Perpetually Present

Among the greatest joys of having a child so far is the opportunity to experience life in a different way. All children offer this window into a different reality, but it’s especially fun when it’s your own child, because every facet of your life together has the potential to expand your ability to stay in the present. LA sees the wonder of everything, all the pieces of the world I take for granted. Fans. Light coming through a window. Reflections in mirrors. The wooden handle of a stirring spoon. 

Currently, LA is obsessed with textures. He pats everything with his hand, testing it to see if it’s hard, rubbing it if it’s grainy; although I wince when he decides it’s a suitable option for tasting, I try to restrain myself from stopping him. He’s particularly drawn to wood and brick, to scratching at it with his little nails. When he encounters a new texture somewhere he turns to me with a look of delight as if saying, “Mom! Isn’t this amazing?” 

One of my commitments to being present in his life is not using my cellphone while on walks with him.  I want to see what he sees, point out the birds, the leaves, anything I would not notice otherwise. I want to interact with him, not someone else, to enact what Tara Brach calls “the only way to live,” which is to see every minute as an “unrepeatable miracle.”

This does not come naturally to me, nor to anyone these days I imagine. I have a Type A personality, which means I need to accomplish things, to end my day feeling as if I moved something forward. As a child, I spent most of my time in my head, planning what I would do when I finally escaped the bonds of isolation and authoritarianism, when I would leave home and be free. Although adulthood and freedom has not turned out to be quite the same as I imagined it would be, I still have a tendency to keep that mindset of thinking about what’s next instead of what is now. The gift of LA in my life is to shift me out of future planning, grounding me in the present, because he lives in the pure present, and unwittingly forces me to do the same. 

This is mindfulness in action: learning to live in the present, to experience what is, not what is not yet. To live in the present, I’m learning, involves letting go over and over again. Letting go of control. Of outcomes. Of attachments. As much as I tried to embrace this concept for years, it wasn’t until LA came into my life that I found a guide to enacting this process. By watching LA be present, I am learning how to do the same for myself. 

Down the street from the house, there is a “creek.” Because this particular street makes a good loop for a quick walk, we pass by it often. Before LA sees the creek, he hears it, and his eyes light up with excitement. He cranes his neck around the side of the stroller until the water comes into view; he stares down in fascination. 

This is not a beautiful creek in any way. It’s actually a runoff to keep the neighbourhood from flooding, a serious problem in an area with mountains and a great deal of rainfall. The water swirls around concrete chunks left over from some building project along with the leaves, rocks, tree branches; LA takes it all in as if it were a miracle, the manmade and the natural. His perspective is radically different from my own. His curiousity is immense, untouched by shame or cynicism.

He reminds me that everything depends on the perspective I choose to take. When I look down, I focus on the ugliness of modernity, the plastic Walmart bags that floated downstream from somewhere else, the random Chick-fil-a cup tossed over the railings. He sees the excitement of water regardless of its unattractive surroundings. Or maybe the surroundings aren’t even unattractive to him, just different. What he sees is ever changing and full of newness, all the important things to see, to hear, to enjoy.

I move myself to be at his level, to see what he sees and try to understand what makes this so attractive to him, because he has had an intense love affair with water since the day he was born. If a faucet turns on, he swivels his head to look, reaches out his hand to touch it even if he’s across the room. Even when he was tiny, he had no fear of water whatsoever. It could run over his head, into his eyes, and he would blink as if it were nothing. He would sink down in his tub, his ears underwater and his feet in the air, his eyes looking up at me in complete peace and contentment. LA is not a peaceful baby. He is a curious, on the go, sort of baby. He’s not into waiting or quiet. Except in the water. In those moments where his world settles and he is surrounded by water, I feel peace emanating from him and am reminded of everything that is beautiful and calm in the universe.  

As grateful as I am for the mindfulness courses I have taken, I have learned more from LA about how to remain present than from anyone else. When I am focused on the future, or the past, I let the present slip by and fail to see the good things that are happening right now all around me. The end result of this is a skewed view of life, one in which the darkness of my past can far too easily control my narrative. I lose hope. I lose joy. And when that happens, the trauma wins. When I switch my focus to the present, to what is good and loving, I detach from trauma as my defining feature. It becomes one of many features, not the most prominent and certainly not the most important. 

When I choose to stay present, to focus on the bluebirds in the trees, the way the light dances across the leaves in the trees, I see everything I have to be grateful for, everything that surrounds me and offers me the chance to keep building, keep enjoying, keep making the ugly beautiful. 

Since I was denied a childhood by trauma, being a mommy has given me the gift of recreating a childhood, of discovering what life looks like from a space of innocence and delight. It shows me what life could be like, and it empowers me because it reminds me that I have the capacity to protect that space for someone else, for my beloved child.