Momma Zen by Karen Maezen Miller

Author:Karen Maezen Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

16

Just Eat

LET FOOD BE FOOD

To study and practice the inheritance of the Buddha’s ancestral wisdom is to bring forth the vital activity of having rice.

—Dogen Zenji, “Everyday Activity”

There are moments of sublime and intoxicating fulfillment in motherhood when all of your doubts give way to a deep and radiating certainty that you are succeeding.

One of these moments is when your child sleeps. Another is when your child poops. And the third—perhaps most gratifying of all—is when your child eats. This gives you an excellent idea of what passes for pleasure in our house.

The satisfaction that I experience as I finagle my baby to gargle down a spoonful of pureed peas is so elevating, so empowering, so altogether delicious, that it becomes obvious: there’s something more on this plate than peas.

When you’re not looking, you will spoon-feed your child all of your hang-ups about food. Even if you are looking, you will still do it. Because there is not a single one of us unenlightened beings to whom food is just food. When is a pea no longer a pea? When it is love, nurturing, comfort, and bliss. When it is good, right, pure, wholesome, and certified. When it is weird, exotic, unattractive, sinful, and forbidden. When it is an accomplishment or when it is a failure. When it is a tool to control, impose, coerce, reward, or punish. And when it substitutes for entertainment, activity, company, consolation, conversation, or anything that isn’t spelled p-e-a.

We think this is part of our job: to teach children how to eat. Our children invariably suffer for it. They are lucky we don’t likewise believe it is our job to teach them how to breathe.

To be fair, there is the acquired knowledge of drinking from cups and using utensils, sitting at a table and eating from one’s own plate. These are social skills; when they are physically able, children will learn these rather refined behaviors in the rather refined situations like the six times a year you sit down at the table and have a family meal. For all the preaching about whole wheat and organics; for all the vexations about salt, preservatives, chemicals, and juice from concentrate; for all the fixations on sugar; for all the kitchen-table conspiracies to introduce, offer, camouflage, convince, trick, and bribe; for all the wailing and gnashing about how to get our children to just eat, they will continue to demonstrate how they can just eat fine without any impositions from us. Until we contaminate their food and eradicate their appetite with all of our extra helpings of anxiety, it’s quite simple. A pea is just a pea.

When our babies are babies, we wouldn’t think of wedging ourselves between their searching lips and the ready nipple. They know when to eat, they know how to eat, and they just eat! This is called ancestral wisdom. They are natural-born buddhas! This is not wisdom they lose, although we can help them forget it, just as we have.

When my daughter entered

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