Delight is Enough

On mothering in the age of judgment

Dear Ones,

At night, Freddi often demands that I carry him to bed.  Laying on the sofa, his long legs draped over the arm rest, he’ll say, I’m not going to bed unless you carry me. 

Now, you might expect that from a toddler, but at nine years old, Freddi is five feet tall and weighs 83 pounds.  Lanky and leggy and favoring calf-length colored socks and high tops, he looks like an adolescent cool kid ready to try out for the basketball team. Really he’s just finishing third grade and is still my baby, and neither of us are ready to let go of some of the rituals that would suggest that.  Snuggling.  Holding.  Physical affection and engagement. Tucking in. Outward expressions of love that I know won’t last forever. 

Let’s do this, I say, squatting down, opening my arms, and drawing in my lower belly to protect my back.  It’s so ridiculous – my sumo stance, his leap, me grunting as I heave him up around my waist, his painful straddle - that we are already laughing hysterically before I even have him fully in my arms. Okay, okay, he’ll say breathlessly.  Keep it together.  We nail it after about three Charlie Chaplin-esque attempts.  As I start up the stairs, he usually starts laughing again and his position slackens.  Don’t let go! I yell.  Lean in!  Because, in order to make it up these slick, steep steps, I need him as much as he needs me, and I am doing everything I can not to crack up, and I can’t stop for too long because I need some of this momentum of movement, but I also can’t rush or risk tripping, so I take one step at a time, slowly, rhythmically, with him holding onto me in just the right way and me believing in my strength, and then we make it to the top and then to his bed where I lean forward and he says in delight, Oh no, oh no, oh no! and I drop him onto his back with a thunk.  Crush me, Mama! He yells, so I body slam him WWF-style until he cries out our safe word- Tutu!! - and  I can’t even remember how we came up with that word! -  but that’s it, I stop, and we both fall back, laughing and laughing. I’m exhausted, so glad to have made it up those stairs one more time, and then he turns to me, full of faith, light in his eyes, and says, Again!

A mother has tremendous psychological power, write psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson in their book Raising Cain about the emotional lives of boys.  The emotional bond a man has with his mother is likely to be the most deeply rooted connection in his life. For many boys she is the only person they can trust. 

Sometimes, knowing this, can feel like a burden rather than a beautiful truth.  A pressure rather than a privilege.  In fact, the authors go on to say that if a boy does not have that kind of trusting relationship with his mother he can suffer a devastating loss.  The inner judge hears that and reminds me over and over of my limited capacity, my shortcomings as a mother, the things I don’t do or can’t do because for as many times as I sumo wrestle wrangle him up the stairs or take him turtle-catching in the canoe or jump on the trampolines with him at Sky Zone, I say no to Freddi’s requests.  Please, Dear God, I think, not one more game of “Sorry.”  Not one more round of PIG in basketball.  Not one more chapter in the book.  Not one more song from the Wonka soundtrack. His tireless appetite for connection through play, his hunger to share his joys with me, his “agains”  are so sweet and beautiful and also they never seem to end, and my body hurts, I have dishes to do, there is dinner to cook, we are late to something, I need to work, and I’m really tired and sometimes bored and, it’s just the two of us, and, while I say my “no”  to him with as much kindness as I can, there’s this twinge in me -  always this rubber-band whip of a voice that strikes through my good-enough mothering - that says what I give is not enough, it’s never enough, and it will, in fact, never ever be enough.

In the worst stage of my divorce, before I received full legal and physical custody, when Freddi  - barely weaned and just two years old – was required to spend several nights a week with his dad, away from me, I would worry about him to my dear friend Bethany Saltman, also a mother and a writer.  Was he okay?  Was he suffering?  How would I know?  What could I do?

How does he eat?  She asked.  How does he eat and poop?

No problem in any of those categories, I reported, adding that, in fact, he was a champion sleeper, eater and pooper. She laughed and said she didn’t need the details but that was good to hear because kids’ bodies – their sleep issues and eating habits and digestive regularity - often let us know how they’re doing.  

But most importantly, she added, do you delight in each other? 

She was referring to the work of Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist whose groundbreaking work helped create Attachment Theory. Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiment is world famous, allowing researchers to study the kind of attachment that exists between babies and their caregivers. 

At the heart of Mary Ainsworth’s impressive legacy is something deceptively simple, and charmingly unscientific, writes Bethany in her amazing book Strange Situation:  A Mother’s Journey into the Science of Attachment.  And then she quotes Ainsworth herself:

“It is interaction that seems to be most important, not mere care, and particularly conspicuous in mother-child pairs who have achieved good interaction is the quality of mutual delight which characterizes their exchanges.  (italics mine).

Bethany goes on to write that this detail of delight changed her entire orientation towards her mothering, and even to her life.  Now delight is her guide, at the forefront of her mind -noticing it, seeking it, honoring it, attending to it  - and realizing - shockingly - that that is enough.   The science proves it. Our hearts know it.

