Last night I fell to my meditation cushion with a broken heart.
Evening meditation. Rare, I prefer mornings, but as pieces from my heart crumbled I reached out for saving. I reached out for grace.
A good day unraveled around the dinner table. I was alone, as I always am on weeknights, with my little boys. My silly little boys. That sounds endearing, but living with constant silliness and their inability to recognize a shift in my tone of voice meant things were about to get ugly. I hate it when things get ugly, when I holler and am harsh, but it is so hard to pull them out of their crazies without going crazy myself.
Last night I did the best I could to avoid yelling, and I succeeded! But I still wound up with a broken heart.
When Max, six, was getting a bit too wild I took us both to the other room to talk. I held him and explained that actions speak louder than words, and his actions were hurting me and being disrespectful. He listened and the whole conversation was reasonable, but ended with him matter-of-factly telling me that he wasn’t sure if he loved me.
I know he is too little to understand the weight of his words, but that sentence pierced my heart, because he’s coming out of a challenging phase. I felt a distance between us grow during it, and I’ve worked hard to bridge that gap. The parent-child relationship is lopsided in youth with all the giving and all the effort on my side, and there have been days when I’ve failed him.
“That hurt my feelings,” I told him when I caught my breath.
He had nothing to say, so the stinging words hung in the air and we returned to Jack at the table.
Jack, who’d spent the entire meal picking at his food, suddenly had and empty bowl. He began to brag about it, sparking my suspicions.
“Did you give your food to Betsy?” I asked.
He said, “No,” and then I slowly walked to the garbage can. We hadn’t made eye contact, but before I even opened the cabinet door that hides the garbage can, he burst into tears. The top layer of garbage was rice, and he knew that I knew.
I held back for a minute, adding nothing, evaluating if his outburst was a ploy to avoid punishment or genuine remorse. His face screwed into itself and he screamed a despair he could not handle. Without a word from me, without even a sidelong glance, shame ripped through the heart of my baby and tore him to shreds. He did something wrong and I had seen it. He was exposed.
He was desperate to crawl out of himself. He was suffering. I went to him, and he effortlessly glided into my arms.
It took eternity to calm him down.
It was hard to know what to say without excusing his behavior or contributing to his shame. Shame is a powerful force. I remember red blotches searing into my own cheeks as I learned some stark life lessons. And I remember other times when I wished I were a slug so I could hide under a rock and never be seen again. I held him tight, whispered sweet nothings, and rode out the storm with him.
Afterwards, I gave him the lesson: Always do things you can be proud of or you will hurt yourself inside. I touched his heart with my hands. I had him help me put away the laundry to make up for his misdeed, hoping that feeling helpful would replace feeling ashamed.
An hour later both boys were asleep, and I was alone on my meditation cushion lighting the candle before me.
It’s funny. In some ways children’s love is the same thing as Divine Love: it’s full throttle, all-encompassing, and freely given. But on the flip side, they take love for granted, haven’t a clue how deep in runs, and don’t know that every second of their suffering hammers into their mother’s heart. Back-to-back, my children cracked fissures into my heart, and I felt slightly battered.
I used a Sanskrit mantra to take me to stillness, and then I sat there, along with my broken heart, and waited. When I am quiet… when I sit in the truth of the moment… another even greater truth sweeps over me: Divine Love, also called God or the Universe. Like an ocean, it can’t be stopped. It flooded me and I redirected it to my boys. To Max, so he can feel my love and his own. To Jack, so he understands love is unconditional. On an energetic level I felt this love shifting, moving, sweeping, pouring.
My own heart is still broken.
And yet, it is full.
There is enough love in the Divine to fill it up, even as some of it seeps through the cracks in my broken places. There is enough.
Tears spill from my eyes.
The universe keeps pouring and pouring. I let it make a mess of me. I blow out my candle.
I sit in darkness that has light with a broken heart full of love.
I breathe, and the moment continues forever.
Leave a Reply