Mothers, Daughters, and "The Eye of the Tiger": How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

First published June 16, 2008

On Father's Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville's local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can't afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when Eye of the Tiger comes on the radio.

Immediately, it was 1982. I was no longer sitting in my practical Honda CRV but in the passenger seat of my friend Deb's Prelude, sunroof open, music blasting, the two of us singing in unself-conscious joy some of the stupidest lyrics ever to grace a Top 40 song. We were 16 years old, pumping our fists in the air as only sixteen-year-olds and sadly misguided middle-aged men with beer guts and Confederate flag tee-shirts can. We screamed of the fierceness of the eighties, with Deb's short-over-the-ears, long-and-puffy-on-top hair style and my inclination toward wearing a rolled bandanna around my forehead under my bangs. Combine the two of us, and you had the lead singer of Loverboy.

(Hey, guess what! Loverboy has a website and they're still recording, albeit without the useless forehead bandanna action. This fact for some reason brings me renewed joy at the thought that maybe I'm not so terribly old after all.)

At the same time, I was sharing a grin at the memory with Jake, sitting there in his throne of a car seat, his ready smile on display. And I was deeply in love. With my boy, my place in the world, maybe even my forty-one-year-old self. For just a moment, it all clicked into place. The alternate universes of the days when I was independent and child-free and these times of confusion and love that come with motherhood folded together like an accordion card so that one unifying picture sat on top.

It was a brief moment of clarity on a day I would uncharacteristically spend with both the father of my child and my own father.

Feeling Like a Grown-Up Even if I'm Still Just Their Kid

There are few things, I hazard, that provoke anxiety like the visit of one's parents when one is an adult and, even more, a parent oneself. Either you must make room for your child in your own cozy cocoon where parents equal snuggling into complete abdication of adult responsibility or you struggle to remind yourself that you are, in fact, an adult and a parent, have been for some time, and are even, thank you very much, pretty good at being both. I, as you may have guessed, fall into the latter category.

To be honest, even by Sunday, I was feeling pretty solid about my footing as an adult and Jake's mother. I had given up on dragging my parents all over Asheville like a crazed tour guide with a couple of bored passengers barely hiding their yawns behind occasional exclamations of politeness. "The hotel is very nice!" "The airport is very convenient!" "Twelve Bones is great barbecue!" (This last fact is unequivocal and undeniable, and I think my father even looks forward to lunch there on his visits.)

My parents, I reasoned, were here to see Jake, not to explore the environs of this place they don't quite understand as a choice of home for their otherwise reasonably sophisticated daughter. I know they don't get Asheville because my mother noted how nice it was that the front page of the paper had a Father's Day story highlighting a gay couple who had adopted—"That was very brave of the paper, especially here," she said. I felt obligated to tell her in perhaps too forceful tones that here is actually more progressive than the moneyed neighborhood in which they live in Los Angeles.

At any rate, even if I was doing a poor job of introducing them to what Asheville is really all about, I did feel that Jake was doing an admirable job of introducing them to what a charmer he can be. Now that he can talk, I got to witness some true interaction between him and his grandparents, and I felt a smooth sense of rightness with it all. Sure, I could hear Mike's teeth grinding when my mother asked repeatedly if Jake wasn't the smartest of his mother's grandchildren. And, okay, I had to pretend I didn't hear the comments designed to awaken me to the fact that I hold my boy who likes to be held way too much for my mother's taste. But she gamely tossed a ball with him, and he climbed into my father's lap with an enthusiasm that made me really, really happy.

I had, I felt, reached a unique point where I can be with my parents and feel like a good parent myself. Just as I could simultaneously be a sixteen-year-old with bad taste in music speeding through the streets of L.A. in a Honda Prelude and a forty-one-year-old mother with a babbling toddler carefully maneuvering her Honda CRV out of a grocery store parking lot in Asheville, so, it appeared, I could be a daughter and a parent at the same time.

Until, that is, this morning.

I awoke feeling kind of hung over, the way I frequently do after taking a long weekend off to entertain, leaving work, healthy eating habits, and a sense of household order somewhere back before the plane carrying company landed at the Asheville airport. Panic descended, a need to place things where they belong, sit down at my computer, just get to work already so I wouldn't succumb to that feeble wish to never have to work again that frequently follows having my father pay for nice meals out. The need to get Jake off to school infused me with both a sense of urgency and of great and deep guilt, especially when he cried most of the way there and clung to me as if he could fuse his little ribcage directly to my heart when I tried to leave.

I ran out of his school feeling jittery and unsettled, nearly hyperventilating with the need to get things back to normal again.

