Birth for a Dying Son

Crooked Timber, No. 3

It was weird: it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous . . . I liked that idea. It was consistent with the power of poetry to transform the everyday. It wasn’t that you had to transport yourself to other realms. You just had to puncture the conditioned view of reality that had been filtering your experience.
- Henry Shukman, One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir

I think I knew I was in a full-on existential crisis when I found myself continuously insisting that my wife, a hair stylist, shave my head. We were about three-and-a-half weeks into parenthood, and I was increasingly adamant for days and days that she help me chop off my long hair, in what I framed to her as a purely utilitarian move that would help me save time on my own self-care. Time and energy, I noted, that I could use to better care for our son. What started out as some light joking with her - “wouldn’t it be funny if I shaved my head?” - quickly became an almost obsessive quest for change. While I could frame it to her however I wanted, for myself, I knew there was something much deeper at play.

As some of you know, the feelings of those early days of parenthood are unlike anything you can ever experience and are, in many ways, indescribable. On one hand, there is an almost transcendent, ethereal haze surrounding your experiences that puts a varnish over reality, leaving you in a perpetually-reflective state where you’re trying to figure out how you actually created this living thing, coming to grips with it finally being here, and attempting to answer the question: what do we do now? And on the other hand, there is no realer reality than taking all-night shifts with your wife to feed, change, soothe, nurture, and love your baby, attempting to ensure that they are healthy and cared for in every waking moment. The juxtaposition of these two perspectives, though, can feel heavy at times, and, as I learned, can make you take drastic measures to try and anchor yourself to a sense of reality.

What I’ve found in being married to a hair stylist is that, oftentimes, after someone goes through an intense, difficult, transformative, or traumatic experience, they will have a strong desire to make a drastic change to their hair. I used to poke fun at this whenever it would come up, noting the delusion that switching up hair color or length would somehow help solve a problem. Then I found myself naked, on my knees in the bathtub while my wife quickly shaved off all my hair during a brief window of time when our baby was asleep. At this point, I realized that maybe it was time to reckon with the questions of agency, control, and identity that were plaguing me as I adjusted to my new life as a father.

It is also probably worth mentioning that I started reading a lot of Zen literature in the past year. As I’ve gotten older, what is likely a reaction to being raised in a conservative Christian environment that emphasizes the individual, their experiences, and a personal salvation, I have been drawn more and more to ideas of impermanence, the illusion of the self, and the notion that the “true” reality of lived experience is actually a deep interconnectedness with all living things rooted in compassion and love. I am probably showing my hand here that many of the core “truths” of Zen are still illusive for me, but the idea that I am actually made in the image of myself, which, put simply, means I perpetuate all of the baggage and snares that come with trying to maintain my own idea of myself, was very helpful in me starting to crack open my worldview.

Specifically, at the time of my son’s birth, I started reading the memoir by Henry Shukman - One Blade of Grass - which is a wonderful recounting of how he went from a young man in England who struggled with his own identity amidst a fractured family life, to having a spontaneous and deeply spiritual experience on a beach in South America in his late teens that ultimately led him to down a deeply rich and meaningful experience with Zen. What resonated with me about Henry’s memoir, though, was not necessarily what he taught about the foundational and spiritual truths of the Zen path, but that his journey showed how one can use a dedicated spiritual practice to help let go of the small trifles that come with a life tethered to personal identity, deconstruct the very foundations of a self-centric life, and connect more deeply with the heart of reality.

So, flash forward to the day I successfully convinced my wife to shave my head, and how the not-so-subtle attempt I was making to alter my physical appearance was actually pointing toward a radical shift I was dealing with internally. Namely, I was starting to think more seriously about how my son’s birth was also the marking of the death of myself as I knew it, and I was struggling to come to grips with how that truth was impacting my grip on reality. Like any death, this death of myself has manifested in what feels like an intense experience of almost every emotion, which has helped take the carefully curated image I made for myself completely down to the studs. Needless to say it has been a jarring experience, but in many ways it has been welcome in spurring me on to do the difficult work involved with letting go of my deeply ingrained views of myself and my life.

In a therapy session about a month into parenthood, after recounting the emotions my wife and I were feeling early on in the experience, we had a discussion with our therapist about the idea that we were both grieving the loss of our lives as we knew them. For me, that grief has manifested itself in deeply complex emotions around my identity, my sense of control over my circumstances, and ultimately how the life I’d spent so long curating for myself could be completely upended in what felt like no time at all.

On a recent call for work, I was discussing my whole submersion into parenthood and when I was done, the woman on the other end described the transition into parenthood as a “life-shattering event.” And while that descriptor might be a little harsher than what I would choose, after chewing on it for a little while, I would have to say that I agree: it is, indeed, life shattering. But what I am slowly starting to realize is that everything I have been grappling with related my identity, the death of the self, a deeper connection to the true flow of reality, the need for a rich spiritual practice, all of it might just actually be a healthy response to this life-shattering event. It might not be a bad thing to have your circumstances encourage you to lay down the burden of yourself and follow the path that leads to the realization that you are actually deeply connected with everything around you.

While it might be eye-roll inducing to suggest that a haircut is indicative of a complete existential crisis, what I can say, at least for myself, is that it was my attempt at small act of defiance amidst a sea of chaos to acknowledge that I am maybe actually trying to put into practice some of the things I’m learning. That I do not need to cling tightly to the image I’ve created of myself, especially when that image detracts from my relationship with my family, my community, and the wide open world of which I am a small part. That maybe the “I” that I think I am is really nothing at all, and that’s OK. And in those moments when I get angry, upset, or petulant that things aren’t going my way, it’s okay to drop the pretense of myself and realize that by tightening my grip on those ideas of identity and self are only serving to perpetuate suffering, pain, and frustration. None of which would arise if I were to simply let go and let be.

If I had to say that I’ve had one major takeaway from the first few months of parenting, it would be that, while the grief attached to losing the life you thought you had is very real, it is equally true that the life you build up from the rubble of your discarded self has the potential to be that much more rich, meaningful, and interconnected in a deeply beautiful way, if you just let go. The best days I’ve had on this journey are the ones when it feels like I’m actually not even trying at all, thinking of nothing and resting in the flow of things. While that might come across as an awful cliche, or maybe some successful parroting of Zen talking points, all I can say is that I have been reminded almost daily that your life is not yours, and the load you carry is only as heavy as you let it be. I suppose that’s as good a lesson as any.