How To Byron-Katie Your Kids

And also how to keep your car from smelling like Jackfruit!

Remember all that stuff I said about how it was hard to parent during a global pandemic? I take it back. What’s really hard is parenting during a global pandemic plus a global-warming-induced natural disaster, which renders going outside basically impossible.

The Kids: Mommy, can we go outside?

Me: No. The air is yucky.

Kids: Can we go anywhere else?

Me: Um, no. The germs. Remember?! THE GERMS!!!

Kids: Okay. Well, then can we play with you?

Me: If you must.

This has been more or less the scene for the past week. I hate on my home all the time — it’s too small, it’s too messy, my son is engaging in some kind of physical-psychological warfare wherein he scatters Legos along my path from the bed to the bathroom, like a trail of “motherfucker what is this??!!!” bread crumbs. Even so, the idea of evacuating my home, losing my home, especially now, holy moly. That’s some real shit I’m not dealing with. But as far as non-disaster-disasters go, living the bunker life with two small children is a capital B Bummer.

Yesterday, I awoke after a night of what I never, before children, would have called “sleep,” took one look at my family and my home (that again, I would never want to lose, do you hear me gods??) and decided we had to make a break for it. We looked at the air quality map, which we now refresh obsessively (“oooh, it’s down to ‘Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups!’”) and saw a patch of greenish-yellow at the beach in San Francisco. We packed/bickered (can anyone tell me how to pack without bickering?) and headed for the ocean.

It was pure bliss. The air was like, Strawberry Nesquik level delicious. We ran into the waves and knocked each other over screaming. We found a trench I could pretend to accidentally fall into, over and over, while my kids cracked up. We ate jackfruit (Public Service Announcement: If you buy jackfruit, I highly recommend eating it on the spot or constructing some kind of holster that sits on the outside of your car to transport it — that shit STINKS). My kids took all of their clothes off. We were basically living inside the music video for LFO’s Summer Girls.

I looked at my children and thought “They have been going crazy cooped up in the house all day, stressing out. They really needed this.” But that was a lie. They would have happily played inside all week, building forts and creating puppet shows that lacked narratives. I was the one going crazy. I needed it.

I’m a firm believer that even if something just gives you an idea about a truth, it’s worth checking out. That is why I read my horoscope in the back of Life & Style and I know that both Blake Lively and I will have “powers of attraction” that are “more heightened than usual” this month. I don’t really think any one thing holds the answers, but I often find that one thing will give me a piece of an answer, some of the time, and that seems pretty nice, especially if I don’t have to read a whole book or attend a conference to learn about it.

If you have dipped even your pinky-toe into the world of self-help, you have most definitely heard of Byron Katie. For a while, I knew the name but couldn’t quite conjure what a “Byron” was. Perhaps due to the patriarchy, I imagined an older, commanding, Peter Gambon-looking white dude. Turns out she is a nice-seeming lady with a cool haircut who was 100% given the name Byron at birth. If you are a procrastinator and have access to the internet, you might also know that her son is the producer who discovered Korn and Slipknot (many thanks!) and that you can pay to live in a house in Ojai for a month, where she may or may not show up at some point. Apparently good candidates for this house include people who “eat even when they’re full,” so if anyone wants to sponsor me please comment below! I digress…

Byron Katie’s jim-jam is called “The Work,” and it has some good stuff in it. Stop complaining, your thoughts are just thoughts, “the cage was unlocked the whole time” type self-empowerment. The core exercise is to take a thought you have frequently, usually a complaint, and ask four questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?

After you’ve done this, you get to engage in “The Turnaround” where you rearrange the complaint to see if the twisted version is in fact more true.

I often like to use this activity to my advantage. For example:

• Complaint: “I can’t afford to buy more high-end statement rompers that I have zero opportunities to wear.”

• Turnaround: “I can’t NOT afford to buy more high-end statement rompers that I have zero opportunities to wear.”

See what I did there?

But then, as much as I feel like a Grade A dork, taking it seriously sometimes does reveal something:

• Complaint: “My partner doesn’t pay enough attention to me.”

• Turnaround: “I don’t pay enough attention to my partner.” Or “I don’t pay enough attention to myself.”

Hmmm. Maybe there’s something to look into there.

Where I have started to use this more recently, to some effect, is in thinking about my children. I complain A LOT about my children. And let’s be clear, children are objectively exhausting, annoying, disgusting, disruptive, and unthoughtful. Never mind that most of what they do is come by honestly — even when you know they have good reason to run out of their room scared every five minutes between the hours of 8 and 9pm (true story), you also have good reason to want to throttle them. But my kids are pretty cool. They like to snuggle. They put on their own shoes. They even let me pick at their dandruff sometimes. So when I find myself stuck in an endless whining loop about being their mother, I like to, as I call it, “Byron-Katie” my kids.

• Complaint: “My kids have so many needs.”

• Turnaround: “I have so many needs. My needs are not being met! I need to close the bathroom door and wash my face for the first time all week while I listen to Mariah Carey’s Butterfly!”

Or sometimes it’s more about my complaints about how the world is serving my children:

• Complaint: “My kids got assigned to the small preschool class this year. They are missing out on the experience of having a class full of kids running around to play with.”

• Turnaround: “I’m missing out on that experience. My kids don’t even know they’re missing it, and who am I to say they’re not happier in this class? This is based on no empirical data from observing my children, only from my own thoughts and experiences. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be excluded from anything.”

Projection is real. As parents we do it all the time. We feel the wound as something happening to our kids — what it means that they didn’t make the varsity track team or what will happen if they don’t get enough healthy snacks. Of course, some things really do hurt our children, but sometimes we don’t notice these things because they are obscured by the problems we have imagined. And parenting can be miserable. But sometimes it’s not our kids keeping us from at least a little joy, it’s ourselves.

As a mother, I am very tired of talking about self-care. It is one of those terms that is so often referenced it has lost its power. It can feel like another box to check. Did I do my self-care regimen this week? And it’s all still in the name of better servicing our children.

I want to put myself back into the equation. And not just as a reaction to having neglected myself for too long (see face-washing example above) or having mistaken getting my nails done for actually tending to who I am as a person, the scars and needs and everyday demands that have not disappeared since having children, though they are much less convenient to acknowledge. I’m not totally sure how to do this. But turning things around sometimes makes me see myself more clearly.

As we reluctantly packed up to leave the beach, everything covered in a film of sand that would somehow make it into our bed sheets later, I asked my husband if we could drive down Lombard Street on the way home. (Lombard Street is an SF tourist attraction, the most windy street in the U.S.). “Sure” he said, “but they’ll probably both fall asleep in the car before we get there.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s not for them. It’s for me.”