Baby Steps (27 page)

They both said they felt the same way, even though none of us knew why connecting suddenly seemed important. I had no idea that one of them was a screenwriter and a director. After two or three playdates, she said, “I've heard through the grapevine that they are casting a new show called
The Client List
with Jennifer Love Hewitt and they are looking for a character that would be the perfect fit for you. Have your agent set up a meeting.” Before I knew it, I had the part—a television show based in Los Angeles. It was just what I'd
asked for. I'm working, playing a part I enjoy, and I'm right here for my daughter.

I've spent most of my life on a quest for God, following in my mother's footsteps. Every moment of my childhood was deeply tie-dyed with my mother's spiritual quest, and I never went through that stage of rejecting religion or spirituality, like some kids do. I always assumed and knew this was part of what it means to be alive in a human body—we are always seeking something more than we can see and touch.

This is probably why I'm so open to the idea of miracles. I was baptized as a Christian and went to an Episcopalian boarding school. I sang in the church choir, but I also spent my summers and many a weekend with my mother at ashrams, wearing saris and meditating and talking about Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Eastern-influenced concepts. When my mother was a devotee of Gurumayi and we spent extended periods at her opulent ashram in New York, I felt at home.

The summer of my sixteenth year, Gurumayi herself noticed me in a crowd of other kids. She had her swamis talk to me, and one thing led to another, until I became part of her entourage, one of the kids who participated in the ceremonies. I wore saris on all the high holidays and Gurumayi even gave me an Indian name, a spiritual name. She hadn't given my mother a spiritual name. When Gurumayi asked me to accompany her to India, I seriously considered it. It was flattering and made me feel special to be one of her “chosen ones.” But after thinking long and hard about it, and talking to my mother about it, I decided it was more important for me to finish high school, so I went back to my boarding school in Tennessee after the summer was over.

Still, it all made a great impression on me, and I've continued to be spiritually engaged. I don't really subscribe to any “ism.” Instead, my
religion is about living a conscious life, being kind and simple in the way I was raised to be. By the time I got to college, I was so versed in world religions that it was no longer about religion but about a quest for God. Miracles seem self-evident to me, and I believe this is because of my mother. She always said that I could believe whatever I wanted to believe, as long as I accepted what others believed. She wanted me to be tolerant and educated, and at the same time, open to the shifting energies of spirit, the idea of faith, and the wonders of a universe we barely comprehend in our limited human form. I have all of that inside me because of her. She was my biggest spiritual influence.

When you stay open to possibility, anything might happen. I really believe that. You don't necessarily need to know what's going to be right for you. Life is about staying awake and aware and keeping your options open, and this notion helped me through my battle with infertility. There are so many possibilities for every life, and so many ways to be a mother, and so many little people out there who need a mother's love and, I believe, so many souls waiting to come down into a body on this earth to love and be loved. Maybe one of them has already picked you out.

When my daughter was two years old and just beginning to talk well, she told me, “I saw you down there, Mama, walking around.”

“What?” I said. “Where did you see me? When?”

“Before,” she said simply. “I saw you down there.”

From where? From heaven? From some other realm? Before she was born? She couldn't tell me any more, but I think I know. I'm not a crazy person, but I think my daughter's soul knew exactly where it was going, before it took that plunge into the earthly realm. There is so much more to life than what we currently know or understand. Ron and I always call her our miracle baby, and this was just one more bit of evidence that indeed she is, and that she chose us. It was a miracle that she found me down here, but somehow, she did.

For as many times as things have been challenging, there have been many more times when things have been right: the fact that I found Ron, that I had my miracle baby, that I had so many surprising opportunities in my career, that I found the grace and inner strength to forgive my parents, and that that they have forgiven me my trespasses, too. Forgiveness is always a miracle, and all four of my parents have enacted their own miracles in my life.

It wasn't a miracle that I have fertility issues. That sucks. But it was a miracle that I went to Cambodia, that I found Dr. Sahakian, and that IVF worked on the first try. It is a miracle that I live in a time and place and circumstance in which I have IVF available to me. It was a miracle that my mother lived long enough to meet my daughter, and that my daughter came to me and that she is exactly the person she needs to be.

