It’s amazing how our children can teach us things even in a place so little conducive to spiritual enlightenment as the Asheville Mall.
The lesson that needed learning began yesterday morning, when Mike more or less demanded I see a doctor. I didn’t put up much of a fight, probably because I was too busy coughing in a high pitched wheeze of tears every time my swollen glands brushed up against the little bumps decorating my throat. I’ve spent nearly three weeks now shining a flashlight into my mouth every night before going to bed, as if just knowing how scary it looks will make much of a difference in my recovery.
I knew the road to a doctor’s appointment would be bumpy. It’s bad enough trying to contact my primary care folks. But just imagine trying to get in to see an internist when your primary care physicians are a bunch of midwives. Who, for some reason, didn’t strike me as the most qualified people to look at my throat, even though I’m all too happy to trust them with the far more harrowing experience childbirth.
Still, I gamely called the office and asked to speak to the desk nurse, figuring she could provide me the necessary referral.
“I’ll have her call you back,” the receptionist said when I made my request.
Now, call me dense, but isn’t a desk nurse’s job to sit at a desk and field questions from patients? I just can’t imagine what else she was doing during the hour and a half it took for her to return my call.
“We don’t work with any internists,” she informed me when she finally did.
“BOOWH!” Jake yelled in my ear as he tried to settle into my lap with said book. He was staying home to play with his grandmother on her last day in town and was plenty bored with us both already.
“And most internists won’t see a new patient for several weeks, or even months,” the desk nurse informed me helpfully.
Jake hit me in the face with his book and grabbed at the phone. I considered letting him hang up on her. Instead, I managed to ascertain that if I could find an internist willing to see me, she could provide me with the referral.
Jake’s grandmother and I settled him at the table with a cup of blueberry yogurt while I set about the task of finding an internist willing to see me. As soon as I lowered him into his high chair he curled into a recalcitrant back bend reminiscent of an inside-out slipper lobster and turned a shade of red reminiscent of the same creature after spending a few minutes in a pot of boiling water. With a sigh, I settled him into my lap and avoided the flying gobs of blueberry yogurt as I called our neighbors who have raved about their GP and left a message asking for his name.
Rachel called me back as Jake was scooping the last of his yogurt into his mouth with his hands. His grandmother seems hopeful that the right encouragement might convince him to use his spoon more consistently, and even to do so without turning it upside down on its way to his mouth. I passed that stage of wishful thinking weeks ago.
After I spent several minutes on hold with Rachel’s doctor while fending off Jake’s attempts to decorate my shirt with blueberry yogurt I was informed the doctor was not accepting new patients.
Feeling personally rejected, I wiped Jake’s hands, sent him off to play with Grandma, and got the number of a family practice near our home.
Jake wandered toward the living room and then noticed I wasn’t following. “MAMA!” he insisted as he clawed at my lap.
There is nothing so frustrating as being caught in an unclear phone tree when your throat is killing you and you just want to see a doctor and the doctor’s office is plainly doing its best to thwart the efforts of anyone to hoping to become a new patient. Except doing so when there is a toddler in your lap yelling in your ear as his grandmother just as loudly tries to engage him in a game of coloring on today’s newspaper.
Eventually, with the relief of a first-time marathoner limping across the finish line, I managed to get a person. I explained my situation.
“We’re not taking new patients,” she said, not unexpectedly. “The only way we’re taking new patients is if they’re referred.”
I was hoping all it would take was one call back to the desk nurse, but of course the receptionist told me they’d already put my file away so, naturally, I’d have to wait for her to call me back. She eventually did and promised I’d have a referral . . . tomorrow. Which was better than quietly dying of throat cancer, as I had stubbornly decided I would do out of spite.
None of this, of course, brings us to the Asheville Mall.
It’s Only Frustrating if You Rush It
Much has changed in my life since the days when I owned a leather mini skirt and drank beverages served in martini glasses late into the night. Now you can spot me in the middle of the food court, surrounded by the smell of french fries and a land of soft vinyl playthings.
What brought us to the mall was crappy weather. I’ve been shouting about it being spring much the way Jake shouts about all the balls he is spotting — most notably in the produce section of EarthFare yesterday afternoon, where every orange, tomato, and onion suggested its resemblance to the bouncy rubber things he loves to play with.
Yesterday’s crappy weather was proof that I am crazy to have ever left California. Not only was it cold and overcast and gloomy. Not only did it start to rain while Jake was taking his nap. But it actually hailed for several deeply depressing minutes. Given the elements, there was nothing to do for afternoon entertainment but take Jake and Grandma to the play area at the food court in the mall.
It was on our way out that Jake slowed us down and I found spirituality at the mall.
