The Mama Sutra Read online

  What could be more ordinary than a pregnancy? Every human being who has ever been born started out that way: a speck of multiplying cells inside a woman’s womb. I had started keeping a journal of my pregnancy, but so far it seemed as if nothing was happening, other than the fact that my yoga pants were getting tighter and I felt queasy when I looked at the baked beans in the dining hall buffet.

  And yet, as I heard your heartbeat, I felt as if I were bowing down at an altar. I was connected with the mystery that pulses at the heart of every moment: Where does life come from? Not just an individual life, or the life of humanity, or even life on earth—but this entire cosmos of stars and jellyfish, bombs and telephones, coral reefs and mitochondria?

  Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

  * * *

  —

  Every morning, in my suite overlooking a lake and an autumn forest of crimson and gold, I did an hour of yoga and meditated for twenty minutes. Then I went for a slow jog—the grass crisp with frost, wild geese shrieking overhead, the water gunmetal gray in the dawn light. I had to stop to pee a lot—squatting under the birch trees, the acrid smell of the steaming leaves so intense to my hormone-enhanced senses that it made me sneeze.

  After my run I’d stop by the breakfast buffet and pile a tray with granola, yogurt, bananas, muffins, soymilk, oatmeal, eggs—ridiculous amounts of food, as if stoking a blast furnace. I sprinkled nutritional yeast on everything: vitamin B for your developing nervous system. Flax oil—omega-3s for your brain. Organic prenatal vitamins. A smoothie of fresh fruit and vegetable juices.

  Then I’d sit at my computer, fighting the progesterone tide of sleepiness that tugged me under. I was supposed to be writing a novel about spiritual practice, but I was having a hard time staying awake long enough to come up with a plot.

  Instead, I freewrote—mainly about you. As I peed this morning, I wondered if Sprout could hear me. It’s a good thing he/she doesn’t have an ego yet, doesn’t get impatient or insulted. What a marvel it is that tucked between my bladder and my bowels is the cradle where a whole new human being is forming—who will emerge just between the holes for the piss and the shit.

  I wrote down random dreams: I give birth to my baby and it is a kitten. It runs under the bed and hides. “Don’t worry,” says my sister. “Lots of babies start out that way.”

  I wrote down random insights:

  Any story can be summed up in a few pages. If getting to the end were what was important, the CliffsNotes of Hamlet would be as good as the play. But what art and yoga are about is slowing down to pay attention—to honor what’s below the surface; to give the gift of bhakti, or devotion, to every passing moment.

  Ultimately—whether with a pregnancy or a novel—it has to be the process that matters; it has to be the process that we care about deeply. It’s the process, not the result, that works its deep alchemy in our soul. It is the process that releases the prana, not the pose.

  In between pregnancy musings, I also typed pages and pages of my habitual, familiar whining and ranting. Sometimes I felt as if I were keeping two separate journals—but maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was that the profound and the ordinary are braided together in every moment, and that it just takes a shift of focus to switch from seeing one to seeing the other. Maybe the sacred shines through whenever the fog in the mind starts to lift, like the sun breaking through the clouds, illuminating a lake full of wild geese.

  Every day on my yoga mat, rolling my hips from side to side, I tuned in to your presence—a boiling energy, nested between my navel and my pubic bone.

  As a yoga student, I’d learned about prana, the great life force that flowed through and sustained the physical form, permeating the body but radiating beyond it. Pregnant with you, I could viscerally sense how the universe itself could have been birthed from this energy, a tiny seed of potentiality exploding forth into galaxies whirling through space.

  I let myself open to prana as I flowed through the poses, spiraling around the forms like a vine twining around a trellis. I felt myself softening, opening, bursting into blossom.

  Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

  * * *

  —

  Dear Sprout Daddy,

  I can feel Sprout moving!

  I know I’m not supposed to be able to feel it yet—the books say most women don’t feel anything until eighteen to twenty-two weeks, and I’m not yet at sixteen—but it’s so obvious to me, this little flutter inside, like a goldfish brushing against the edge of its bowl. The books say most women mistake it for gas at first, but what are most women thinking? It’s in a completely different place, clearly not intestinal. My mom says the doctors always insisted that she was making it up, that she couldn’t be feeling it that early, but that she always did—she described it as a gentle stroke on the inside of her uterus, like someone brushing a finger against her cheek.

  Love and kisses and butterfly wings,

  Sprout-Mama

  * * *

  —

  Dear Sprout:

  Daddy bought a guitar today.

  A guitar is a six-stringed instrument for making music. Music is an arrangement of sound that expresses emotion. Sound is…Daddy’s not sure whether you have ears yet. This will all be a lot clearer after you are fully incarnated.

  Anyway, Daddy bought a guitar today. A good one. (Yes, the money came out of your college fund, but college is years away.) As Daddy was trying out the different guitars in the store, he kept thinking of you and how much he looks forward to playing music for you, to singing you lullabies and love songs.

