Yep, I’m blaming it on the Tooth Fairy. It’s really my fault, but I couldn’t bring myself to call it a “Mommy Fail.”
Here’s the scene: Adorable six-year-old loses her 5th tooth, is so excited to put the tooth under her pillow, even predicts that the Tooth Fairy will bring her “one thousand bucks”! And then she wakes up in the morning {at 5:06} to check…. and the tooth is still there. No money. No Tooth Fairy. Just one disillusioned child and one horrified, guilty, ashamed mama.
“I’m sure she was SO busy last night she just didn’t have time to get all the teeth from all the kids in the world,” I tried to reassure my daughter.
{Crying} “But why did she remember all the other kids and not me?”
Mom had no good answer to that one. Not at 5:07 am.
“Maybe she was all the way on the other side of the planet last night and wasn’t able to get to kids here,” I tried.
“But Mom, it would have been daytime on the other side of the planet!” Apparently overly-rational mamas have overly-rational little ones.
“Well, I’m sure she’ll visit tonight and bring you something extra special to make up for it.”
*****
I felt miserable going in to work that morning. What mom forgets about the Tooth Fairy? My colleagues and students were all horrified at the tale of the Tooth Fairy not arriving {though the story did work in well in my World Religions class that day, as we were discussing how faith can be tested, and ultimately strengthened, through doubt. Hopefully that works with six-year-olds who believe in flying orthodontic pixies?}
A Zen Buddhist saying tells us that “the whole world is medicine.” Each moment is an opportunity to learn something that can heal us. My mommy-fail moment was a call to mindfulness. My distracted mind had caused sadness in my daughter ~ certainly, in the grand scheme of things, this was not a major trauma. I am truly grateful that this relatively-minor incident was what constituted a “crisis” in our household that day. But what six-year-old understands “the grand scheme of things?”
Even when we know about all the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of mindful living, it sometimes takes personal experiences with forgetfulness to call us to mindfulness.
“Living mindlessly . . . takes an enormous toll. What we get from each moment depends on the attention we give it, and the quality of our experience reflects the quality of our awareness.” {Roger Walsh}
Unfortunately, I could identify other “mindless” moments with my children. {Hopefully you’ve realized by now that I am certainly not perfect when it comes to mindful living and parenting ~ it is a practice that we work on our whole lives!} But I am choosing to see these moments of forgetfulness as calls to mindfulness. In fact, these moments are a big reason why I created Left Brain Buddha ~ to become more mindful in my journey of mindful living and parenting! {“Meta-mindfulness”!}
One such call to mindfulness occurred just a few weeks ago as I was dropping my children off at daycare in the morning. Before I left, their teacher said to me, “Be sure to remember to wave to the kids at the window when you leave. They get so sad when you forget to wave.”
Another punch to the mommy-gut. Most mornings after the hugs and kisses goodbye, my kids run to the window so they can wave at me as I drive away. And so many times, I forget to wave. Somehow, in the approximately 82 seconds that elapse between saying goodbye and driving away in my car, my mind manages to travel to my job, my to-do list, the students I need to work with before school starts… and my sweet children are staring out the window watching their distracted mom drive off. What do they think? Mommy already forgot about them? I cringe just writing that!
I now make the morning drop-off a mindful moment ~ I remind myself that I can have one more beautiful moment of connection with my children before I arrive at work in the morning. I am loving the moments of waving, blowing kisses, and smiling as I drive off to begin my workday. And my children are loving that mommy is no longer “losing her mind,” as they say. How appropriately stated.
“You may only be someone in the world, but to someone else, you may be the world.” {Unknown}
*****
And how did my daughter deal with her Tooth-Fairy crisis of doubt? When I picked her up from school that day, she was fine. She eagerly wrote a note to the Tooth Fairy that night, decorated it with stickers, and put it under her pillow with anticipation. And the mindful Tooth Fairy mama remembered to visit.
Still smiling even though the Tooth Fairy forgot to come!
I guess somewhere between the resilience of our children and our earnest striving to parent them mindfully, we take our medicine, hear the call to mindfulness, and learn from the small disappointments.
{Though it did cost the Tooth Fairy mom an extra five bucks and a new set of paints.}
What moments can you identify in your life that are calling you to mindfulness?
*****
This post is the third in the Living a Mindful Life series. Check out the other posts in this series: Living a Mindful Life: What is Mindfulness? and Living a Mindful Life: Why Practice Mindfulness?
Next up in this series: Living a Mindful Life: Creating Reminders for Mindfulness.
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
