This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Dec. 8, 2016.
“I think definitely this one,” I say, and hand him the photo.
He holds it up to his eyes a moment and pretends to study it, even though we both know he is just being polite–can’t help it, really.
In the picture my daughter sits on the stairs of our former home, the 1890 Victorian short on space and long on charm my husband bought in graduate school and we finished renovating together. She clutches an unidentifiable white stuffed animal to her heart, tiny bare toes digging into the mauve carpet, a color I had inexplicably favored during my pregnancy and have loathed ever since. Her odd little outfit is velour and studded with pink roses. A matching headband anchors her blonde bangs. She stares at the camera with an expression we referred to even back then as “the look,” a cross between a pout, a plea, and a rebuke for which she remains justly famous. 95-12-28, the digits in the corner read, and I wrack my memory for what might have precipitated this adorable gaze of recrimination in a newly turned three-year-old so soon after Christmas.
He waits patiently as I set it aside and pick up another–Easter this time—and nods as I hand it to him.
In this photo, my friends Peggy and Beth had flown in to join us bearing the world’s most fetching, life-size solid chocolate duck from an exclusive confectionary shop in San Francisco. My daughter has obviously already partaken of an edible beak or wing and popped out of her chair Jack-in-the-Box-style, eyes shut, hair flying, and beaming with what could only be described as maniacal rapture. A little golden halo undulates around her head, a trick of our dining room lighting perhaps, who knows? I point it out to him.
He hands me a tissue. That’s just the kind of guy he is.
I am sitting with my imaginary Jesus over tea—organic chamomile lavender to be precise because who couldn’t use a little calming down these days?—engaging in a one-sided conversation involving the selection of childhood photos for the traditional ads parents of high school seniors are expected to purchase for their children’s final yearbook. It has been a week of such activities in a year that at times feels like a kind of elongated final parenting exam. Needless to say I am, at times, a little anxious about my grades.
My daughter has but one of the arduous college applications left to finalize and submit. We attended her final club soccer game over the weekend, an event that brought tears to my eyes along with blurry visions of her and several teammates swarming across the field like a tiny beehive that first couple of years. This weekend, I will work our final silent auction benefit for the high school sports program where she will play her final Varsity season this spring. In hot pursuit of emancipation for such a long time, these recent harbingers of actual independence seem to have shifted her, too, into a temporary stage of largesse. She has been staying home more than usual, happily accompanying me as she once did on errands, and last night, my husband out of town, even climbed into bed with me for the night, a literal dream come true for our little dog sprawled out between us.
I take down the photo I keep on the bulletin board in my office of her taken at five years old, sitting on a bench in the garden outside the Rodin Museum in Paris looking oh so bohemian in black leggings and turtleneck, scribbling into the journal I bought her to chronicle our trip, and, you know, just in case she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. On that same holiday, I carried her on my shoulders in the Luxembourg Gardens and was asked for directions in French by a woman who knew how to tie scarves, if you know what I’m saying.
Je ne sais quoi, I had responded helplessly, nonetheless feeling that we had somehow finally arrived on the planet, no longer mistaken for ugly Americans.
He throws back his head and chuckles at that. His laugh is contagious. Buoyed by its lightness, I can feel myself rising along with my desk, our chairs, the computer, the pot of tea, the pile of photographs, and the blank page on which I am supposed to come up with a sentimental caption. Something that captures the specialness of the last 18 years I have spent attempting to nurture and guide this divine creature to this very threshold of striking off on her own that has left me dabbing at my eyes and counting the many ways in which I have failed to rise—no pun intended—to the occasion.
C’est la guerre, I say, and we laugh some more, giddy in our shared stance above the battleground of my illusions, clinking our teacups together in the theatre of my imagination, transported by healing mirth like Uncle Albert and the children in the Mary Poppins movie, deaf to the nanny’s dissenting opinion.
As A Course in Miracles Chapter 23, IV, Above the Battleground, reminds me when I choose to be reminded:
Be lifted up, and from a higher place look down upon it. From there will your perspective be quite different. Here in the midst of it, it does seem real. Here you have chosen to be part of it. Here murder is your choice. Yet from above, the choice is miracles instead of murder. And the perspective coming from this choice shows you the battle is not real and easily escaped. (From paragraph 5)
I have worked with A Course in Miracles long enough not to be put off by this reference to murder in response to my ambivalence over my daughter’s looming independence. Whether in touch with it or not, everyone shares the same unconscious belief that we have chosen to separate and thereby destroy our source, leaving us to fend for ourselves, seeming fugitives from eternal wholeness in a projected world of dualistic, competing forces. Every relationship in this so-called world thereby becomes a battleground in which we attempt to reenact our impossible defection from perfect wholeness, convinced our identity rides on the outcome of our war to prove ourselves guilty of hard-won autonomy at true love’s expense. Is there any more perfect venue than the parent-child relationship in which to perpetuate from both seeming sides a story of misunderstanding, self-incrimination, disappointment, and ultimate abandonment?
And yet I am learning there is no difference in the regrets I may find myself clinging to as I prepare for this final exam before moving on to the continuing parenting education I hope will follow me to the grave and the annoyance I feel with a client, the knee-jerk condemnation the very image of certain politicians can arouse, or the tribal fear I can easily embrace in the guise of another terrorist plot or natural disaster. A Course in Miracles has taught me that we are in the battleground–blindly obeying the ego’s orders to attack and defend our projections through a smoky haze–or we are above it, having chosen the inner teacher that remembered to gently laugh at the tiny, mad idea of it all from the very beginning, patiently waiting out our inevitable return to sanity.
When I choose to turn away from the ego and join with Jesus (that symbol of our one, eternally lucid mind that followed us into this illusory experiment in fragmentation), I can view the pictures of my life with my daughter kindly and clearly without any need to step back into the frame. I can smile and even learn to laugh at the tearful idea that her inevitable launch into adulthood will somehow diminish me. As I rise above the battleground with Jesus in my mind, gently laughing my head off, I begin to share his vision. These negative and positive images dissolve as if developing backwards into the ether of illusion from which they emerged. And the loving caption for our life together flows easily and unimportantly through my hand and onto the page.
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.