A Mother's Prayer

What keeps me up most nights isn’t my grief; it’s my fear.

While I admit that grief exacerbates the fear, it existed long before in different forms. Fear is a tricky thing. It masquerades around as very noble causes. It lurks behind your most joyous endeavors. It morphs and changes to fit the specific jigsaw of your psyche no matter how much work you have done to quell it. It becomes a familiar friend whose absence you somehow miss when absent, and if you leave it behind for any significant amount of time, you search for it again like a lost teddy bear.

Since my husband’s death, my fear has become the poster boy of my own impermanence. It settles in late at night, jolting me awake from an otherwise deep and peaceful sleep. My fear is the producer, director, and star of the horror movie that plays on repeat in my mind’s eye, keeping me awake for hours. A scene plays out behind my closed eyes, desperate for sleep, where I am witness to my own death and the subsequent struggles my two boys would face as orphans.

Given a choice, any mother would choose their own death over the death of one of their children. Mothers of many different species would innately sacrifice even their own lives for the lives of our offspring. This seemingly fundamental reality of motherhood, alongside the bouts of fear I experience periodically, has demanded I ask myself “why.”

Why are we so eager for our children to live? To have a fighting chance at life. What about life makes this chance so important, so imperative we would sacrifice our own?

In the immortal tale of life and love, The Princess Bride, Westly says to his beloved: “Life is pain, Highness; anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.” The Buddhists have a similar sentiment. The first teaching of Lord Buddha was “There is suffering.” All beings are suffering. Whether the pain of the struggle to survive, the pain of the fear of being hunted, or the pain of the expectation of pain. There is no shortage of ways to experience this fundamental experience of existence. Pain is inevitable. When we become parents, we know that our children will experience pain despite our best efforts. Knowing the inevitable pains of life: loss, humiliation, injustice, and so on, what is it about life that we hold so dear for our children that we could make the ultimate sacrifice for them to have it?

I can think of only one reason. The joys of life make the pain bearable. The happiness of finding true love, expressing our fullest potential, and appreciating our senses’ beauty makes life so precious and fulfilling that we are willing to risk everything for that experience. Yes, I fear a reality where my boys grow up without me, but they would still grow up. Growing up, they would find tenderness and care, love and worthiness in other places, comfort and closeness with other people, and their lives would still be beautiful, deeply meaningful, and, dare I say, happy.

We are willing to die for our children if it gives them a chance to be happy.

Just a chance.

But let’s unpack this a bit further because happiness is vague and elusive. It is fleeting; it comes and goes with the ebb and flow of the very breath. This fleeting nature of happiness demands we discover what is at its core. Some of us spend lifetimes upon lifetimes searching for the meaning of lasting happiness. We pray endlessly on mountaintops, we devote ourselves to a craft, we study the human mind and its endless intricacies, we practice austerities, put our bodies in contorted postures, meditate, ponder and philosophize. Lifetimes dedicated to uncovering the secret to lasting happiness. And the answer? The thing we are all searching for, the cause of happiness? The Buddhists put it very simply: finding a genuine desire that others find happiness. In other words: Compassion for all beings.

A mother’s prayer is the strongest force in this universe. In the yogic teachings, it is said that even God can not oppose the force and power of a mother’s prayer for her child. It IS the guiding force of the universe, more than ego desire, it is the force of creation and its relationship to the created. Unstoppable. Inevitable. All-encompassing. My prayer for my boys is that they live and be happy. But what that means, at the most fundamental level, is that they find a way to have true compassion for every other being. They understand that their actions and intentions thusly affect every other being, and in this way, they will never feel alone.