Whole Body Listening

Yesterday was kindergarten walk-through for the boys. It was an hour-long program meant to kick-off their academic year. The “big kids” have officially started their school years, and the kindergartners--while these small five year-old bodies, close enough still in our collective memories to evoke a time when we could literally cradle them in our arms and far enough from the anticipated time when they tower over us, mocking us mercilessly for our musical choices and unrepentant love for jeans of a certain style--in Carlisle, anyhow, board the bus and start school in earnest next Tuesday.

At one point during walk-through, the parents were herded into the auditorium to finally give the teachers a moment alone with their companions for the school year and the staff--the school psychologists and social workers and the principal--a chance to start explaining to us parents what our role in the indoctrination into the formal education system is going to be. [Side note: earlier this week, the school called a meeting with us to talk about how to manage my cancer diagnosis in the context of the kindergarten year-- not just to support our twins, but to think about the effect on the kindergarten at large in a small town having two kids with a mother who may be seriously ill or pass away this year will have on the larger community of five-year olds and their families in Carlisle. The exquisite and genuine care demonstrated in that family meeting was yes, the stuff of privilege and was a dream for me.] As many of you know, I like to say I parent by benign neglect. I do mean that. In the last few months, as I have heard from so many people with whom I have worked over the years, especially once my role at Ropes officially switched from practicing to a staff role which was some combination of speaking truth to attorneys (you have all heard me say, when how you are professionally developing at the firm matches up nicely, if not perfectly overlapped, with how you feel you are professional developing generally as an attorney, great, and when the shadow grows between those two trajectories at work, let’s start having a real discussion about what we are all doing here at the firm) and truth to the firm and practice groups about what associate and attorney development might/should/could look like) but I particularly heard from many women and younger men trying to negotiate the competing, conflicting, pervasive, daily demands between work and life (more on that in another broadside, as I start to really embrace a way of thinking about that division as far less binary), who quote me on having said the “secret” is to parent by benign neglect.

I mean that, and of course, I don't. What I do mean, is that I really, really think consistency is overrated and your kids can figure that out, that it’s okay to let the kids do all the work on all the take home projects, that it’s okay not to live up to the full potential of every last little thing (the lunches with the sweet notes: mommy loves you, and the carefully homemade hummus and carrot curls, and the matching socks, and the always washed hair, and the meticulously sewn on badges, and the on-time permission slips, oh and it only goes from there--the rational, information-balanced conversations about sex and consent, the role of money in their youth, how much anger and strife in your household can they see, on and on and how to do all this beautifully while still showing up in the pressed suit, with the right documents, early, to court or the client or the opposition law office, bells on toes, research at the ready, extra copy of the document, analysis of the underlying facts.

Benign neglect is such a nice road. We’re going to get there, more or less in one piece, love carries the day, plenty of time to start a fund for the inevitable therapy about all the things you did wrong, because no matter what, there will be therapy (or at least late-night commiseration about parenting styles with their boyfriends and girlfriends in bed), and there will be judgment flying at you from all corners (gulp, from your child, your spouse, your ex-spouse, the love of your life who is forced, by virtue of timing, into the impossible step-parenting role), so let’s just cordon off actual neglect and try really fucking hard and forgive ourselves all other trespasses.

I can bring this essay back.

Over the summer, there was a kindergarten pre-meeting about kindergarten (see what I mean, meeting after meeting, missive after missive, and yet still, I forgot the requested photographs of them yesterday on the kitchen counter)--this must have literally been days before I got my diagnosis. And I sat in that auditorium and admit I did a little internal scoffing. The principal told us no information was too minute for them not to care about it. If a child skinned her knee on the way to the bus and got on the bus weeping, give us a call so we know what to expect. Really? I thought? Really?

And then I was diagnosed and the school called this incredibly thoughtful meeting. It was nothing less than adorable-looking. Both kindergarten teachers, the two social workers, a special ed guy and the principal and me and Kyle all tucked into a kindergarten table, awkwardly sitting around a table in the little chairs, our knees bent up over the level of the table. And a discussion of what the kids might know, what language we are using, how this information will inevitably be spread by the boys to their peers, who will have their own experiences of illness and death to draw on and add to the conversation. We set up an email chain so we can keep each other informed of things like, Mama Trace* is in the hospital, or Elijah was worried about cancer today at school. I am so grateful for the attentiveness and care--I am embarrassed by the May me, who was all, hey I’m the benign neglect mom, I think I can do this without all this helicopter parenting, thanks so much.

Anyhow. During the parent break yesterday, during which time, who knows what they said to the kids, but maybe something like--look, your parents are acting a little weird, this is a big transition for them, they may cry at the first bus pick up, but the best thing you can do is separate quickly and ask them at the end of their day how work was--they explained a concept called whole body listening the staff is going to work on this year with the kids.

