Time to write is scarce, short and precious. There is constant unrelenting labour required from me. I work or look after C all day. Then I work in the house and look after C all night. It does not stop, yet I am also thrilled by it – mostly. And I long for the page, the spill over, to simply be with the word, to allow myself to pour over and communicate, to walk through walls of thoughts and pillars of ideas, to enter this sanctum.
So let me capture right now: something is blooming in my chest. I’ve been feeling it in meditation, a kind of opening, tantalising and scary. It is the bloom of algae on a lake in the weird new weather – explosive and lurid and terrifying. I’m still trying to meditate for half an hour in the afternoons and I’m getting to it about half the time. When I don’t I’m mostly able to give myself over the task that is preventing me, though I find feeding C becoming more of a chore each day. Why? I feel a rub, a worry. She must eat, but she might choke. She must be given her allergens, but she might die from her throat closing. She mostly refuses to eat. I have been letting her refuse – I mean what else do you do? You can’t force a baby to do anything. They are themselves, and they are right up against the hilt of the moment, sliding from joy to pain and back, discomfort, tiredness, awake, full of beans, wet, dry. They ride their lives on the crest of this wave of sensations.
Only lately perhaps that is starting to change a little. It was only a small thing, but the other day C hurt herself somehow and then did not stop crying after I’m sure the pain had faded. This is new. Before, like when she got her vaccination injections, she would howl in a frenzy at the pain and the flush of the medicine and then stop right after. No grudge, no ruminating. Seeing the injection did nothing for her. She had no response. She approaches the world with a total innocence and trust, with absolute openness. Yes, to the injection. Yes, to the morning and her funny monkey. Yes, yes, yes. And when it hurts, she screams, and when it doesn’t, she stops. She does not worry, has no fear. She flings herself backwards, bites down hard on the screen of my phone. She expects to be caught, or rather, doesn’t even cog the danger. And she is caught, every time. This is what it means to be like little children, I think. And yet already I wonder if this profound freshness is lessening as she begins to develop memory, right around now. Is she beginning to realise it’s possible to be hurt? Does this begin a subtle withdrawal from the world, to protect herself?
I am afraid C will die. Deadly, constantly afraid. And it is a very real, visceral fear. I went on a CPR course to get equipped, especially for the fear of choking. But I think about her dying every day, multiple times. I think about getting hijacked with her in the car and I want to throw up. I picture it and then get full of fear wondering if I’m calling it to us. Don’t think the bad thing! But then I do and I plan and tell Ricky to make sure the doors are (ironically) unlocked so we can get her out.
At night I watch her breathe in bed with us. Again it’s like I want her to die so I can get relief from the tension. No, don’t think that! How could you! Back and forth. I love her so much I could explode. And of course I want very much not to ooze all over her, to put my fear and madness on to her, or even the bigness of my love, tainted as it is by desperation, by the need for her to stay and be with me always. Somehow love is looped into this. Stay, stay, stay. As though love calls an equal fear into existence.
When I read these New Age books, or listen to the podcasts, they always say the answer is love. The universe, they say, is infused with love. That is what God is. Oh, very good. But what is love? (Whenever I ask Ricky this question he follows it with “Baby don’t hurt me”, so I get nowhere.) It is love I feel for C, a deep well of it, full of cool water washed clean by clouds and rocks in rivers and silt and soil and great underground caverns, enough for many lifetimes. And I have considered the quality of this love. I believe it is close to unconditional, except, of course, for the fear.
If she were to die, I would be ripped apart, so I hold this very slightly against her, and I think that taints my love. I need her. She must stay. There are no conditions to my love: she can never do anything that would affect it or change it. She cannot increase it nor can she decrease it with her actions – except for dying. I wish I could untangle myself, my ugliness, my tightness, from her, allow her true freedom. Mine is a needy love, a bear-paw love, crushing with a powerful desire for a closeness, an intimacy that cannot be achieved by proximity, only by honesty. I don’t want that. I don’t want to transmit this hereditary disease. Pinioned love, unfree, squirming on the pinboard. What is the underlying belief? That the world is dangerous, and that love will leave, and that pain is just around the corner and we should brace and hold everyone very mightily close. But then when pain does come, there is only numbness, coldness, a turning away.
I read a book that spoke of cathexis, the Freudian term for love as it is sent out to its object and then reeled back in – or not, in the case of melancholia. It defined this as against aloha, a love closer to perhaps compassion, an unselfish love outflowing from an open heart without terms and conditions, without a need for reciprocity or even-stevens or phone calls and gestures, arm strokes, love letters, gifts, quality time. I also found a definition of compassion, not from the same book, that said it was not being angry with someone for learning what they’re learning, including yourself. Developing the compassionate witness in yourself is the work of a lifetime. Developing it towards others too. I feel I am close to that with C, but without the cleanness of distance.
The witness though can suggest a cold fish, a numbness, a keeping above. When C is hurt she cries full throated. No, I don’t want to be held above myself. I want to be immersed in the stream of life. I want to be incandescent, doused in grief, wiggling with joy. Is the witness this or separate from it? Who am I in relation? Am I both? The point here is compassion. I must love wholeheartedly, with aloha love, free love. Compassion saves the witness from coldness and distance. The witness saves compassion from drowning. Give me a breath, God, whomever, between the gong and the bell.
This too: something infuses everything with lifeiness. I got this image in meditation of it just bursting through any point that it can, any way that’s open will become engorged with life. Perhaps this is the love that’s spoken about, just the word “love” is the quality of the sensation of the throb of life as it is sucked up inexorably, as sap up a trunk. It can be blocked, but when the block is removed, dissolved, loosened, life floods through. Is this what I can feel blooming in my chest? Love? Life?
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