Hold on Tight

For several weeks, I had been meaning to attend a local group meditation practice: a sangha. I’ve been meditating irregularly for a few years. First, I would say it began with yoga nidra, which is a lying-down meditation I cannot recommend highly enough, especially for anyone who doesn’t get proper restful sleep at night. It’s powerful. Then, when I couldn’t afford that anymore, I started listening to recordings of Tara Brach’s guided meditations, and doing some on my own, using her RAIN method. I highly recommend that too. I might even say it changed my life. But really, all of the pieces came together to change my life, so it probably wasn’t just one thing.

Anyway, after a while doing Tara Brach meditations, I got the itch to participate in something communal, with a group. But since we’re still in a pandemic, unfortunately, it has to be virtual. Finally, I made the time to attend one of these local sanghas online, on a gorgeous Sunday morning, when I wasn’t with the kids. The person leading the group read out a poem by Mattie Weingast, from a book called The First Free Women, Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns. The poem is called Subha, the Goldsmith’s Daughter and here is the first part, which gripped me, immediately:

They all told me the same thing,

There’s only one way to be truly safe.

Get as much as you can-

And hold on tight.

It still blows me away to read it now. 

It’s true that when I first had the thought, what might a separation look like, hypothetically, the financial insecurity terrified me. I knew that, statistically, women do much worse, financially, after a divorce. I also knew it because I remember what it was like for my mother, after her divorce. There were some very difficult times, and money was always tight. 

When I had my first baby, I made a choice to leave a higher paying job for another, more flexible job, with less responsibility, so that I wouldn’t feel torn between my duty to my baby and my duty to work. I never regretted that choice -I love my job!- but it meant that, over the years, the gap between my husband’s income and mine grew, until I was making less than half of what he makes. Based on this salary, when I thought, hypothetically, about separation, I imagined myself living in run-down apartments, where no one really wants to raise their kids. I couldn’t bear it. 

So -not just for that reason- I stayed, and worked on my marriage, for as long as I could. 

But is that a good reason to stay married, when you are suffering and deeply unhappy? 

After my separation, some people, who maybe hadn’t witnessed my suffering in the previous years, seemed to focus exclusively on the financial aspect: how will you afford it? I could see my old fear living behind their eyes: “I can’t imagine doing that.” Of course taking care of myself and my children is partly a financial responsibility, and I can go into how scary and empowering that feels at another time, but mostly I wanted to ask these people, solely focused on the security and the money… Is that all there is, to you? Is that the most meaningful reason you choose your life?

The poem ends like this:

This is what freedom looks like - 

Not a bucket of coins buried out back.