Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood - Softcover

Miller, Karen Maezen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590304616 ISBN 13: 9781590304617

Publisher: Trumpeter, 2007

Synopsis

Combining humor, honesty, and plainspoken advice, Momma Zen distills the doubts and frustrations of parenting into vignettes of Zen wisdom.

Drawing on her experience as a first-time mother, and on her years of Zen meditation and study, Miller explores how the daily challenges of parenthood can become the most profound spiritual journey of our lives.

This compelling and wise memoir follows the timeline of early motherhood from pregnancy through toddlerhood. Momma Zen takes readers on a transformative journey, charting a mother’s growth beyond naive expectations and disorientation to finding fulfillment in ordinary tasks, developing greater self-awareness and acceptance—to the gradual discovery of “maternal bliss,” a state of abiding happiness and ease that is available to us all.
In her gentle and reassuring voice, Karen Miller convinces us that ancient and authentic spiritual lessons can be as familiar as a lullaby, as ordinary as pureed peas, and as frequent as a sleepless night. She offers encouragement for the hard days, consolation for the long haul, and the lightheartedness every new mom needs to face the crooked path of motherhood straight on.

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Maezen Miller is a mother, wife, writer, and a Zen teacher (dharma holder) in the lineage of the legendary Zen master Taizan Maezumi Roshi. A journalist by training, the author had a twenty-year career as the owner of a marketing and public relations agency. Today she freelances as a business communications consultant, speechwriter, speech trainer, web copywriter, and ghostwriter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Too Tired

Avoid it as long as possible, then when you're ready, stop and look at yourself in the mirror. Staring back at you is your new best friend, your steady companion. Say hello to fatigue. It has come to stay.

I was not a wife or a mother when I attended my twentieth high school reunion. I wafted into the Marriott ballroom that night, bright, shining, and weightless by the choices that had left me unencumbered at the age of thirty-eight. I looked fantastic, and more so by comparison to my classmates, I thought. Most of them were, naturally, raising families and toughing out difficult marriages. They wore every hard day's night on their faces, hair, and everywhere. An exuberant ex approached, sizing up my full effect. "What's your secret?" he gushed. I demurred. I was so deluded. I thought (a) there was a secret, and (b) I knew it.

Whatever I thought it was, I must have forgotten it between the 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. feedings. I must have misplaced it on one of those ten thousand nights when the fever goes up, the coughing gets worse, or the crying won't quit. I must have washed it with the whites or swept it up with the mud, crud, and cracker crumbs.

More so than the endless tasks and deprivations, it is something else that ultimately wears you down and out. It is the monumental responsibility of parenthood in general and motherhood in particular. It renders you so very tired that you begin to look and even sound like your own mother. I am too tired to pick you up. I am too tired to play. I am too tired to laugh. I am sick and tired.

A Zen teacher might exhort, "When you're tired, be tired." In other words, don't exaggerate, contemplate, bemoan, or otherwise involve yourself with it. Don't reject it; don't despise it. Don't inflate it with meaning or difficulty. Be what you are: be tired.

Exhaustion is not a strategic spot from which to defend your turf. It's not the best place to start drawing lines and setting limits. It's not a power position. And therein lies the extreme benevolence of it. Be tired. Be so tired that you will let the troubles and turmoil wash over you. Be so tired that you will stop measuring the length of your hardship and stop looking for an end. You will forego some things for a time—bouncy hair, brilliant eyes, clear skin, incalculable dress sizes, good cheer, the intoxication of looking your best—but you will lose nothing that is worth fighting for.

Fatigue is a gift. Like many of the gifts that come to mothers, it is not one you would choose, like a spa vacation, but one you can use, like a humidifier. It is a cure and a balm. Fatigue helps you forget. When you are tired, you let go. You drop what you no longer need and you do not pick it up again.

About this edition

• Publisher: Trumpeter
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1590304616
• ISBN 13: 9781590304617
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192