The Crooked Tree · The Peaceful Path

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The Crooked Tree

Hi Everyone 👋

A few years back I sat with a mother who told me she'd stopped taking her son to the supermarket. Not because of the meltdowns—she'd learned to ride those out. Because of the looks. The sighs. The woman who said, loud enough to be heard, "he'd behave if you were firmer."

She wasn't complaining about her son. She was complaining about the world's insistence that he be somebody else.

That's the thing nobody warns you about. The exhaustion isn't only the child. It's the constant, grinding work of explaining, defending, advocating, absorbing judgment, and holding your child steady while you're being knocked off balance yourself. Add a job, a course, a calling, and you've got a nervous system running on fumes and guilt.

There's a very old story that speaks to this.

Zhuangzi, the other great Daoist, the more mischievous one, tells of a carpenter called Shi who walks past an enormous oak tree growing at a shrine. It's vast, ancient, branches spreading out over hundreds of oxen. Everyone else is gawping at it. Shi doesn't even look. His apprentice asks why. Shi says: it's useless. Bad wood. You couldn't build a boat, a coffin, a door out of it. Good for nothing, which is why it's lived so long.

That night the oak appears to him in a dream and gives him a bit of a telling off. What are you comparing me to? You're comparing me to the useful trees—the pear, the orange, the apple. They bear fruit, and then they're picked at, torn at, broken. They don't live out their years. I've spent a very long time learning to be useless. If I'd been useful, I'd have been cut down long ago.

Zhuangzi's point isn't that uselessness is noble in some sentimental way. It's that the world has a very narrow idea of what a thing is for, and anything that doesn't fit gets hacked about until it does—or gets discarded.

Your child doesn't fit the world's idea. Neither, probably, do you.

The world looks at an autistic child and sees a set of deficits to be corrected. The world looks at a burnt-out mother and sees someone not coping. Neither is the truth. Both are the world's narrowness wearing the mask of common sense.

Now here's the bit I find most useful day to day.

Further on in Zhuangzi there's a cook called Ding who's been cutting up oxen for nineteen years with the same knife, and the knife is still sharp. The lord asks him how.

Ding says: when I first started, all I saw was the whole ox. Now I don't see it at all. I go by the natural lines. I find the gaps in the joints, and the blade slides through. A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts. An ordinary cook changes his once a month because he hacks. I've had this knife nineteen years because I never hack at the bone. There's plenty of room in the gaps.

Plenty of room in the gaps.

I think about that a lot, with parenting. Most of us were taught to hack. Push through. Force it. Make the day go the way it's supposed to go, and if it doesn't, force harder. That's the ordinary cook's knife, chipped to bits inside a month.

The Daoist approach Wu-Wei, isn't "do nothing." It's don't hack at the bone. Find where the thing naturally gives, and go through there.

Concretely: some days the school refusal is a wall. Push against a wall and you just get bruised. Sometimes, if you leave it an hour, or take the pressure off entirely, or change one small thing, the wall turns out to have a gap in it. I'm not claiming that always works. Some days there is no gap, and that's a hard truth too. But the days you spend hacking at bone are days you never get back, and they cost you the knife.

And the knife matters. It's the only one you've got.

Which brings me to the part I know is hardest.

You are allowed to not be the ideal mother.

She doesn't exist.

She was invented by people selling something.

You are allowed to leave things undone.

You are allowed to be a person with needs while being a parent, not instead of it.

Whatever gets your child through today with their dignity intact is not a failure. It's the natural line. It's the gap.

And when you're burnt out, when the knife is blunt, and there's nothing left to cut with, that isn't a moral failing. It's the natural result of having hacked at bone for years, mostly because the world told you that was the job.

Nobody cuts down the crooked tree.

It just grows.

With Love ❤️

Always

Mark

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The Crooked Tree