Lessons from an Acu-Mom

The challenge of attending graduate school and starting a CA clinic while raising two young children has cultivated endless opportunities for me to let go, express gratitude, appreciate community, and step into the present moment.

I began attending MCOM in September of 2002, when my boys were 1 and 3 years old.  In the beginning, I struggled with letting go: allowing their father to care for them independently while I left home to pursue my studies.  When it became evident that he was unable to care for both himself and the children while I was away (his addictions blew-up the night before one of my midterm exams), I asked him to leave and ended the marriage within the year.  Confronted with single-parenthood twelve months into my acupuncture studies, I approached the school’s administration and gratefully found them agreeable to reducing the pace of my studies.  I was given permission to complete my education in 5 years, significantly longer than the standard 36-month program.  With this blessing of additional time, I picked-up a part-time job, my children adjusted to a new daycare schedule, and I continued my classes and clinics.  I deepened my ability to release and let go as I turned the boys over to their new daycare providers.

Our long and leisurely days together while I was a Stay-At-Home-Mom were dramatically altered as I began providing financial support for my young family.   I learned to be present with my boys in our every moment together, because there were so few of them.  A trip for groceries was no longer a means to an end, but an opportunity to connect: we shared stories and songs in the car.  We stopped to smell the blossoms in the floral department and made games of finding food items in the aisles.

Because their father could no longer care for them unsupervised, and because my family did not live close enough to lend support, I learned to reach-out and ask for help from my community.  Isolated and alone when I began school, by the time I finished my studies I had a beautiful web of former strangers helping me to raise my sons, giving added dimension to the quote, “It Takes A Village…”.  I saw that their generosity offered my children loving & joyful experiences that I alone could not have provided.  Classmates living near their daycare picked-up the boys when I got caught in traffic at the end of the day…friends hosted the boys for a sleepover when the stress of final exams and major papers and year-end-closings at work overwhelmed me…and when the child-support-checks stopped arriving and we were forced onto welfare and had to sell our home in the last nine months of my schooling, a wonderful family that I’d met through MCOM took us in and provided shelter and support until my graduation.  Words cannot express the gratitude that I still feel for this community which became our extended family.

Crises along the way brought me abruptly into the sharp, razor’s edge of the present moment: my youngest son had grand mal seizures one morning at daycare.  He and I spent hours together in the emergency room with monitoring and testing, and then we made the 90-minute round-trip-drive down to school that afternoon.  I had an herbal exam in the evening, and he needed to be continuously observed by me following his seizures.   If I had missed the exam, the school would have rewritten it and forced me to study a whole new set of formulas--time I simply had not the luxury for.  He sat next to me and drew pictures of Pokemon while I answered questions about Ren Shen and Bo He.  There was no projecting into the future, fearing for his health, or worrying about the test that day in the hospital…there was only the immediate moment of his being in my arms. 

In our home, every day has the potential to be “Take Your Child to Work Day”, and the boys love it!  When sick and not in school, they have snuggled in my lap while I tended to business matters, or they have come to the clinic and received a treatment alongside my patients.  Through my young brood, I have learned to use Traditional Chinese Medicine for treating acute medical conditions not regularly presenting in our school’s clinic: double-Staphylococcus-and-Streptococcal-infections, raging UTI’s, blistering sunburns, blunt trauma to the orbital cavity, violent stomach flu’s, fevers soaring above 105 degrees… Yunnan Baiyao really does stop hemorrhaging, and you can evaluate a bone fracture by using a tuning fork instead of an X-ray’s radiation.  I’ve given talks in the children’s daycares and classrooms with varying messages for their friends: “May you create a career for yourself that brings you joy and love”…  “May you learn to care for and nurture your body with healthy choices throughout your life…” “May you open your eyes to the endless possibilities that your future offers…” 

When I look back, I see that the path we walked was sometimes difficult, painful, and even heartbreaking.  Had I known what we would face before embarking on this adventure, I don't know that I would have felt courageous enough to take the first step.  When I look to the future, I see that there are many years ahead to discern childcare options for snow-days and summer-days and sick-days so that I can continue to make my practice accessible for working class patients.  But when I step into the Now, into this very Present moment, I see that everything I have ever required has been handed to me in the precise moment that I needed it. 

Presence…Gratitude…Community…Letting-Go…These are lessons that I carry with me into my clinic each and every day as a community acupuncturist, a mom, a (new!) wife, a sentient being.  They are lessons that I have learned because of my children, through my children, and alongside my children.  I pray that they are teachings which my sons will assimilate more easily, because we have traveled this road together…