mindfulness for fathers giving your child secret space

8/13/2019 Mindfulness for Fathers Giving Your Child Secret Space

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Matthew Remski, 2013

All rights reserved.

Mindfulness for

Fathers:Giving Your Child

Secret Space

Matthew Remski

previously published here:

http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/mindfulness-for-

fathers-giving-your-child-secret-space/

About Matthew Remski

Matthew Remski is a teacher of Ayurveda and Yoga philosophy, a novelistand poet. He also works as an Ayurvedic therapist from his home inToronto, where he lives with his partner and son. He was the co-founder of

Yoga Festival Toronto, and has been an outspoken proponent for robustcommunity action in yoga culture and beyond. He is the author of many

books -- most recently the highly acclaimedThreads of Yoga.He is co-writing a book on the spirituality of parenting with Michael Stone called

Family Wakes Us Up.He blogs about contemporary issues in yoga cultureand Ayurvedaon his site.
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Mindfulness for Fathers: Giving Your Child Secret Space

Our son Jacob is thirteen months. From dawn till dusk he treads the thresholdbetween the togetherness we share with him and the secret space he is beginning to

find in himself. At this age all ages pass so quickly! the contrast between the two

is most visible in his relationship to books.

After his first nurse and fresh diaper of the day, we use our excitement-voices:

Should we go downstairs and read some BOOKS? He laughs and claps. He sits with

his mom and tears, literally, into the pile of picture books, showing her his favourite

pages, ooing and aahing, pointing out a car, or pumpkin, or dancer. He barks at every

dog and squeezes out his proto-version of the word, a loud and guttural whisper of d

andg. If he sees a plane he yells Up, up! He turns a page and sees a big tabby cat

and sniggers, and then lays his head down on the picture as if hes cuddling up with

our housecat, Krishna. Hell snuggle the page and whisper krish, krish. We are

obviously not reading the books to him. He is performing the books to us. This is a

small part of beginning to read the world of his endless surprise, and to measure his

discoveries against our responses.

But at other times, he uses books to fold himself inwards, away from our attention

and, more importantly, our approval. Often when Im on solo duty Ill be cooking or

cleaning and notice that hes a little too quietjust around the corner. When I peak I

see him sitting stock-straight on the little meditation cushion of his diaper, with a

big book in his lap. He gazes at each page for a long time. He sometimes traces his

finger over the letters, or around the contours of the picture. Sometimes he

whispers stories made up of nouns alone some recognizable, some improvised.

His sounds for dog and up and pumpkin interspersed with repeatedsyllables

and rhythmic humming. (I imagine verbs come after nouns because the toddlers


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movements themselves arethe verbs.) When he turns the page, he turns it slowly,

without breaking his absorption.

If he becomes aware of me, the spell is broken: hell want to show me something andto resume the dialogue of our relationship. So I hide and watch him silently, trying

not to break the spell. It feels like the most important thing I can do is to recognize

that this Jacob-bubble is hisspace and time, and to commit to not interrupting it.

How could I possibly know what he is meant to discover? I pull my attention back

into witness modeto better allow his inner life to blossom. Strangely, as I do so, I

feel my own inner life blossom as well.

Jacob is exploring a new kind of space, and its different from the space of revealing

his fascinations in dialogue with his parents. Hesentranced, listening to his own

impressions and perhaps fantasies, slowly progressing towards an internal verbal

tapestry that no other person will ever fully hear. His attention is like a thin line

linking thing to thing in space, in the same way that hes wiring neuron to neuronin

the soft folds of his brain. This is here, and then this, and then thisis over here. The

thin line becomes a story without details, which is perhaps just thefeelingof time

passing, one breath at a time before the meaningof time sets in.

Whats crucial to this inner space is that it happens in those brief but growing

moments that he doesnt need me, as he makes the slow but necessary transition into

forming within himself the internal trust and presence I at least try to model. He is

learning how to be alone, not only safely, but with pleasure. Hopefully, hes learning

to hold that secret life in such a way that doesnt automatically lead to the feelings of

alienation with which most of us are familiar: You dont know me. He is allowed to

enjoy a secret world that not even his parents can know. And someday he may see

that everyone has this secret world, and that this is what makes us so mysterious

and so lovable.


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Jacobscapacity to be alone to borrow the insight fromD.W. Winnicotts 1958

essay of the same titleisnt emergingon its own, or by him being in the next room.

It comes through a process of being able to be alone while beside me. It comes

through witnessing me at close range being comfortably alone with myself. But waydeeper than this, he has spent thousands of hours with his mother, feeling the gentle

difference between her gaze upon him and her attention diverted to her other needs

and interests. I love watching my partner holding him and gazing contemplatively

out of the window, while he sucks his thumb and considers in detail the sunlight in

the room. Mom and baby are with each other, but not dependent upon each others

attention. They are alone together, but still comfortable and secure. Its an amazing

achievement.

Theres been a flurry of concernover the impact of technological distraction upon

these intimacies of family life. Rightly so: we instinctively know when were

disconnecting from the closeness of the living room or kitchen by checking our

phones. But we should also remember that being present to our babies and toddlers

will always be a mixture of attentions: together in one moment, alone-together in

the next. At this point, Jacob is nourished by both my overt interaction with him, and

by witnessing my own comfortable privacy, with a book, gazing through the

window, or writing this post with the laptop screen turned so he cant see it. I try to

show him that I have good secrets, and that he neednt be afraid of what he doesnt

know.

What is this comfortable privacy? Its my ability when I have it to rest in myself

and with my own activities, to rarely interrupt his rhythms to fix something, ask

questions, or try to make something more comfortable. I want to give Jacob the

warmth of watching me be okay doing something, or nothing. I want to model

contentment: the fact that more often than we think, life requires no intervention.

And that while we never know the content of each others secrets, we can share the

knowledge that a secret silence connects us.
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mindfulness for fathers giving your child secret space

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