Related to contentment and joy, delight is defined as extreme pleasure or satisfaction, but it requires no work or effort. Deriving from the Latin delectare - to charm - it is a root that gives us the word delectable.  Delicious.  To delight-in is to be charmed and satisfied by a simple pleasure.  Uncomplicated and pure, it is not diluted with longing or fear, grasping or aversion. Delight is straightforward and it often arrives unbidden and unasked for, as a tiny gift.  The familiar, beloved tone of your child’s laughter.  The sudden fragrance of lilacs in the spring.  It is just the right size and shape for a moment’s awareness. 

So when Bethany asked me if I delight in Freddi and if he delights in me, I had to laugh.  Delight has defined my relationship with him from the moment I first saw him, a wild, hairy bear of a thing, his big feelings a perfect mirror of my own  - and remains central. Every morning when I wake him and his small crossed feet stick out from under the covers, one soft sole holding the top of the other foot, and the morning light falls over them just so.   When he tells me his dreams over breakfast and says things like, Oh, Mama, I know you’re going to have a lot to say about this one.  When he hums to himself while drawing.  When he giggles at squirrels.  When he walks home from school and delivers to me a flowering branch and says, Here you go, Mama.  I remembered you saying how much you loved these white flowers.  When he turns to me and says, laughing,  Again! Again!    

My delight in him and his delight in me reverberating back and forth and back and forth like a super conductor creating an unbreakable attachment that can withstand me saying “no” to a board game or my need for a break from another song about oompaloompas.

And though I celebrate the mutual delight Freddi and I share, and while I believe that that connection is strong enough, I still feel the worry creep in.  I hear the voice of not enough. I wonder if, as a woman, I’ll get it wrong.  His needs.  His cues.  His ways of communicating.  I make jokes about saving up for his future therapy.  I defend myself against the very real vulnerability I feel as a single mother without the daily presence of a healthy, guiding male figure – a vulnerability deepened by the insane expectations our culture put on mothers.  I feel at times our resonance disrupted, our mutual delight withering, our distance growing.  Is it truly that?  Or is that the part in me that compares, that worries, that falls prey to judgment?  As he changes and life changes, it can be hard to know, hard to keep trusting.

Sometimes Freddi holds my hand as we walk to school, and sometimes, as we enter the parking lot, he pulls it away.  100 feet from the school door, he’ll say, Annnnnd Goodbye. 

Sometimes, at a public event, he’ll want me to stay close, our bodies touching.  Sometimes he sees his friends, and he’ll run away without a backward glance or a word.  

Often he longs for me to read to him, snuggling close, saying, I love this so much.  Other times, he sees me coming with a book, holds up his own and simply and definitively points to the door. 

Sometimes, he begs for my help, frustration and need rising in his voice.  The next day, with the same thing, he’ll reject my help. Geez, he’ll say with irritation.  I’ve got this!

This is the fundamental pattern of the relationship between a boy and his mother, Kindlon and Thompson explain.  He is the explorer; she is home base.  As he grows, a boy must be able to leave his mother without losing her completely and return to her without losing himself. 

Mothering any child, they go on to say, comes down to this delicate balance of closeness and distance.

How can we as mothers feel into this delicate balance?  What activates us most:  closeness – our child’s need to be near - or distance – our child’s need to have space?  In what ways do we feel ourselves suffocated or rejected… and everything in between?  And how do we react?  Clinging and rejecting, tightening our grip and pushing away? 

How, in the midst of their growing and changing needs – needs that can feel whiplashing and difficult to discern - do we hold ourselves in tender care, remembering to turn towards delight?

When my mom dropped me - the last of her four kids - off at college, she felt stricken with grief.  She had been a stay-at-home mom for 26 years and loved it.  I used to jump out of bed in the morning, she once told me. I couldn’t wait to spend the day being your mom.  And now what?  What would she do and how would she hold all that loss?  She sobbed for three hours as she drove from Bloomington, Indiana back to Fort Wayne, landing in her parent’s kitchen, seeking, unconsciously, her own secure base.  My grandfather - sitting in front of the black and white TV, smoking a cigarette and watching the weather report - eyed her with bewilderment. 

What’s wrong?  He asked.

I just had to drop Sara off at college! She sobbed, thinking her despair was obvious - that any parent would understand how bereaved she felt - but he just peered closer at her, ever uncomfortable in the realm of feelings and, especially, sadness. 

Well, he finally said, throwing up his hands, Why the hell did you bear them if you couldn’t leave them?!

Indeed.  Why do we bear these creatures who will stretch our hearts, break our hearts, open our hearts, shut them down with one word, destroy our ideas about ourselves, and challenge our carefully constructed systems of identity and control?  Why do we create them in our very bodies, putting our lives at risk, knowing we will never ever feel the same and be the same, knowing we will never be the perfect mother and yet trying anyway? Trying in the ways we know how.  Trying. Trying. Why do we give and give and give and give only to know they are going to leave and leave and leave and leave? 

