{"id":569,"date":"2015-09-01T19:14:35","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T19:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zatma.org\/new-wp\/?p=569"},"modified":"2015-09-01T19:20:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T19:20:41","slug":"a-fathers-birth-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/?p=569","title":{"rendered":"A Father’s Birth (#6)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Master Yao Xin Shakya<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Father’s Birth<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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A series of articles on becoming a parent from a Zen’s priest memories, guts, and imagination<\/em><\/h4>\n

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Click here to access all available issues of “A Father’s Birth”<\/a><\/h4>\n

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Part 6:\u00a0Confidence<\/h3>\n

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It was our first night home. \u00a0I was exhausted to the point that unconsciousness would better describe my state. \u00a0Somewhere in my sensory fog a voice was calling, but I couldn’t be sure where it was coming from or if it even concerned me. \u00a0‘Wake up! Please wake up!’ I recognized the distant voice as my wife’s voice. \u00a0I asked myself, What does she want? Doesn’t she know I’m sleeping? \u00a0I’m so tired. I want to go back to sleep. \u00a0But no. \u00a0Here comes the voice again. \u00a0“He just finished nursing. Could you please change his diaper?” \u00a0He? Nursing? You? Diaper? \u00a0All the words came together and I woke up fast.<\/p>\n

I sat up and looked around. \u00a0The room hadn’t changed except for one thing… there weren’t two of us anymore. \u00a0There were three. \u00a0And Zen priest or not, I was suddenly scared out of my wits. \u00a0‘Take him,’ my wife said. ‘His diaper needs changing.’ \u00a0She held him up and I knew that I had to take him from her, so I did and was shocked to find him so light… weightless. \u00a0All this commotion for weeks and days, and here was this little creature that was the cause of it all. \u00a0I held my arms out and held him in my hands; and suddenly I felt like a bear holding a squirrel.<\/p>\n

My wife and I had made a deal. \u00a0She would feed him and I would clean up the results of that feeding, i.e., change his diaper. \u00a0I took him into the bathroom and put him on the changing table. \u00a0I unsnapped his pajama bottom and pulled them off. \u00a0So far, so good. \u00a0I found the diaper’s adhesive tabs and pulled them, and then like a bizarre flower the diaper opened up and the poop I expected to find wasn’t there. \u00a0Instead my little son had filled his diaper with something that looked like crude oil or greenish tar. \u00a0It was dark, thick, sticky stuff. \u00a0I took a baby-wipe and tried to clean it off. \u00a0I was fully awake now, and being so, I began to remember what the nurse at the Birthing House had said. \u00a0Then it had seemed just a casual comment; but now it made important sense. Meconium. \u00a0‘For the first few days, the infant will excrete all the contents of his intestines… everything that had been ingested while he was in the uterus.’ \u00a0She said that it wouldn’t smell funny at all; and in fact, it didn’t. \u00a0She had said that it would be different from normal poop, and it was. \u00a0So I had learned Lesson #1. \u00a0 And my son had passed the first test. \u00a0If he had excreted this meconium while he was still in my wife’s uterus, he might have ingested it; and that would have made him a candidate for some very serious problems. The nurse had told us that people used to think that this meconium was sterile; but, in fact, it isn’t. \u00a0Researchers in Spain tested many samples and found that half of them contained E. coli. Uh, oh. \u00a0I used a second wipe on his behind… and then a third. \u00a0I wanted to be sure I got it all off.<\/p>\n

Where, I wondered, did people get the idea that changing a diaper was just a simple thing? \u00a0Changing a tire is less hazardous… and less complicated! \u00a0When I was certain I had gotten his bottom clean, he peed in a pretty golden arc. \u00a0I stood there speechless and watched him. \u00a0He gurgled or giggled. \u00a0I couldn’t be sure, but it certainly seemed that he was laughing happily as if he were really having fun. \u00a0I knew only that this whole messy experience was absolutely beautiful. \u00a0Now I was giggling, too. \u00a0And I got wipe #4 and did my duty.<\/p>\n

Naturally, I thought about Zen Masters who take their turn with the “Shitstick.” \u00a0There was a time that monasteries would be built in rural areas and, since monks are human beings, they went to the toilet regularly. \u00a0Disposing of this waste was usually accomplished by diverting a small stream into a sluice that depended on gravity to get it down to wherever the waste would finally be deposited. \u00a0Often clumps of waste would get stuck in the sluice, and the monks had these paddles that they used to push the waste down so that it didn’t form a blockage that would dam-up the flow. \u00a0It wasn’t a pleasant job; but the Masters would demonstrate that they were no better than the lowest monk when it came to these human necessities. \u00a0There is no place for an ego in the act of eliminating waste. \u00a0The Shitstick united the master with the novice. Titles cannot separate us from our common humanity. And I learned something else, too. \u00a0I was due to officiate at an Ordination ceremony. This would be an even more awesome experience since now I was aware of the hazards and complications none of us ever imagines will occur, but they do. Human beings make mistakes and they also are simply ignorant of things that they will later need to know. \u00a0It is scary to take on such responsibility; but if, like those masters who took their turn in using the Shitstick, we remember our common humanity and keep our ego out of the process, we can prevail and share a happy experience instead of showing disgust at actions that we decide\u00a0are beneath us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Da Shi Yao Xin conducts an ordination service\u00a0in Belgium and speaks about the priestly mandate to remember our common humanity.<\/em><\/div>\n
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\u00a0So there I was… a dad… like a doctor or a plumber or a grocer… \u00a0putting a clean diaper on my boy. \u00a0His bright eyes looked at me. \u00a0I don’t know what he saw, but I saw an adorable face that radiated a kind of confidence in me and an approval of what I had done. \u00a0I had begun the task, shocked to see what looked like lava that had erupted from his behind. \u00a0And then with just a little knowledge and, I suppose, a lot of instinct, I had wiped away the tar and the urine and in this act, I had joined the rest of the world’s dads.<\/p>\n

My transition to fatherhood had begun.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0\"buddha_and_baby.jpg\"<\/div>\n
\u00a0 Da Shi Yao Xin and Baby Eliott<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this final section of his paternal experience, Da Shi Yao Xin changes a diaper for the first time and finds in the experience a happy connection to Zen’s ancient monastic practice of using the Shit Stick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,25],"tags":[27,18],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-essays-by-fashi-yao-xin-shakya","tag-a-fathers-birth","tag-essays"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":581,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}