Marrow (10 page)

MY FIRST HUSBAND WAS A
doctor. He trained me in midwifery, and I assisted him in home births. I was only twenty when I scrubbed into my first birth; my husband wasn't much older. We were babes ourselves. He was doing his medical internship in a hospital in San Francisco and I was finishing college. I had gone back to school not because I wanted to but because if I didn't I'd break my mother's heart.

We were living with that guru I had been searching for and found in California. He wasn't your run-of-the-mill guru. He was an erudite religious scholar who had grown up in France, fought for the allies in World War II, and moved to the United States when young Americans began showing interest in Eastern spirituality. His father was a revered Indian mystic; his mother was American. She was the niece of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science—a coincidence I found compelling.

By day, I was halfheartedly going to college in San Francisco. When my classes were over, I'd cross the Golden Gate Bridge to where we were living in Marin County and wholeheartedly apply myself to my education in meditation, Eastern religions, Western religions, all kinds of spiritual traditions. And midwifery. The academic education I was receiving in college paled when compared to the spiritual instruction I was receiving from my teacher, and
the medical training from my husband. I was learning about the inside of things—the inner spiritual life, the insides of a woman's body, the guts of the human experience. Finally.

The body, as it turns out, is as mysterious as the cosmos. For all we know, it's a mirror of the cosmos. The secrets of the universe dwell within us, from the marrow in the bones to the tips of our fingers. Did you know that there's a one-in-sixty-four-billion chance that your fingerprint will match up exactly with someone else's? And that those little ridges and whorls on the tip of each finger are formed from pressure on a baby's developing hands in the womb? No two people have ever been found to have the same fingerprints.

When I was a practicing midwife, we followed a strict checklist after the birth of each baby, a list that included heart rate, skin tone, reflexes, and other markers and measurements of infant health. After completing the checklist, I would take the baby's little hand and examine the stamp on each tiny finger. It was like reading the baby, reading the fingerprint of its soul. In greeting so many babies in their first minutes of life, I became convinced that our only purpose here is to study the fingerprint of our own soul, to get to know it, to love it, to live it.

There's a problem, though. From the moment we begin to reveal to the world our soul's fingerprint, family and society offer conflicting directions. If you're an energetic kid, you'll be told to calm down from an early age. If you're shy, you'll be pushed to connect; if you're quiet, you'll be encouraged to talk; if you're loud, shhhh. “You're too ____________(fill in the blank: aggressive, passive; social, withdrawn; wild, timid; messy, prim . . .),” say the parents and the teachers. Of course this implies a comparison to the perfect human being who does not actually exist. All those
other kids we're told to be more like—the siblings and the cousins and the friends—are busy being compared to their siblings and cousins and friends. No wonder we're all so confused.

The babies I delivered never looked confused to me. Their gaze was steady and clear. Before I swaddled each one and gave him or her to the parents, I always whispered a quick and easy welcome-wagon speech in their ears—something like “Hello! Hooray! We've been waiting for you.” Infants look to their first earthlings—mother, father, siblings, tribe—for signs that they are welcome here. They search the first faces they see with intense curiosity, as if they are saying: “Here I am! This is who you got! Let's get to know each other. Let's belong to each other.” And to the best of their capabilities, parents try to welcome their new little human with joyful acceptance.

But it's a tough job being a parent; no one is quite prepared for it. If mothers and fathers were handed a script to read to their newborns from a Certified Human Parenting manual, it might go something like this:

Welcome, little one! We are glad you have come here. We want to know everything about you—down to your marrow, down to your fingerprint. Please show us who you are. We'll listen closely to what your soul needs and what it longs to express. But we also will teach you the ways of this earth. There are some things here that cannot be changed, but there are many things that can and should be changed. We will help you figure this out because we know you have come here to make a difference; we will help you find that purpose.

You will cross paths with many “others” throughout your life, and they too will be sorting out their unique purpose and plans. This will be your greatest challenge: staying true to your marrow while honoring the truth of others—their values, their backgrounds, their wounds, and their
strengths. If you have siblings, they will be your first teachers in this arena. They will serve you a confusing cocktail of care and competition, friendship and rejection. Please forgive them for mistaking you for an invader.

And please forgive us—your parents—if we give you conflicting instructions; if we push you toward individuality and also insist you play well with others. Somewhere in between those two impulses is the holy middle path. To be true to yourself and to be good to others. Our greatest gift to you will be to walk that middle path ourselves, because we know talk about the path is cheap. We promise to try to walk the talk.

That's what should have been said to us, and what we should say to our kids, and they to their kids. But even if a script like that were hammered out in the United Nations and then handed out at every birth around the world, it would still not guarantee any kind of universal success. Babies wear down even the strongest among us. Not to mention toddlers and teenagers and adult children. The Certified Human Parenting manual should really include the shocking information that the job never ends, and that one needs to follow the script year after year. Someone forgot to tell us that.