  Hugs and kisses and songs,

  Daddy

  * * *

  —

  “If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh. “All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”

  With you beginning to kick inside me, Sierra, I understood this as never before. You carried your ancestors inside you like Russian nesting dolls. You were made of their stories, as surely as you were made of blood and bones, carbon and calcium, sunlight and water.

  So as you grew, I wrote their stories to tell you.

  I wrote the story of my father’s birth at a US military hospital in China in 1921. His father, an Army officer, was stationed there with his young bride. The military doctors didn’t know that she was pregnant with twins, although her Chinese ayah had told her so again and again. My grandfather had already left the hospital to announce the news of his son’s birth when the doctors discovered another little boy inside the womb. By the time they extracted him, baby Bernard was dead. “I was so happy,” my grandmother wrote later in a letter home. “I always wanted twins.” My grandfather added a terse PS: ‘“We buried him in a corner of the churchyard reserved for unbaptized babies. Poor little chap. But it’s not as if he had ever really lived.”

  I wrote the story of your dad’s mother, your wild and free-spirited Grandma Joan—and how, as a teenager in the 1930s, she dived off a cliff into Echo Lake in the High Sierra, holding a rock in her hands to pull her deeper. She hit her head on the rock and passed out underwater. If a friend hadn’t dived in after her, she would have drowned.

  I wrote the story of how my father met my mother—in 1942, at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his class of West Point cadets were to study engineering at the Officer Candidates School. The United States had just entered World War II. Engineering would mean building bridges, laying and disarming mines.

  A hop at the Polo Hunt Club welcomed the cadets. At one end of the room stood the row of young men in khaki uniforms. At the other end clustered a bevy of officers’ daughters in party dresses—including my nineteen-year-old mother, in lavender organdy, home from Connecticut College for the summer. The band started playing “The Dipsy Doodle.” Nobody knew what to do
.

  My mother stepped forward. “Let’s all find someone to dance with!” she called and offered her hand to the first cadet she saw—the man standing next to my father. Everyone began the jitterbug, and my father promptly cut in to dance with my mother. Then he cut in again. They danced to “Blue Moon” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).” After the dance, they sat together on the steps in the warm Georgia twilight. My mother pointed to the outline of the trees against the dimming sky and said, “This is the silhouette hour.” A week later, on the train to Fort Knox—where the cadets were going to study armor and tanks—my father said to the cadet sitting next to him, “I just met the girl I am going to marry.”

  Thich Nhat Hanh writes in No Mud, No Lotus, “If you have suffering in you and you don’t know where it comes from, looking deeply you may see that this is the suffering of your ancestors, handed down from one generation to another, because no one knew how to recognize, embrace, and heal it. It’s not your fault, nor is it their fault….The suffering of the parent is the suffering of the child. Looking deeply is a chance to transform and heal this suffering and stop the cycle.” So many times in the zendo I’d chanted it: “All my ancient twisted karma…I now fully avow.”

  What was the legacy we were passing on to you, Sierra? How could we heal it best we could?

  * * *

  —

  When I was five months pregnant, I flew back to California. I went shopping for a wine-red maternity wedding dress for our ceremony at Green Gulch Zen Center. Your dad created a flip-book for the invitation—a black-and-white image of my hand entering from one side of the frame, while his hand entered from the other. At the end of the book, the hands were joined.

  On Christmas morning, your dad made me a cup of raspberry leaf tea—good for the uterus, I’d read—and brought it to me in bed. Then he went to the closet and pulled out a pile of wrapped presents. “They’re mainly for Sprout. I got a little carried away.”

  The note on the first package said, “Welcome to a strange, strange world.” Inside was a goofy little rattle shaped like an elf.

  The next two packages I opened contained tiny T-shirts. “You know these won’t fit her for five or six months, right?”

  He looked stunned. “You mean she’ll be tinier than that?”

  Next, I unwrapped a clear plastic Super Ball with tiny dolphins embedded in the center, leaping through the waves. “They remind me of her,” he said. “So joyful, so playful, so brave. She’s the culmination of so much. She makes up for all our mistakes.”

  “She heals everything.” I hugged him. “All the ways we have hurt each other are erased by this one huge thing we are doing right.”

  * * *

  —

  Every time I blow my nose, the tissue comes away red with blood. That’s normal, my new midwife, Johanna, tells me, when I visit her in her home office in San Francisco. Apparently, all my mucus membranes are swollen and extra sensitive. There’s almost double the blood volume coursing through me, plus I’m hauling around thirty extra pounds of baby, placenta, amniotic fluid, blood, and fat. My skin is like a drum over the twitching mound of my belly. The arches of my feet ache. The flesh under my left armpit is bulging out in an old-lady wad—Johanna tells me there is mammary tissue there that is swelling, along with my breasts, as the pregnancy progresses. She asks me, seriously, if I have an extra nipple.

  “Some women have them,” she says. “Sometimes they even have a whole line of nipples, extending up into the armpit.”

  I was six months pregnant, and my armpit was preparing to nurse my baby, like a dog preparing to nurse a litter? I can’t believe how animal this whole experience is. After the appointment, when I come home and do yoga, I find myself prowling around the room on my hands and knees, roaring and snarling. I rock and wriggle and moan. I growl and bark.