Mall-walks generally make me tense — all that useless merchandise screaming at you, an eerie lack of sunlight or any suggestion of a world outside retail hell, corridors going on and on in an endless trek of piped-in music and fluorescent lighting. Now I was forging through it with a twenty-five pound toddler in my arms, and he was not being cooperative.
Tantrums are a new talent of Jake’s. Just in the past three days, it seems, he has realized how much he has a mind of his own, and he seems determined to express it, even if he lacks the words to do so. Belatedly, I think of the baby sign language book I optimistically purchased six months ago. I can still recall how to say “dog” and “cat” and “fish,” but gave up on teaching them to Jake because he seemed to be geared up to get language before he hit the Terrible Two’s. That may be his plan, but he has compensated for it by developing his belligerence at a mere fifteen months.
In this instance, Jake decided he was going to walk through the mall. Furthermore, he was going to do so without holding Mommy’s hand. Nor with any thought of following Mommy. Not when there were so many opportunities to walk the wrong way, stare at himself in plate glass windows, and grab at the sunglasses foolishly displayed at toddler level.
My frustration level could easily have been as high as it had been earlier in the day when I was caught in the maze of the doctors’ office phone trees so much like the maze of the mall. Progress was no more within my control now than it had been then. The distractions were far less pleasant than blueberry yogurt-covered hands and baby yells. And my desperation to get out into fresh air and sanity was much, much stronger than my determination to see a doctor.
But none of this mattered because Jake was being so darned cute.
How can you not smile when your toddler is throwing a big, earnest smile at some stranger, getting her to slow down and break into a smile even wider? Why not choose to laugh when your boy points at the candy machines and bellows “BAHW!” with an insistence that suggests he wishes every person within earshot to praise him on recognizing a ball when he sees one? Far better to find creative ways to coax him forward than to end up hurt at how vociferously he rejects any assistance in moving more quickly, even though you really should know better than to take it personally.
And there, in our walk through the mall, I learned a lesson in finding beauty in unlikely places.
Beauty Exists Everywhere
Everything, I was recently reminded, shares the same energy. Put it in yogic terms or scientific ones, whichever you believe, but they both amount to the same thing. We are all made up of the same energy (atoms, molecules, whatever — I dropped out of AP chemistry in eleventh grade and never looked back).
This means many things, but for present purposes, it suggests that the same beauty I find looking out my window at the budding trees exists somewhere in the stale, dim artificiality of the Asheville Mall.
I’m not suggesting that the physical pieces of the mall hold the beauty of a tree in spring. Artificial is artificial, and the mall per se can no more soothe my senses than Diet Coke can nourish my body.
But the energy is there nonetheless, squeezing its way past the revolving doors, beating in the hearts of the other mallgoers, bursting out in the joy of my boy discovering that he can walk on his own past The Gap and Stride Rite and the Complete Laser Clinic of Asheville. The beauty is there, waiting to be found, if you can bring yourself to open to it. Which, admittedly, is a lot more difficult in the mall on a cold, rainy day than it is in the park on a beautiful, sunny one.
And there’s the lesson. It is up to us to find the beauty in our lives. Sometimes the Universe makes a gift of it — like in the faces of our children. Sometimes, though, we have to make the choice to find it ourselves. We can react to the frustration of a doctors’ office phone tree by becoming angry and shut-in and by poutily deciding to just be sick because no one is willing to help us get better. Or we can refuse to let the frustration be anything more than what it is — an annoyance, a discomfort, but nothing that should blind us to all the beauty that is in our lives regardless.
Children, I figure, offer a constant refresher course in this concept. At least twenty times a day, you will have the opportunity to give in to frustration and exhaustion and a weepy sense that you will never get to do anything you want and need (more, I imagine, if you have a teenager). And each of those times, you get the chance to blink your eyes and see past the red, bunched-up face winding up for a tantrum because you do not wish to be hit in the head with a picture book. You get to pull up the corners of your mouth just a little bit and exercise your ability to smile at this precious little person whose very recalcitrance is, if you think about it, pretty charming.
Do I necessarily want to be hit over the head with this lesson twenty times a day? Not any more than I want to be hit in the face with Jake’s picture book. But it’s one of the complicated, twisty parts of being a parent — all the joy and the frustration and the figuring out life in a new way bound together like strands of the DNA of our souls that have been altered by the bits of our DNA running around the living room spilling juice out of a waved sippy cup.
Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana (King Pigeon Pose)
Nothing is as beautiful in the yoga asanas as a full back bend, and few poses are as difficult to open to. Eka Pada Raja Kapotasana adds a further challenge because it requires open hips as well. But it is also a lovely way to find the beauty in whatever version of the pose your body embraces. And remember, as difficult as you may find it, it’s a lot more fun than being stuck in the mall.
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