Whole Body Listening. For me, this put me right into the why didn’t I listen to my exhausted, complaining, in pain and pretending it was just normal, just something to power through, body over the last couple years. I had a way to compartmentalize every ache and pain, and work to do to distract myself from helicoptering anyone in my family, especially and always, me.

Here’s how the school defines it: Listening involves more than our ears, and whole body listening is a tool breaking down the abstract concept of listening by explaining how each body part other than the ears is also involved--the brain is thinking about what is being heard, the eyes are looking at the speaker, the mouth (ideally, and aspirationally) is closed, the body faces the speaker, and, and here is the rub, the “heart” (not in the pumping blood organ way, but in the spiritual, ancient way of thinking of the heart as our soul’s center) displays empathy.

Which is not really that different from the kind of listening I wish I had been able to do on my own behalf for myself--a kind of listening to myself that was based in empathy for myself, and would have (possibly) led to more self-care, and certainly could now. I was really caught by the phrase and the idea that this is a pedagogical tool our school system is deliberately employing because it dovetails so much with what is going on over here at our house these days.

Kyle took the boys to swim lessons and out to the local Chinese food buffet last week--which is something of a routine on Saturday mornings (about to be supplanted by in-town soccer, and this is where sometimes I can’t believe I am doing this whole shooting match of child-rearing a second time through. A second time through at failing to remember the oranges for the team and running to the grocery store and slicing them madly at the edge of the field only to watch them tossed onto the field--half eaten. Because these kids do have Carlisle helicopter parents, and they don’t need my stinking oranges--they have special thirst-quenching gum, and some kind of hydro-replenishing gatorade liquid in their water bottles. At lunch last week, Kyle and Asher and Elijah had their first conversation about my health without me there.

Asher told Kyle he is angry. He is mad that I don’t get to do the things I used to do with them. As in, I was home taking a nap and not at swimming, watching him practice kicking, and secretly waiting for his little head to bob back up, because wasn’t that really too long to be under? Elijah told Mama Ky that he is sad that I am sick. Kyle asked them if they are scared? Elijah said yes that he is scared I am going to die. They immediately turned the question back to her. Are you scared?

Yes, she admitted. But she knows that the doctors are really helping, and there are lots of medicines for me to take. And that calmed them a bit.

And then Elijah said you don’t have to be afraid. Because when someone dies, You can hear them speaking to you from your heart. You can hear them speaking to you from their hearts. You can ask questions and sometimes you can get advice from someone who really loved you. This is what I say to them. I don't know much--I don’t know that there is anything like heaven, although I am fairly confident about what heaven does not look like (I just can’t believe we are reunited with our pets), but I do know that when I need a particular kind of love and acceptance and understanding that I associate directly and purely with my own grandmother, who passed away from lung cancer decades ago, I do literally imagine looking for her in my heart, and honestly, often can find her there in the kind of unmediated way we aspire to when we think about life after death.

Whole Body listening as a way to make peace with death. I am trying it on for size this next week, as I watch the twins bolt towards school, as I anticipate getting some more information about my own prognosis as we get some initial test results back from this first round of targeted chemo. Could you ever be so engaged in whole body listening that you could attend to the subtle, insidious mutation of your beloved, taken-for-granted healthy cells into the treacherous cancer cells? That seems less plausible to me--although I’m sure there is a test or a test coming soon for that, it’s Boston after all.

Could we listen to our selves enough to recognize our own pain, and take care of the often strung-out, tired animals we are, in addition to being the caretakers of the seat of the soul? Could we listen to each other as a way to bridge the distance between the living and the dead? Possibly. I do hear, on occasion, my grandmother when I listen. She had a kind of tuneless whistle she would hum as she moved around the kitchen--yes, inevitable cigarette in her mouth, picking things up in a desultory kind of way, answering the phone, hooked to the wall, making sure one adult child had a half a roast beef sandwich, she had taken her turn in Scrabble against her older sister Louise (a game made more interesting and lengthy by the necessary nursing of shots of scotch or whiskey) the noise of an NFL game coming from the kitchen television, the wildly ungroomed dog curled up in the corner of the kitchen. My grandmother was talk and words and unconditional love and food and whole body listening before that was a named pedagogical tool.

*Before the boys were born, Kyle and I hammered out some semi-satisfactory agreement about who would be called what--I don't honestly remember the terms of the deal and who got mom, and who was what else? Mother? We had a plan. Once the boys could talk, they named us in the manner that worked for them, so I became Mama Trace and Kyle became Mama Ky. Like we live in the Deep South: Mama Ky? Can I have another popsicle? Radio silence. Indignantly: Mama Ky? Can. I. Have. Another. Popsicle? More silence. Mama Trace?