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Blasting Through Attachments
I owe my ability to accept maternal failure to my son Adam. Though I bred young, never smoked or drank, ate right, and all that, Adam showed up with an extra chromosome, mentally retarded. Oops. From the word "go," I'd failed to make him a successful student, athlete, rocket scientist. In my mind, nothing could compensate for such massive failures.

This was when I discovered that the bigger the perceived problem, the better it delivers failure's great gift: freedom from attachment to ideas about success. A lucky person escapes her enemies. But a really lucky person (as the poet Rumi puts it) "slips into a house to escape enemies, and opens the door to the other world."

This can happen in tiny ways and huge ones. The day my pencil-proficient mind accepted failure and allowed my hand to start dancing with that mechanical pen, a door opened on a new way of drawing. Accepting that I'd failed to create a "normal" life for my child blasted away much bigger assumptions, bone-deep beliefs like "Successful mothers have smart children" and "My kids should never fail."

This hurt like a sonovabitch, but when the rubble cleared, I found myself in a world where all judgments of success and failure are arbitrary and insignificant, as ridiculous (no offense) as the American Kennel Club's definition of the "perfect" poodle. Without judgments, it's obvious that joy is available in every moment—and never in anything else.

I can see that Tammy gets this. Jason's rebellion becomes a gift as failure does for Tammy what I've seen it do for so many others: soften, mellow, calm, enrich, embolden. The poet Antonio Machado expressed it this way:

Last night as I was sleeping
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
I can't say I look forward to the failures that await me. But they'll be along in no time, so I feel lucky to know what to do when each one arrives. It will work for you too. Unscrunch. Exhale. Let go of "Oh, no!" and embrace "Oh, well..." Then, whatever door opens, walk through it.