Also, someone forgot to tell us that our own journey never ends. There is no finish line. There is always more to uncover, more to know, more to heal, more to love, more to give. Being true to oneself is a rough-and-tumble ride, full of challenges and wonders. The Jungian scholar James Hollis writes, “We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.”

YEARS AGO, BACK WHEN I
was spending a lot of energy “trying to fit in, be well balanced, and provide exempla for others,” my courageous ex-husband dragged me to a notorious personal growth workshop called the est 6-Day. We were in our thirties; our marriage was ten years old and faltering; we had two little kids, a stressful business, and a shaky future.

The tactics of the est program were similar to those of the military: Gather a group of people together, take away their personal belongings, and allow no contact with the outside world for an extended period of time. Then, during that time—in this case, six days—from early morning till late into the night, bombard the hundred or so participants with nonstop instruction, group process, and extreme physical exercise, while offering a restricted-calorie diet and a piped-in soundtrack that included the theme song from the movie
Rocky
. The premise was that the intensity of the schedule and the rigor of the program would clonk us over the head with wisdom so that we would, in the words of the 6-Day, finally “get it” and “stop having an argument with reality.”

It sounded great on paper. My husband and I were in the middle of a huge argument with each other and with reality. The reality was we were married. The argument was we didn't want to be married anymore. He had broken my trust and my heart; I had returned the favor. Would the 6-Day put an end to our argument?
Would it help us slink back into the marriage with our tails between our legs and make peace with reality? I wanted it to. But I was dubious about the whole thing. First of all, there was an aggression to the organization I didn't like. Even if I was having an argument with reality, I didn't see how anyone was going to argue me out of it. And secondly, I didn't want to have the argument in front of a group of strangers. It felt dangerous to me. My husband and I had Band-Aids all over our hearts. I was afraid the 6-Day might demand we rip them off, taking the marriage too.

On the other hand, we needed to do something. We were too young to accept a bitter marriage, but old enough to have a lot at stake. And so I tagged along with my husband to the 6-Day, complaining all the way. The literature said the program started the minute you signed up for it, and that you could prepare for the experience by listening to your real feelings and jotting them down. But that was the whole problem right there! I didn't know what my real feelings were, and even if I did, I wouldn't have listened to them. I didn't understand then what I know now: that my own precious self was worth listening to, that what I wanted was of value, and that telling the soul's truth is not something best done in a military setting.

It certainly would have been better if I had known how to let the truth set me free in a more gentle way than what happened during the 6-Day. My memory has erased most of what my husband and I said to each other during interminable exercises and brief, calorie-restricted meals. I do remember saying—or was it yelling?—“I never really loved you.” Well, that certainly was not true. I loved him as well as someone who didn't love her own self could love.

But human beings learn in strange and broken ways. We venture
far astray to find what we already have. Does that mean I could have uncovered my genuine self without the journey, without the ragged circling, the painful losses, and the unkindness hurled and received? The lucky among us may be able to ride high on a cloud through the storms of life. That has not been my experience, nor the route I have noticed most mortals taking. Sometimes it is in the eye of the storm where we find the eye of the heart—the genuine self, the marrow of what really matters.

And so, off we went to the 6-Day, both of us determined to patch up our leaky ship. I can remember only a few of the actual strategies employed by the “trainers,” as those leading the 6-Day were called. During the week, we did one exercise where a trainer had the whole group follow his command to stand up or sit down for hours until finally, way past midnight, everyone had complied and was performing in harmony; we had our hair cut and restyled by professionals hired to help us shed our old identities; we ate lightly and we ran several miles each day. All the while, we sat in our group and were encouraged to spill our guts.

I knew what the training was trying to accomplish. I respected the goals. But I resented the martial methodology. For whatever reasons, I had always been the kind of person for whom spilling one's guts came easily. I was actually trying to go in the opposite direction. I needed to put some boundaries up between me and other people. The more everyone else cooperated with the regime, the more I refused to go along. I was central casting's angry resister. I was brought into the head trainer's office when I demanded I be allowed to call home and check up on my children. I told the trainer I wanted to leave, that I wasn't getting anything out of the program except missing my kids and feeling pissed off. He told me that my resistance to the program was no different than my
resistance to life itself, and that the more I fought, the further I got from the truth I so dearly desired to know.

I'll never forget a line he said to me, a line that had been repeated throughout the 6-Day: “You are already in Baltimore but you don't know it, so you keep trying to get to Baltimore.”

“But this isn't Baltimore,” I answered, exasperated by the psychobabble. “This is upstate New York!”

The trainer looked at me with compassion. “Sweetheart,” he said, “YOU are Baltimore. OK? We are trying to help you get to Baltimore.”