Because we can’t help it.  We’re made for love!  It’s our birthright!  It defines us through and through!

Love, when working well, is automatic, writes Saltman in Strange Situation, intrinsic to who we are, almost imperceptible, stitched into our very being like digestion or respiration.

But it’s not simple, she acknowledges.  It’s laced with worry and fear, disappointment and longing, grasping and aversion.  What she used to consider her anguish, she realized is actually her love, because of the way, she writes, that anguish reaches for love.  

Anguish and doubt, judgment and not-enoughness turning towards love like a plant seeking the sun, like a child with outstretched arms, returning to his secure base, and saying, Again! Again!

Attachment is not something we do, Saltman assures us, but a state of mind.

What state of mind leads us to connection rather than disconnection?  What kind of attention – and to what - orients us towards joy rather than despair?

When my mom recovered from her dad’s response to her empty-nest grief – it stunned her a little, it hurt a little, but mostly it made her laugh, waking her out of the trance of despair – she got to work orienting herself towards connection. Every single day of my freshman year of college I received a delight in my mailbox.   Sitting in that cold, square box like a sliver of sunshine was an envelope inscribed with my name and filled with news of her day, stories about our dog Spunky, quips from her dad, an article she enjoyed.  Once she included a red maple leaf, dried and curling at the edges.  Found this on my hike at Pokagon! Another time, the petals of a flower slipped out.  From the Tulip tree at Grandma and Grandpa’s, she wrote.  And always she included a prayer or bible verse.  May the Lord bless and keep you, may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

When I felt alone during that year – which was often and in acute, heart-stabbing ways – I opened the top drawer of my desk, and there they were, all stacked up in a tower of delight, a structure of security towards which I could turn and remember.  I didn’t even need to read the letters.  Just the handwriting alone was all the reminder I needed to turn my mind towards love, to feel the pleasure of my mom’s presence, to be satisfied.

When the writer Toni Morrison was being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, they talked about parenting.  Morrison explained that she had often made the mistake of greeting her children with a critical eye.  Checking, she said, to see if their hair was combed, their faces clean, their socks pulled up, and she realized that her face would express that scrutiny. 

You think your affection and your deep love is on display because you’re caring for them, she confessed, and then added.  It’s not.  What they see, they see the critical face.  What’s wrong now.

Then she said simply - in the voice of a woman who wholeheartedly loved and also made mistakes and wasn’t afraid to own them – Let your face speak what’s in your heart.  When they walk in the room now my face says I’m glad to see them.  It’s just as small as that, you see?

How do our allow our faces to register delight? Tuning into and reveling in simple pleasures keep us attuned to what is here, what is small.  The moments in which a little bit of light enters our minds, a little bit of space opens between the thoughts, a little bit of freedom creates relief.  The gentle gaze.  The unclenching of the jaw. The deeper breath.  We turn towards the little things that will eventually stack up to a tower of love and security.  Again, as Freddi says.  Again.  And again.

At this very moment, Freddi snuggles next to me, attempting to sleep after being up all night with the stomach flu.  At one point – 3 or 4 in the morning, after the fourth time up and down the stairs to clean out the puke-bowl, after offering him sips of water and a fresh blanket – I asked him what else I could do for him.  He shook his head, eyes locked to mine. Just stay close, Mama, he whispered.  I’ll tell you if I need anything.   And I delighted in that.  That I could stay.  And now, just this moment, he looks up at me and says, I think I need you to leave. 

The typing is annoying? 

He nods.  And I just want to be alone. 

I kiss him on the forehead and as I’m at the door, he says.  I’ll call you if I need you. 

I know he will.  And he knows I will come.  And the love in my face will show him more than anything – than any fourth round of wrestling or game of Monopoly – that he is safe. We’ll lean into each other and take it one stair at a time, one small, good moment at a time.

It takes fortitude and trust to be a mother.  Not perfection. Not brilliance.  Not talent.  It takes the willingness to show up and be present – to cultivate attention to the small things.  And not just for our kids but for ourselves, for our own inner children that sometimes tantrum and sometimes weep in fear and grief and need.  On this mother’s day weekend may we choose to practice feeling into the power of delight.  May we choose to celebrate the small, ground-that-we-walk-on ways of the inner and outer mother.  The nothing-fancy mother.  The sumo-wrestler, one-stair-at-a-time-mother. The I’m-here-and-around mother. 

May we build in our hearts an overflowing desk drawer of love letters. Letters to our kids and letter to ourselves. Letters that say, it’s okay, you’re enough, way to stay at it, you are not alone, you are loved, and I am here, whenever you need me, I am here. 

From the downstairs sofa, one ear turned toward the bedroom, one ear listening to and sharing from my heart, I am yours in loving security, grateful for my mother and for Freddi who made me a mother, for all the mothers, the earth beneath us, the ground we walk on, the delightful face-lighting-up hereness of life –

Sara

  refrigerator delights