I really didn’t mind too much when I got the not-unanticipated Please Pick Him Up call on Wednesday from Jake’s school.
True, I had picked him up early on Monday and kept him home all day Tuesday, which I really thought ought to have scored me a few points with the teachers. And he had seemed perfectly fine when I dropped him off two hours before the call; he had practically sprinted for the climbing toy, even looking a little bit disappointed that none of his friends were pushing him off of it. Plus, it was more than a little bit annoying to find they had taken his temperature a second time before I arrived, managing to get that magic number of 100 that means he can’t return for 24 hours. And, sure, they were closed for a conference on Friday, so I might have let a touch of bitterness creep into my voice when I said, “Have a good weekend,” as we left.
Still, I had managed to get a little bit of work done in the five hours he spent at school all week. And he did actually seem kind of feverish when he finally got over the excitement of coming home with Mommy so early in the day and let his nap overtake him. In fact, as I settled into bed next to his little sleeping angel form to read a book, I felt pretty centered about this sick child thing. I felt like I was getting the hang of surrendering to the moment and understanding that the work will get done in its own time while I spent precious moments with my ailing child.
That perspective, apparently, can end up a bit battered — chewed up and wrung out — by the end of a sleepless, fever-ridden night. I was crying well before I began a cold, rainy Thursday with a bored and truly sick child suffering diarrhea and an attendant diaper rash from the antibiotics he received for the lung infection and two ear infections that were, we discovered at the doctor’s office, laying him low.
I tried to be in the moment and just play with him, I really did. We got some fresh air on the porch and read tons and tons of books about animals and I let him sit in my lap for every meal in the hopes it would encourage his appetite.
But a suffocating sense of being shut in and helpless rode on my shoulders all day, occasionally clambering onto my chest to crush it with the weepy certainty that I’m just not cut out for real motherhood. The very thought of reliving those early infant months of endless baby-baby-baby so much like this single day of it now convinced me in no uncertain terms that I could not — absolutely can not — do it again.
Worse, I found myself wondering if I have what it takes to keep doing it now.
How Do Those Full-Time Moms DO It?
I always found it somewhat odd when people warned me that my whole life was going to change once I had Jake. “Well, duh,” I thought. “I’m having a baby.” Anyhow, I assured them, I was going to be forty when I gave birth, plenty old enough to have done all the other stuff that needed doing in life. I was ready to be a mom.
Four months after his birth, holding up little brightly colored animals for his amusement for hours on end, far too excited by the prospect of being able to turn on the mobile for a few minutes of having something else do the work of entertainment, bored beyond belief and feeling mighty guilty about it, I realized that full-time mothering, like anything else, comes more naturally to some than to others.
It’s not that I feel any less of a mother because I’m not endlessly fascinated by watching my child play. I love him just as much as the mothers who actually enjoy blowing bubbles on the front porch for more than, oh, five minutes at a time love their children. I am just a restless sort of soul, someone who needs projects and adult words and to sometimes be able to walk in public without a twenty-five pound child resting on my left hip.
I lost only a few work days homebound with Jake. And yet I felt as if I was coming apart. Sunless days, sleepless nights, and a cranky boy surely didn’t help. But — being completely honest here because I know others have felt this too, and anything to make anyone feel better during such moments seems like the kind thing to do — I really felt as if I didn’t have it in me to be a good mother. In those few days I was tired of the hormonal shifts, tired of being tired, and firmly convinced that I left the person I’m supposed to be far behind somewhere between saying “I do” and meeting Jake, wobbly and wide-eyed, for the first time.
Those days home with Jake this week were, to put it mildly, a low time, a period of sluggish depression, occasionally churned up by crying jags over how, just, crappy I felt. And when Mike came home to relieve me and Jake refused to leave my arms, I took it as my due, the unwritten agreement that comes with motherhood: My child comes first, and if there’s nothing left for me, then nothing is just what I’m left with.
I was through it by Jake’s Friday mid-day nap. A good yoga session at home — I had given up Thursday and Friday classes, barely energetic enough to get Jake downtown where Mike could watch him for a couple of hours, must less ready for a tough bunch of asanas — followed by a lovely shower with the sun poking brightly out of the clouds from time to time brought me pretty close to my center again. At least I felt human. And at least Jake seemed up for a quick trip to the store, after we read a bunch of books and he finally decided maybe he was hungry enough to eat a little bit of applesauce.
Not that there weren’t a few more tears on both our parts by the end of the day Friday. And not that I would have minded if he had let Mike put him to bed instead of me. I’m still a little groggy, even though I somehow cobbled together close to eight hours of sleep, wound around the hour and a half in the middle of the night when he was coughing and then not but still wouldn’t let me put him back in his crib; his angry wails when that’s just where he woke up at 6:15; and handing him off to Mike to fall back asleep to the sound of him crying, crying, crying for Mommy who was, at this point, too burned out to care.