  * * *

  —

  After our wedding, your dad and I moved in together. We found a house in a sheltered, wooded valley about ten minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the grassy backyard was a play structure with a corkscrew slide we imagined you squealing down.

  We painted our bedroom yellow and your room pale lavender. We moved in our hodgepodge of possessions—a hand-me-down couch from his parents, my king-size bed, his television. A wooden coffee table made by his mother’s father and a small rug my parents had picked up when they were stationed in Korea. A clutter of mismatched forks and knives inherited from various roommates. A muffin tin and a blender we had been given as wedding presents.

  I knew that this stage of pregnancy was called the nesting phase, and my hormones were screaming at me to gather together my twigs: diaper tables, rakes, breast pumps, fire alarms, a sponge mop and bucket. I felt as if I were preparing my life for a new arrival the way a pujari at an Indian temple prepares the altar for a ritual.

  But pregnancy wasn’t just preparation, it was an experience in itself. Sitting on a pile of crates at the Home Depot, resting my aching feet while your dad rounded up garden hoses and shower curtains, I remembered a meditation retreat I had done years earlier with Thich Nhat Hanh at his monastery in the south of France. I was doing walking meditation along a path that wound by a field of sunflowers into a wood when I passed a small wooden sign: “You have already arrived.”

  You were not in the future, Sierra. You were already here. I knew when you slept and when you woke up. I sensed your personality—bright, curious, active, playful.

  You had already arrived.

  * * *

  —

  Seven and a half months pregnant.

  Sprout is stronger every day. I can’t even call her Sprout anymore—she is Sierra to me now. She has a new move—she reaches out with her feet deep into my right side while simultaneously burrowing her head down toward my crotch. I can feel her just beneath the surface of my skin—squirming, kicking, rolling, pressing out as if she wants to break through the surface.

  My belly juts out preposterously over my feet. “You look like a building by Frank Lloyd Wright,” her daddy says.

  He puts his face up against my navel and croons, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?”

  Sierra kicks him in the nose.

  * * *

  —

  In April, a month before my due date, our midwife, Johanna, came to our house to inspect the room for our home birth.

  Johanna was a tiny German woman, both stern and warm—a cross between an earth goddess and a drill sergeant. She had delivered over a hundred babies. I could feel my whole body relax every time I saw her—Thank God, finally, someone who knows what’s going on here.

  “You could probably do most of your labor outside if you want,” she told me, looking around our yard, bright with daffodils and irises. “But it’s probably not warm enough to actually give birth out here.”

  Letting go of my hopes of giving birth under a redwood tree, like a deer, I followed her and your dad back into my bedroom.

  We all sat down on the bed, and Johanna explained the stages of labor to us, from the early “prodromal” stage—“Sounds like something to do with camels,” quipped your dad—to the “ring of fire” at the end.

  “If early labor comes in the evening, I may just tell you to have a beer and go to bed,” she told me.

  “That’s never going to happen. Anne doesn’t drink beer even when she isn’t pregnant,” said your dad. “I’ll have a beer, though!”

  “And if the early labor starts in the morning, then—” Johanna continued.

  “Then I’ve got all day to drink!” He leaned over, put his face against my belly, and told you, “When you’re born, Daddy’s going to be drunk, drunk, drunk.”

  Johanna pulled out some educational props: a plastic model of a pelvis; a baby doll whose arms and legs snap into a fetal position; a stuffed placenta and cord, trailing a web of amniotic sac. She slip
ped the baby’s head in the ankle-piece of a cut-off sock to show how the cervix dilates and effaces in preparation for labor and delivery.

  How was it, I wondered, that in all the pages and pages of Buddhist and yogic texts, there was so little about this miraculous passage, this incredible practice of giving birth, of arriving in life? Most of the texts were, of course, written by men—monastic men, at that. There is a lot about death, and instructions to the dying on how not to get born again. But as far as I knew, there were no instructions given on how to bring new life into the world, and how that can lead to awakening.

  “Your baby is riding low in your pelvis,” Johanna told me after my exam. “That’s perfectly normal. It’s good—she knows where she is going.”

  All was just as it should be, she said: my cervix was closed but soft and ripe; there was plenty of space all around it for a baby’s head.

  “Perfect,” she repeated. “Perfect.”

  When I left the room, I heard her say something softly to your dad. Later that day, he repeated it to me: “I have such a good feeling about this birth. I hardly ever have such a good feeling,” she had whispered to him. “But she shouldn’t hear this. I’m not supposed to say such things.”

  * * *

  —

  Eight months pregnant.

  I no longer want the angular forms of traditional yoga—the military precision, the silver stars shining on the shoulder of my uniform. I want to move into the deep territory of dreams, wild and untidy like the grass growing outside my window. I want both my yoga and my life to be a celebration of the sacred feminine, a celebration of flesh and spirit both—a way to bow down to each moment. So that my meditations, my movements, my words, and my life sing of the mystery of birth and death.