Then Mike called my name from across the street. "Can you give me a ride to work?" he asked, leaning against that old dependable CRV. He had ridden his bike to work on Friday and left it there when we all met him downtown for dinner, and now it was too darned hot to walk all the way back.

He held my hand the whole seven minutes it took to get there, physically steadying me.

"I thought I was doing so well," I said truthfully. I had felt so much less defensive than I usually do around my parents, so much less hurt when they told me something I already knew or something I knew was simply not the case.

"They've been here for three days," Mike said reassuringly. "It takes some time to get back to normal."

And therein lies the grounding sentiment. Normal. Empirically, something that doesn't really exist. 

What's normal to one person isn't necessarily normal to another. A New Zealander, for example, might find it completely normal to eat Marmite on her toast for breakfast. Having sampled this indigenous cuisine that tastes like nothing so much as motor oil when sitting for our New Zealand neighbors in high school, I can attest to the fact that such a breakfast would be far, far from normal for your typical American. Normal, in other words, is relative, an arbitrary point from which to decide what feels different, uncomfortable, unsettling.

Still, even if normal doesn't exist in any abstract applicable-to-all sense, it sure does help on days when you're feeling untethered. On such shaky mornings, it's awfully nice to have a sense of how it feels to be normal that you can grab onto in your search to feel grounded again.

Letting Things Move Through You Instead of At You

As I sat in meditation this morning, trying to move away from the impending panic attack and toward feeling normal again, it occurred to me that stillness is a tricky concept. Because it suggests, not illogically, that the way to stillness lies in being still.

Certainly, I needed to find a moment or two of stillness to gain my bearings, to resist the whirling sense of being swept away on a wave of anxiety and overwhelmed rootlessness. If I could find stillness, I knew, I could locate that sense of normal that helps me order my universe. It was as if I'd taken a meandering stroll with my parents through a relatively nonthreatening forest only to find myself hopelessly lost amidst the now slightly menacing trees and on rocky ground to boot.

But holding onto stillness like Jake held onto me this morning—with a ferocious determination to make it be so—would have actually thwarted my search. Because, I realized, if you are too still as you approach stillness you will never find it.

This requires no little explanation. Imagine, for a moment, that I left a slender vase of day lilies from our garden sitting on the deck railing after dinner last night. Imagine, too, that a winter-like wind had picked up during the night, blowing directly against the smooth, solid stillness of the vase. The vase would, no doubt, have toppled over the edge, much as I was about to topple over my own edge if I remained too rigidly still in the face of the emotional winds buffeting me this morning.

Now suppose Mike had never picked those day lilies and they had remained in the ground, slender stalks rooted into the earth. If the same freak storm had occurred, the lilies would have bent, moved, but not fallen over. As the storm abated, they would have remained right where they were, altered, perhaps, but rooted into the same sure spot in the ground.

The rush of panic that arose in me from the sudden juxtaposition of myself as a good mother and as a daughter willing to let go of the jabbing criticisms, the faint patina of disappointment, the defensive asides about my own parenting choices, was going to move me, one way or another. The choice I had to make, sitting in my little cedar-lined meditation room, was whether to let it topple me over or to move with it, trusting that I have the roots to keep me firmly planted in the earth of this life I have made.

I'd like to report that the experiment was an unqualified success, that I let myself be moved and instantly felt more grounded, normal, bathed in stillness than ever. But I'm not quite that healthy. My roots aren't that firmly set into the ground of this new life as a mother and a writer and an Ashevillean that I have chosen. I'm not really sure these days what my normal is.

But I am sure that it felt really great to let all the movement engendered by my weekend move through me. It felt right to focus, not on stillness, but on the motion all around me.

The other side of the stillness coin, I was reminded, is movement. When you are still, it is to let the energy of the Universe move through you. The point of meditation isn't to become a rock, planted in one place and impervious to the elements, or a glass vase turning a smooth, immovable face to the world. It's to be a day lily, beautiful by dint of being affected by sunlight and rain and the gale force winds that sometimes accompany a parental visit. Affected, yes. Moved, even. But bathed in the serenity of stillness all the same.

Circular Breathing Meditation

I offer here the way I've been finding my way to a little bit of meditation and stillness at the start of my day. I was reminded again this morning as I first sat down and headed right for stillness that trying to achieve it by trying to be truly still is something for which I'm just not built. Most mothers, in fact, would have a pretty hard time turning from the life of motion that is our children and our care of them and of ourselves to a sudden oasis of . . . STOP. 

Nope. Great frustration likely to follow.

Instead, I have found it beautifully settling to consciously move my breath in circles through my body. The rhythm of it soothes me and gives all that movement around me a place to go. And, magically, the more I celebrate the movement, the more still I feel in some deep, wise part of me.