May 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie
When my children were babies they seemed to be sick very regularly. Maybe it was something to do with them being twins, constantly passing germs backwards and forwards between them, I don’t know, but every four or five weeks one or the other would wake in the night with a fever, and that fever, accompanied by other symptoms, would run its course of four or five days. Then just as that child was on the brink of recovery the other baby would go down with it, and the cycle would continue. One of the enduring memories I have of that (extremely happy) time, is of pacing backwards and forwards across the room with a bright red, sweating, wailing baby in my arms, waiting for the Calpol to kick in, and not being entirely sure if I could get through this time with my sanity intact.
A method I found for coping with this experience, and which has become something of a paradigm for other experiences since, was a particular way of being in that experience which I developed. I initially found that trying to cope by actively doing anything was pretty pointless. Beyond the obvious medical necessities, no amount of pro-active invasive ‘caring’ made the slightest difference to the child or to my own state of mind. Also ineffective as a means of sanity preservation was any attempt to ‘escape’, to think of other things or imagine more pleasant times in the past or in the future. Escape was impossible, and the frustration of a failed attempt, being brought back from an ideal somewhere somewhen to the stress of the here and now simply highlighted my own perception of how bad things were.
A much better strategy was, paradoxically, to do the opposite of escaping, and the opposite of pro-active ‘doing’. This was to experience what was happening as closely and as carefully as possible, putting maximum open attention on the actual moment-by-moment events of being with a crying baby. Particularly significant to me was the experience of listening to the sounds made by the child, and the cycle of wails, and cries and sobs. One thing I found, which became very important for me, is that a crying baby is not only crying. Or rather, that there is more to the cry than a simple extended unpleasant noise. The cry of a sick child has structure and organisation and rhythm. It rises and falls in volume and intensity, ebbing and flowing like a tide. I found that there is one particular moment in this tidal flow when the child has emanated a sound and the breath is exhausted when there is a sudden, sharp intake of breath, this is followed by a very interesting phenomenon. Just after the in-breath and just before the next outcrying there is a tiny, almost imperceptible period of calm, a poised moment of elan, empty of content but filled with being and energy and potential. This moment, each instance of which probably lasts less than one third of a second, stands out, or stood out to me those years ago, as an island of sanctuary in a sea of stress and anxiety, the anxiety of a father worried about his sick child and his own ability to cope.
The second thing I noticed about these islands of calm is that, although each one is separated by a period a time, the several seconds of wailing, each island itself is identical. Having no content but being simply a state of emptiness and gathered, poised elan, there is nothing to distinguish one from another. The tide of crying returns to the same high point on the beach each time before gathering itself and returning, and whilst the waters may change the point itself is constant. I found that listening to one point of silence is the same as listening to all the other points of silence; when there is no content, each act of listening is the same as every other act of listening. Furthermore, just as the high tide mark on the beach does not ebb and flow with the tide, but is always there as a constant point of return, so the multiple moments of silence in the crying of my babies , which were really only one single ongoing moment of silence, was always there. I had, and have, an image of the crying as containing within itself this eternal fixed dynamic point of calm and quiet to which the wails return and confirm within the cycle of their distress.
This begins so sound like a father finding intellectual entertainment, even pleasure, in the suffering of his young, and I cannot be happy with that. Looking back I remember this time more as one of intense pleasure threaded through with the necessary desperation and anxiety required of all parents.
My finding of this island, or possibly the high-water mark on the beach of this island, gave me the ability to cope, maybe even thrive, in these quite difficult times. I found that even whilst pacing the floor at four in the morning, arms aching from carrying this hot, screaming babe back and forth, by simply listening, and without taking any action whatsoever, I could hear this eternal beautiful silence. I could enter into this moment and feel it expand around me, filling my consciousness. I felt I could stand in the midst of the silence and experience the calm and the majesty at the heart of my child, and be with him in a way which did not require me to share his suffering, or mirror his cries in my own distress.
This experience has never left me, and I still try to listen for those moments, no longer in the rhythm of crying but in all of the actions and words of my children. Whatever else they may be saying or doing, and however they may change. Whatever separation between us comes with their growing toward manhood, in that place they are always open and with a little effort I can still listen for it, step inside of it, and be in love with my boys.
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