesting people he knew came from broken homes—although he was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt because my father had been gone in Vietnam for so much of my childhood.

  I had never been in love with anyone who wasn’t a character in a novel: Laurie from Little Women was high on my list, as was Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind. I didn’t admit this to him that night, but I had never even been on a date, unless you counted the time I went to “A Presidential Classroom for Young Americans” in Washington, DC, and a fellow overachiever from a high school in Vermont asked me to sit next to him on the bus on the way to the tour of Capitol Hill.

  Nor did I tell him how I used to open like love letters my end-of-term envelopes full of grades and comments, reading and rereading the litany of As and praise that let me know I was admired. And I definitely didn’t tell him about my failed attempt to find a table to eat at in the boys’ dining hall my senior year. I had gone from half-empty table to half-empty table, asking if I could join them. Boy after boy looked me over and told me there was no room. I fled to the girls’ bathroom and hid in a stall until it was time for English class. The rest of the year I spent lunch in the bathroom, eating handfuls of dry Grape-Nuts I’d stashed in my blazer pocket at breakfast.

  Later, Sierra, I would discover that there were things your father hadn’t told me either. He hadn’t told me that after a brutal divorce when he was two, his father had gotten custody of him and his big sister. His mother had climbed over a fence to kidnap them back. She changed her name and disappeared with them. He had never seen his father again.

  He didn’t tell me that some mornings before he left for elementary school, his mother told him she didn’t want to live anymore. He would come home not knowing whether he would find her dead or alive.

  Together we were an emotional ship made of toothpicks, sailing through an ocean of submerged icebergs. But we didn’t know that, that night as we walked across the golf course toward the tower of the graduate school, looming above us like a medieval prison. “According to surfers,” he told me, “getting tubed in a breaking wave is the greatest pleasure the world has to offer. The next is taking LSD. The next is having sex. They’re the only people in the world who rate sex so low.”

  I looked up at the sky. This was the first night in my life that no one was checking to see what time I came home. My life, which had proceeded in black and white, had suddenly burst into color.

  All I said was, “I’ve never surfed.”

  A few weeks after we met, we began collaborating on an article about what the graffiti in the campus bathrooms revealed about male-female relationships at Princeton. When we started comparing our research notes I discovered to my chagrin that I didn’t know the meaning of most of the terms used in the men’s bathrooms. He was happy to tutor me.

  It turned out that no campus publication would print an essay that began with the words “Her pubic hair was jet-black”—a reference to the full-size image of a naked woman we discovered on the wall of the art department’s bathroom, with a three-dimensional vulva sculpted out of clay and a head the size of a pencil dot. But it didn’t matter that we remained unpublished. Our relationship was off and running.

  Over the next four years, here’s some of what happened: We began spending every night twined in each other’s arms in dorm beds barely big enough for us to roll over. Your dad commissioned the university glassblower at the chemistry lab to blow us a giant bong. He built a system to shine a laser beam through a multifaceted glass ball rigged up to a speaker woofer, so we could dance in his dorm room to a private light show that pulsed to the beat of Brian Eno and the Grateful Dead.

  While your dad wrote short stories (avidly) and Chaucer papers (belatedly) for his English lit degree, I signed up for a class in world religions because it did
n’t meet too early in the morning. Captivated by the lectures on yoga and Buddhism—paths that pointed toward the possibility of happiness in a world I already knew could be painful—I switched my major from creative writing to comparative religion. I became the campus stringer for a local newspaper. After he graduated, your dad stayed in town to try to launch a video production company.

  My senior year, I got us both a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to produce a documentary on Zen Buddhism for my senior thesis. We spent a month shooting video and meditating together at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, an urban community where we heard occasional gunshots in the neighborhood and the Japanese Zen master had just been packed off to an alcoholism treatment center after his followers discovered that he had been having affairs with his senior students. “I am not a perfect teacher,” the Zen master told me in an interview when he returned, “but the dharma is a perfect dharma.”

  The term dharma, I knew from my studies, referred to the teachings of the Buddha—and, in broader sense, the truth about how things really are. Your dad and I were so inspired by everything that we were learning about spiritual practice that on the plane home, we took turns slipping into the bathroom to smoke a joint.

  * * *

  —

  Or here’s another place your story could begin, Sierra: the day your dad and I decided to have a baby together.

  By then we had been best friends and an on-again, off-again couple for eighteen years. He was my first love and my heart’s imperfect gold standard for measuring all those that followed. We had played together, worked together, fought each other, traveled the world together. But by the time I passed my thirty-fifth birthday, we hadn’t spoken for months. Then he came to visit me in my funky one-bedroom cabin in a one-intersection, one-bar town an hour north of San Francisco, where I’d moved to the last time we’d broken up.

  Your dad maneuvered his ancient, unreliable, cream-colored sports car—which he’d nicknamed Creampuff—up my rutted driveway. “Do you realize that in all the years I’ve known you,” he asked as he got out, “you’ve never chosen a home that didn’t have a sign on the driveway saying, ‘Not a City-Maintained Road’?”

  “Just playing hard to get,” I said, leaning in for a hug. His arms wrapped around me, my head rested against his chest, and the circuitry that bound us together sprang alive again, as if we had just slept through our morning classes wrapped in each other’s arms on a twin dorm mattress; as if we had forgotten the time I threw a mug at him that just missed his head and dented my bedroom wall.

  We sat in front of the smoky fire in the living room, curled up on the futon sofa we’d bought together in college.

