“I traveled the next morning to my see my maternal grandmother. This is the grandmother I am named after. It is our custom that when we are to embark on a long journey, we must seek the blessing of our living elders as well as our ancestors. My grandmother and I prayed together. I could feel the joy, anticipation, anxiety, and hopes of my family. I was carrying the dreams of our people.

Finally, somewhere in my late thirties, I had an epiphany. It dawned on me that all the questions about being a doctor were just my father’s way of trying to make contact. He didn’t know any other way. When I stopped resenting his questions and judging him for them and just answered, without truculence, things got much better between us. We could actually talk! I thought this might be helpful for Sarah to hear. We can benefit from meeting our parents where they are, instead of resenting them for where they are not.

He [Winnicott] was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and

wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making

interpretations. . . . It appals me to think how much deep change I

have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If

only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively

and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to

enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let

the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is

that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We

may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or

become aware of it with acceptance.

The main theme of Buddhism,” the Dalai Lama began, “is altruism based on compassion and love.” He then went on to teach the foundational Tibetan Buddhist practice of “mother recognition”: imagining all beings as one’s mother.

Again, in order to have a sense of closeness and dearness for others,

you must first train in a sense of their kindness through using as a

model a person in this lifetime who was very kind to yourself and

then extending this sense of gratitude to all beings. Since, in

general, in this life your mother was the closest and offered the most

help, the process of meditation begins with recognizing all other

sentient beings as like your mother.

I shiver when reading about a mother full of wrathful and possessive love. The thought that not all mothers are like that more and more is becoming a solace to me. There was Chen Duansheng’s mother, who raised her two daughters as poets at a time when education was considered damaging to feminine virtue. It was reassuring to see that John McGahern was buried next to his mother. When I met a friend’s parents, despite my theoretical understanding, it was extraordinary to see them interact with natural closeness. The fact that I had found it extraordinary made me cry afterward.

But one cannot have a different biography. One cannot find consolation in revision. One cannot relive age twelve to unread Turgenev. On the phone my father suggested, with a quantum physicist’s mystic illogic and a fatalist’s pure logic, that our difficulties be put into a new light. Who knows what we did in our past lives to others, he said; what we have is what we deserve.