Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood by Karen Maezen Miller, Karen Maezen Maezen Miller

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Table of Contents

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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.