  “I like what you’ve done with your workspace.” He nodded at the custom-built desk and bookshelves fitted into an alcove to the right of the fireplace. “You must think you’ll be living here a while.”

  “Unless I decide to go back to India.” I had just spent a year there, researching the spiritual guidebook that was about to come out that month.

  “Is that an option?”

  “I’m tossing a coin. Go to India or have a baby?”

  He looked at the sputtering fire, not at me. “You’re thinking about having a baby?”

  “Well—I’m thirty-five.” I stared at the bloodstain in the middle of the rug where my cat Kali had decapitated a rat. “If I’m going to do it, it’s time.”

  He picked up a poker and adjusted the logs. “It doesn’t scare you, the idea of doing it on your own?”

  “The idea of not doing it at all scares me more.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  At one end of a smoldering log a flame leaped up.

  I looked up at your dad and said something I hadn’t been planning: “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who I want to have a baby with.”

  “I feel the same way,” he said. “I’ve never wanted to have a child with anyone else. And I’ve never stopped wanting it with you, even when I thought we were never going to speak to each other again.”

  “Are we insane to be even talking about this?”

  “I told my mother I was going to see you. She said, ‘It’s not too late yet. But it’s almost too late.’ ”

  Your dad and I had never even lived together. I had just quit my job as an editor at Yoga Journal to try to make it as a freelance writer. This cottage—with wood rats in the walls, a smoky fireplace for heat, a propane-fired stove, and a hole burned in the kitchen linoleum where a previous tenant had tried to do a Vedic prosperity fire ritual—was the first home that I hadn’t shared with roommates. I’d invested a lot in personal growth workshops and nothing at all in a savings account. Having a baby was a crazy idea.

  But as I watched the flames spreading from log to log, I felt you with me for the first time. You were a passionate, intense, stubborn little presence, neither polite nor convenient. You weren’t a winged cherub. You were more like a ball of fire. And you were hammering on the door of our lives, demanding that we let you in.

  The classic myth of the spiritual journey always begins with a call. In the traditional male version of the story, that’s generally a call to leave. In India, I’d met yogis living in caves in the Himalayas; meditating naked and ash-smeared by the funeral pyres in Benares, the city of death; wandering as beggars from town to town, their only possessions a staff and a metal lunch tin. To prove their scorn for the body, they took ascetic vows—sleeping in slings hung from trees or holding a hand in the air for years at a stretch until the arm withered to a twig. They left their families, changed their names, and never spoke of their pasts.

  But what if there were another kind of spiritual call—a call to stay? What if I could hear it as I hacked through the tangled jungle of human relationships, riddled with fear and delusions, graced with tenderness and passion? And what if that path of awakening took me deeper into that jungle rather than away from it?

  * * *

  —

  “Let’s do things in the conventional order for once,” your dad said. So we decided we’d wait a few months before getting pregnant, and we started to plan a wedding instead. But before we’d even picked out a venue, you were on your way. I was just beginning a three-month stint as a writer-in-residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in western Massachusetts, on the other side of the country from your dad. So to welcome you, he sent an email.

  * * *

  —

  Dear Sprout:

  As you currently are smaller than a tadpole and lack even rudimentary sensory apparatuses, I shall ask your mother to read this aloud to you. Despite your surprise arrival, your mother and I already love you very much. I have to confess to a little bit of nervousness about meeting you. Of course I want to make a good impression, though I suspect that all you’ll notice about me for the first couple years is that I have no breasts. I don’t know much about your kind either, but I’m very interested in learning from you.

  I have many powers and abilities, and I shall use them all to keep you safe from harm for as long as I live. I shall help you grow in ways you feel are important, even if I don’t fully understand the point of your efforts.

  Like me, you’ll probably have to make a lot of mistakes.

  Love always,

  Daddy

  * * *

  —

  At my first prenatal visit, at a clinic in the Berkshires not far from the ashram, the doctor told me that I was an “elderly prima gravida”—a woman having her first baby over age thirty-five. “We’ll have to keep a close eye on you,” she said.

  The term was a shock. I thought of myself as just getting started in life. Packing for this trip to the East Coast I’d included a sweater that still had my name tag from boarding school sewn in it.

  I opened my mouth to tell the doctor that she didn’t have to worry. I’d been eating organic vegetarian food since I was nin
eteen and doing yoga every day since I was twenty-one. In my mid-twenties, I’d taken the “five wonderful precepts” in a ceremony with the Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh—and to honor the vow to avoid intoxicants, I hadn’t so much as sipped a glass of wine since. I wanted to assure her that my idea of getting wild and crazy was putting butter on my toast instead of olive oil.

  But before I could say anything, the doctor was rubbing a cool jelly on my abdomen. “Would you like to hear the baby’s heartbeat?” she asked, gliding a plastic wand over the flat surface of my belly.

  “You mean, I can already hear it?”

  “Absolutely. Nice and strong.” She passed me the Doppler. “Fun fact: When the heart first forms, it’s actually on the outside of the embryo. It takes a few weeks for the rest of the body to form around it.”

  So we all start out with our hearts outside our bodies? That sounded about right to me. The protective shell on top of them comes later. And sooner or later, if we are really alive, we feel as if our heart is back on the outside again, undefended.

  I slipped the Doppler over my ears and heard your heartbeat for the first time: Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

  I’d been a Zen student for almost two decades. I’d sat on a black cushion, chanting over and over an ancient sutra called “The Identity of Relative and Absolute” while incense rose in spirals before the statue of a serenely smiling Buddha: “Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind in walking. Ordinary life fits the Absolute like a box and its lid.”