I could name a thousand miracles in my life. A hundred thousand. When I think back, I see that it's all been a miracle, the natural order of things playing out, and how people show up and events happen just when you need them. I used to think the phrase “When a door closes, another one opens” was such bullshit, until I experienced the truth of it myself. Everything works out as it should, if only you're willing to see it that way. You just have to get out of your own way and stop assuming your own defeat. There will still be defeats in every life—but there can also be greatness in their wake.

In my mind, the miracles in my life are not just things that happened. They are something more: the shifting, breathing conscious machinations of Spirit—the light or God or energy or hand of fate that knows me and brings me what I need, and what I most purely and passionately desire. I believe miracles are divine interventions that help to keep me on a divine path. I think they are orchestrated, and I believe they are available to anyone willing to see them and act accordingly. It's easy to feel like your prayers aren't being heard. Oh
how I know this. It's easy to feel that you are completely incapable of manifesting what you want, whether it's love or success or a baby. Life often seems cruel and unfair, especially when it comes to infertility.

But if you look at your life as a series of divine lessons, then maybe you will find that you are the recipient of miracles, after all. Maybe you will fall backward into the miracle that provides you with the answer, even if it's an answer you didn't expect. Because that's the nature of miracles—they are divinely unexpected.

Recently, I was talking to a swami who said, “I don't believe anybody is an atheist. I think everyone believes in God, but it is just a matter of where they are on their path.” I like this idea. It comforts me, that wherever each of us may be on the path of our life, believing or not believing in divinity at any given moment, maybe some little part of every human being always knows God is there. Maybe you wouldn't call it God. Maybe you would call it something else. Spirit or faith or love or the source of all miracles, or just self. Whatever it is, why not look inside? Why not see if you can find that deep inner diamond that never changes, that is always pure and healing, peaceful and essentially unique? Breathe into it. Let yourself be calm. Then let the miracles begin.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

W
hen I was a child, every night when my mother put me to bed,
she would lean in and I would smell the scent of earth and flowers, and she would whisper this poem to me.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .”
At a young age, I already had the entire poem memorized, and I still think of it often, almost every time I remember my mother.
“. . . and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Losing my mother hit me hard and made me rethink my whole concept of love. Having my daughter has also made me take the concept of relationships more seriously. I see the notion of commitment in a new way now, but I'm still trying to decipher what it really means, and so I've been looking back over my past to determine my history of love, and where I've made errors, and where I've been lucky, and where I've done things just right.

What I've observed is that love comes in many forms, with such varying intensity. It is what humans seek, and sometimes it's easy. It's easy to love your child. It might be easy or incredibly difficult to love your parents. Love for friends comes and goes, ebbs and flows. And when it comes to romantic relationships, love may just be one of the most elusive and frustrating and inspiring feelings a human can possibly have.

I've always struggled with love. I love quickly, easily, intensely, and often unrealistically. This is why I seek to understand love—so that I can learn to love better. So that I can be a partner to someone, and learn how to make that last, not just for the sake of my daughter, but for my own sake. Because for me, and for the man I love, every day is a choice. Every day, we decide:
today, we will stay together.
Ron and I still haven't married, and there are a host of reasons for that, both spoken and unspoken. At the heart, I believe it has to do with the
eternal struggle between love and freedom, and the misunderstanding that they are mutually exclusive.

And so I investigate love. I ask people about love all the time, and I record their answers, as if they are research for a scientific study.

I asked a mentor of mine if she was still in love with her husband. She raised her wineglass. “Today I am,” she said. “Tomorrow? Who knows.”

I asked my godfather, “Are you in love with your wife?” He said, “Yes, I am very, very much in love with my wife.”

“One hundred percent?” I said.

He looked at me. “Distance helps,” he said.

My stepmother once said, “We live our lives in chapters. Each marriage should last ten years.” But she's been married to my father for thirty years, and she's still totally in love with him. In fact, they are the greatest love story I have ever witnessed. Part of the reason why I believe in love with such passion is because I have seen them claim it and own it and use it to hold their family together, painstakingly and relentlessly. Maybe what she means when she says a marriage should last ten years is that love and relationships change, becoming something new through each cycle. This might mean you leave someone and find someone new, or it might mean transformation within a relationship. Love is wily like that. You can't plan it. You can't know what it will do to your heart.