And not, to be honest, not that I’d be willing, if confronted with the choice just at this very moment, to go through this all again with another one. Or — did I ever really talk about having three with Mike? — another two.
I’ve just got to believe it’s normal to sometimes want your life back, even if you know your life is better for having that child who took it away from you.
Being Led by Intentions Instead of Goals
Often, in teaching a yoga class, I remind my students to approach their asanas with intentions, not goals. For example, touching your toes in a forward fold should be approached as an intention, not a goal. The difference? An intention gives you a direction in which to move — making your way slowly, gracefully, and with a great deal of exploration along the way, toward one day grasping your toes. A goal — Must. Touch. Toes. — not only makes you miss the journey, but sacrifices the benefits of slowly opening and creates a risk of injury. You lose all consciousness of what you’re in that pose for and instead single-mindedly focus on touching those toes, which is really, when you think about it, pretty darned insignificant.
While it’s relatively easy to give up on goals as minor as touching your toes in forward fold, it gets a bit stickier when you’re talking about things like, oh, having a career, fulfilling a dream, doing something that completes you. So, when I’m forced to spend a week with a sick child right as I’m feeling antsy to get my website going, my book proposal written, my life as ME back on track again, I more or less collapse.
Most immediately, it was hard for me to let go of the momentum I’d been building. At first, I just tried to fit my projects into the time I had free — finishing up a blog posting while Jake was napping, writing a legal memorandum while Mike was putting him to bed. The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to just squeeze everything that was supposed to take seven or eight hours a day into scattered clumps of two hours at a time. Especially when you’re not getting much sleep.
But the crazy-making part was that when I lost the ability to fulfill the goals I had unconsciously set for myself, it was as if I lost that part of me entirely. Rather than seeing a small detour along the path to my dream — a half-mile loop to the scenic lookout of a nearly seventeen-month-old boy who, if you take the time to read books to him, will readily, charmingly, tell you the cow pictured says “Moo” and the duck “Kack, kack” — I instead saw a precipice over which I had fallen, leaving the fragile, deluded hope of achievement far behind.
Things take longer when we have children. It’s just not realistic to think we can squeeze these huge, enveloping, amazing beings into our lives without displacing other awfully important parts of us. For example, daycare does not enable us to have careers unaffected by our children, even though it seems like it should. Because our career doesn’t fit into those eight hours a day we can leave them there any more than they fit into the time we have free. If we think it works this way we end up that much less equipped to deal with the days when suddenly daycare isn’t an option.
What I suppose I was thinking — in some primitive, unconscious, barely thinking way — as I cried hollowly while Jake hit me in the head with a plastic measuring cup was that the life I was trying to make for myself was being taken away from me along with the time to make it. When, in fact, it’s still there, if only I’d stop focusing on some future, end-result version of it and instead come to terms with the journey.
Because, really, while my intention is to one day be able to share YogaMamaMe widely, there’s an awful lot that can happen along the way. And losing a day or two here and there to my child doesn’t make me someone who has nothing but him to shape my life. It makes me someone who is navigating a complicated and beautiful life with my complicated and beautiful family.
How to Keep the Intention from Becoming a Goal: Prasarita Podattanasana (Standing Straddle Fold)
I remember well those years of yoga when prasarita podattansana was for me an occasion to mutter angrily to the teacher suggesting otherwise, “I don’t care how far I spread my feet apart, my head is never going to touch the floor.” Which made the pose not one of my favorites.
I’d probably have had a few things to mutter at myself right now, as well, when I say Bravo! to those of you who can’t imagine ever resting your head on the floor as you fold forward with your feet far apart in a straddle. Because you are lucky to have in front of you an intention that simply will not slide into a goal when you’re not looking. It’s not like there are just a couple of tiny inches between your head and the floor — the tips of your bangs brushing it tantalizingly — so that you hunch your shoulders and bend your knees and otherwise assault the integrity of the pose in the hopes of achieving that goal on which you have telescopically set your sights.
Nope. If your head is a good six inches from that floor, you have the luxury of perspective. Your head on the floor is nothing more than an intention, so best to tend to the important parts of the pose — letting your hamstrings open, lengthening your spine, releasing tension from your shoulders and neck. If only someone had pointed out to me how great upavista konasana is for tension release way back when, I might not have cared so much about my stupid head and the stupid floor.
And here’s the beauty of this pose, and the reason I offer it here. Even if you can rest your head on the floor, it’s oh so easy to take that false little victory away. You move your feet closer together and suddenly you’re in the same boat as those lucky people who have had to accept that head-on-floor is nothing more than an intention because it’s not a realistic goal. And you, too, get to focus on the physical benefits of the pose, as well as the bigger benefit of practicing letting go of goals in your life off the mat.
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