The image shows the paperback version of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I actually ended up listening to the audiobook. The Chaplain recommended this book to me a little while ago. He didn’t say much about it. I just remember him telling me, “you should read it.” Since he doesn’t recommend many books to me and our reading interests don’t intersect much, I took him seriously.

I started with the audiobook, which is read by Kabat-Zinn. I admit I immediately judged his voice based on my personal biases and stereotypes. He is a male with a Long Island accent, and he is talking about mindfulness and being aware of your emotions, and I was thinking, seriously?! I didn’t think I would last through the whole book with his voice reading it. I requested the paperback from the library.

When it arrived, it was probably 2 inches thick. I looked back at the audiobook, which had about 4 hours left. I did the math. Four hours, or two inches? Four hours seemed more doable. Audiobook it was. Since audiobooks are way harder to photograph, I took a photo of the book for the post before sending it back to the library.

I listened to it while sewing my Arenite pants, and it reminded me a lot of Micky Singer’s books. In both Singer’s and Kabat-Zinn’s book, the narrators’ voices grated on me, but the content was really good. Also, Singer’s and Kabat-Zinn’s books dealt with mindfulness. As I listened, I vacillated between wanting to pause it so I could go meditate, and audibly agreeing with his points as he went along.

Full Catastrophe Living is about the process used to teach mindfulness and meditation to patients dealing with stress and chronic illness. The book discusses the different methods participants were taught to begin practicing and the benefits of the practice.

With my personality, if I didn’t already have a meditation practice, I might have been intimidated or frustrated by the book. Kabat-Zinn talks about setting aside 40+ minutes at a time, preferably in the morning, for the sitting practice or the body scan. If I weren’t already doing that, I would think to myself, but I can’t!

The book encouraged me as a nurse and as a human being to continue to endeavor to incorporate mindfulness into my life. Kabat-Zinn talks about really listening to your body and what it’s trying to tell you. He describes riding the wave of anxiety without getting caught up in it. He applies the practice to eating, relationships, and making decisions about how we spend our time.

Kabat-Zinn offers instruction on the general practice and specific steps for using the techniques. It’s a great encouragement and refresher if you already practice mindfulness in some form, and a good way to get started if you haven’t tried it before.

One day I listened to a section about being mindful during a moment when you are really angry. As I put the kids to bed that same evening, a night that the Chaplain was out and I was doing bedtime solo, I discovered that two of the little kids had taken flour, water, and eggs upstairs to their bedroom to make “dough.” They had snuck the flour a little at a time and gotten the water from the upstairs sink.

There was flour, blobs of dough, and water EVERYWHERE. When I first started to discover the mess in their doorway and asked the kids about it, they didn’t use the opportunity to tell me that a much bigger mess was hidden behind a homemade tent in the back corner of the room. It had gotten on clean laundry, on toys, all over the carpet, and every time I took another step, I found more of it. It took half an hour or more to remove most of it. I kept finding more and more mess. I lost it and shouted at them. I was so tired and angry, I was shaking. One kid who wasn’t involved was so tired he fell asleep in his school uniform on the sofa while I was scrubbing the carpet upstairs.

I’d intended to spend the time after I’d put the kids to bed but before the Chaplain got home for sewing. My three big kids were all out for the night and I would have the place to myself. Instead, I started the bedtime routine late, and the rest of the time evaporated while I crawled around on the kids’ bedroom floor, scrubbing Cinderella-style. The methods in the book felt lost to me.

I wasn’t able to practice what I’d been reading about. The Chaplain showed up just as I was putting the last rag in the laundry, forty-five minutes after the kids should have been in bed. The kid sleeping on the sofa was still there, fully dressed. Flour remained sprinkled on the floor in the upstairs hallway and a few other places, too. My sewing project was lying untouched on the dining room table.

I hadn’t tried to sew for most of the day. After a couple of weeks of binge sewing along with survival housekeeping and homeschooling from my sewing machine, I’d wanted to really be present with my kids that day. I’d been attentive during school. Instead of sewing through quiet time, which I had been doing for those two weeks, I actually let myself lay down on the sofa, eat my lunch, and watch Call the Midwife. That’s when the kids were making dough.

I stayed present in the afternoon, too. I would sew or cut here and there while I listened to the audio book, but mainly, I stayed available for the kids and got some of the neglected housework done.

I thought I was putting the kids to bed so I could sew. Instead, I ended up waging war against tenacious dough with an unknown amount of raw egg in it. The practices didn’t seem to matter. With parenting, sometimes it seems like nothing matters. You can ignore your kids all day one day, kicking them back outside every time they come to the door, and at night they will fall asleep exhausted and happy. And another day, you spend much of the day with them, present and involved, and at the end of that day, you are punished for the hour and a half you DIDN’T spend with them, during which their creative efforts produced the stickiest, grossest dough ever.

I’m of two minds. I see the value in mindfulness and meditation. The practices have improved my life and had a positive effect on my parenting. But there are some parts of parenting that feel so crappy that there just doesn’t seem like there is a point. You just have to survive it and try not to scream to much, at your kids or just in frustration. At that point, you aren’t thinking about being present, you’re just trying to keep your eyeballs from exploding from the pressure. I suppose that’s where Kabat-Zinn would offer his wisdom about responding rather than reacting to stressful situations. And perhaps he’s right.

Maybe that’s why three of the best books on mindfulness that I’ve read have been written by guys. They may not be the ones discovering the dough smeared into the carpet under the tent in the back of the room. Or maybe with continued practice, I will be cool as a cucumber the next time my kids host a baking show in their bedroom.