The other day I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot waiting for one of my children to be either retrieved or deposited. I forget which because most of my days are spent in a never-ending, dizzying loop between home and school. Since moving to the suburbs of Boston, this has become my past time – hovering like a stalker, eyeing the entrance, waiting for a child to finish an after school lesson, occupational therapy session, or some other enrichment program, which is actually strange, because I would classify myself and my children as “under-enrollers.” We prefer home. The time between these sessions is too short to accomplish anything like grocery shopping or laundry, so instead I sit in the car and force myself to read the dry psychological journals I intentionally avoid in favor of scrubbing floors or organizing mittens.

As I sat reading, I saw a father in a new black Mercedes dropping off his two sons. They grabbed their backpacks and got out of the car. Although I couldn’t hear what they were saying, it was clear something was amiss. The smaller of the two was shouting at the larger one. As he yelled, he walked toward the school quickly outpacing his older sibling until he caught up with friends and slipped into his clique. The older brother stood frozen near the car and suddenly burst into tears. Children passed him by staring blankly. Some laughed. My heart broke for him. I wanted to usher him into my car and administer emotional triage. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his father pulling away and made a split-second decision to dive for the car door. The car slammed on its brakes and the boy piled in. I imagined the sleekly groomed father already running late for work impatiently checking his blackberry. I wondered how he would take to his son’s unraveling and felt a pang of guilt remembering my own reaction toward my daughter in an eerily similar situation the day before. I had been neither patient, compassionate, nor modulated in my response. I was running late, she refused to get out of the car. I was frustrated that our separations seemed to have taken a developmental regression, and I used the verbal equivalent of pushing the ejection button.

But now, toward a complete stranger’s child, I felt what Buddhist’s call metta – unconditional, limitless, goodwill and love. Some scholars liken metta to the love a mother feels for her only child. So why was it so easy for me to feel metta for a child I didn’t know, but not for my own? Simple. This little boy wasn’t making me late, increasing my anxiety about whether he’d ever be autonomous, acting out a scene from a script we’d played over and over. He was just crying and I felt empathic toward him. As I watched the father and the son through the rearview window, I felt relief when the father bent over to kiss the boy’s head. The boy opened the door, dragged his sleeve across his nose one more time and waved good-bye to his dad. As I returned to my reading I made a mental note; that the next time one of my children needed compassion I would be mindful of moving beyond my own fears, restrictions, and knee-jerk reactions to summon the same metta for my own that comes so easily for others.