It Takes A Village, People

I just finished a weekend with my 22-month-old "Buddha-son". It's easier to introduce him to other folks at the park as my "nephew," but my husband and I were invited to be the Buddhist half of his spiritual guides along with a Christian couple.

One of his moms is an old friend from college, who stood up at my wedding, and is a sister to me. She is also on the path of Zen. Amazingly, we both came to this path completely independently of each other. She is about to take Jukai in Iowa next week. Incredible.

I had not spent any significant time with Hans since his baby blessing when he was an infant.

He departed blowing kisses from his carseat. I found him to be a surprisingly agreeable little guy, especially for an almost-two-year-old. His meltdowns are usually for good reason: HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired), just like mine. Well, I guess you could add poopy diapers. And I bet it would not take long for me to melt down if I had poopy diapers. That might appropriately fall under the "angry" category.

Anyway, I feel like I just did a Beginners' Mind weekend retreat. Entering the world of a toddler is just not much different than Sesshin. He was even awake at 4:30 am (having come to Pacific time from Central time). We spent time at the park, and at one point watched a little iridescent bug for what, five, ten, fifteen minutes? It's relentless; a roller coaster of emotion, requiring constant consciousness and intentional widening and narrowing of focus. The difficult times just keep calling for more growth to contain it all. The sweet, wonderful times feel so cosmically delightful. And Hans simply embodies wholeheartedness. He would give big hugs, one by one, to everyone's who was standing in the kitchen in one moment, and then fling himself, inconsolably sobbing, from one end of the house to another in the next moment.

But there was a point on a hike we took at the coast, at which I felt like an Auntie in an elephant herd. I simply knew that if anyone ever tried anything on this boy, they would have to get through me first.
What is that? What causes this connection? Is it biology? It sure feels biological. But I've been around other kids, and don't necessarily experience that, or at least I'm not conscious of it. Is it the closeness between me and his Mommy? The time spent with him? I find it kind of astounding.

So I googled around and discovered that the word for these "aunties" of either sex in species of animals who do share parenting is called "allomother."

I ran across an article in the NY Times discussing a primatologist's research into this phenomenon. Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in her book called Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, theorizes that humans developed this ability to cooperatively parent not to be competitive with other groups, but because it was effective:

“I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

She posits that it's this development of cooperative breeding that is the source of much of our behavior and extreme sociability (empathy, cooperation, relative pacifism, and trust), rather than the complexity of our brains.

And that somehow, it's those helpless babies who trigger and promote "many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine."

So apparently it takes a village, not only to raise children, but to evolve ourselves.