And so I hung in there, because, indeed, I did want to get to Baltimore. The final exercise of the 6-Day took place after dinner on the last night, and went “as long as the last person gets it.” My intention going in was to fake “getting it,” whatever that meant; I didn't want to be the one keeping the whole exhausted group up half the night. The exercise consisted of lining up in front of a wall-length mirror, each of us sitting in a chair, facing the mirror. We were told to stare at our face, to look into our own eyes, to take in our features, to scan our body. To look and look and look, and to really see.

All around me I heard people laughing or crying or yelling. But soon all the sounds in the room dimmed and I was only aware of my face in the mirror. Only it wasn't my face. It was my mother's. I kept blinking and looking away, not wanting to see my mother's face, not wanting to see her features in mine—her high cheekbones, her brown eyes and bushy brows, her funny smile, her fine hair. She looked like me. Feelings of revulsion welled up within me, and then revulsion turned into rage. I did not want to look like my mother. The more I allowed myself to feel my real feelings, the more shame I felt. And then in a flash I remembered a conversation with my mother that had occurred several years after my parents
moved from my childhood home on Long Island. In her typically impulsive way, my mother got rid of everything she didn't want to take to the house in Vermont, without inviting “the girls” to claim our belongings. This included dolls and toys, keepsakes and schoolwork—the debris left on the shore after children move out into the world.

In high school and college I had studied sculpture. I loved the damp smell of the classroom, the quiet poses of the model, the texture and temperature of the clay. I loved molding emotions into form. I was usually surprised by what my hands chose to make. Perhaps I thought I'd fashion the clay into mermaids or horses or gods. But inevitably I'd lug home busts and figurines of girls and women—sisters, mothers, daughters. The primary images of my young life.

My favorite piece was a life-sized head I made in high school that looked strikingly like my mother. I had no intention of creating such a statue; the model in class looked nothing like her. But there was no denying it—there it was, my mother's face made out of clay. After I fired it in the kiln and mounted it on a piece of driftwood, I gave the head to my mother. She swore she loved the statue, but she put it on a low shelf in the living room behind the piano where no one could see it. And there it stayed, until my parents moved.

After the move I looked for the statue in the Vermont house.

“Where's the statue of you, Marsh? Where's that statue of your face? The one I made in high school?”

“Oh, it's no fun to look at your own face,” she answered. “I sold it in the garage sale.”

“But Marsh! I made it. I gave it to you. You should have asked me. Maybe I wanted it.”

“Well, it was my face and I don't like looking at my face, so I got rid of it.”

Now—a decade later—I was sitting in front of the mirror at the 6-Day, seeing my mother's face and hearing her say, “I don't like looking at my face.” In my exhausted state, I began talking out loud to her:

“Why? Why don't you like your face?”

“No one really likes her own face,” my mother's reflection said back to me.

“Why not?”

“Because it's a map of everything that's wrong with you.”

“Like what? What do you think is wrong with you?”

“All the things I should have done but didn't do. All the things I did do but shouldn't have done. All my flaws. All of my mistakes. All the bad things from childhood.”

“What bad things? Tell me about them.”

“No, I can't. It's self-indulgent to relive the past.”

“No, it's not! Talk about it! Tell me. Don't be ashamed. Then you'll see the good things too. And maybe you'll love your face.”

“It's too late for me to love my face. Love YOUR face. You do that for me.”

By that time I was crying. I was sitting in a chair, facing a wall of mirrors, talking to myself and weeping. A part of me knew I was making the whole thing up—my mother would never have talked to me like that. And yet a part of me knew I wasn't making it up at all.

“Marsh! Love your face,” I kept saying, over and over, heartbroken that my beautiful, talented, charming mother was unable to see her true self—the face of her goodness, her uniqueness, her soul. I knew that if she would explore her perceived errors and her
unhealed wounds, she would come to the shining center of herself. But she shook her head and said again, “It's too late for me. You love your face.”

“It's never too late, Marsh,” I cried. My heart ached for her. I closed my eyes and put my hand on my chest and sat still for a long time. When I opened my eyes again, my mother was gone and I was looking at myself. “It's never too late,” I said to the girl in the mirror. I stared at my face. I saw parts of my mother, parts of my father; I saw my ancestry, my culture, my tribe, my times. I saw both love and anger in my eyes. I saw my familiar, imperfect features—nose, lips, eyebrows, chin, arranged in a way unique to me. This was my face, my heritage, my gift to either celebrate or reject.

And suddenly, I got it: This was my Baltimore. This was the way home. This was the reality I had been arguing with. My very self—all this time I had thought I was struggling to love my husband when really I was struggling to love myself. This was the argument I needed to put an end to.

The next morning, at the closing gathering of the 6-Day, we sat in a large circle. The leaders asked each of us to sum up the entire event in three words. By then, everyone knew that “three words” meant exactly that: three words. After a week of endless talking and sharing and processing, I was happy for the brevity of the exercise.

When it was my turn to say what I was taking home from the experience, I didn't hesitate.

“My mother's face,” I said.