A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
I just wanted to tell this story, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any YogaMamaMe topics. At the same time, I’ve neglected A Hill-ish Life even more than I’ve been neglecting YogaMamaMe recently. (More on that shortly.) And so, shamelessly, I am creating this post for no other reason than to pretend I am adding content to this website when in fact, I’m just blogging about life in Asheville.
Still, I think it’s a pretty good story.
How about that Michael Phelps, huh? Single-minded determination, laser-like focus, conquering his body’s limitations. The ultimate competitor.
I’d like to see him take care of a toddler while suffering from a good bout of stomach flu. (Dara Torres has probably done it, but then she’s a goddess, being over 40 and an Olympic athlete and all.)
I’d heard the horror stories before: Entire family succumbs to a nasty virus that has them battling each other for the bathroom, pits parent against parent in the fight over who has to drag her or his aching body out of bed to change the kids’ vomit-covered sheets, reduces the parents to shivering skeletons sleeping in puddles of sweat while their fully recovered and now ravenous child chirps, “Pasta? Pasta?” How does anyone survive?
Honestly, I didn’t have it that bad. In fact, I had the good fortune to get hit on a Sunday, when I could lie moaning in bed and Mike could, with only a tiny bit of reluctance, take Jake to a work party. (His only complaint upon returning was that he was so busy chasing Jake around that he never got to eat any of the food.) I did, however, have the bad fortune of getting hit on the Sunday before the Monday and Tuesday when Jake’s school was closed for summer break.
In other words, like an Olympic athlete, I found myself pushing my body beyond what is probably healthy (standing dizzily in the heat of a toddler playground while Jake ran an endless loop on the slide). I kept going by tapping into that voice in my head telling me I could work through the pain (or, perhaps, Jake’s pain, as when I found my way to a shady bench to rest I refused to leave it when Jake fell and starting crying, instead calling out, “Did you fall, Mister?” and prompting a woman at the next bench to stand up and bellow, “Is that anyone’s child?” She seemed only slightly embarrassed when I assured her that — my heartless response to him falling down notwithstanding — he was, in fact, mine.) I made it through the school-less-stomach-flu day, in other words, with the utter commitment of an Olympic athlete going for the gold. (Okay, maybe I had no choice, but neither do a whole bunch of the Chinese athletes, and it doesn’t make them any less committed.)
There is one big difference between me and the Olympic athletes, though. (Okay, two, if you count, oh, what great physical shape they’re in.) A gold medal, however awesome and life-changing it might be, surely can’t compare to the feeling of sitting with my neighbors at the end of the day watching 20-month-old Jake walk, grinning, single-file along the fence in front of our house between the four-year-olds who live on either side of us.
In that single moment bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, my toddler grew into a little boy and my heart grew with him.
Continue reading ‘A New Olympic Event — Caring for a Toddler While You Have the Stomach Flu’
About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend. The one I thought I’d marry but didn’t.
It wasn’t a stalker sort of thing. It wasn’t, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I wasn’t feeling the least bit dissatisfied with the choices I’ve made. Quite the opposite in fact. Today is my and Mike’s wedding anniversary (can it be just four years?), and the very fact that it seems fitting to write about googling an old boyfriend on my wedding anniversary points up just how much the search told me about the wisdom and rightness of my choices in life.
The reason for my search was really just a warm and contented feeling of wondering what someone who truly is a good and kind person was up to. It was, I suspect, a symptom of how comfortably I’m settling into my life right now — slower, more self-contained, but so much more peaceful than what it was eighteen years ago when Sam and I met. (That gurgling sound you hear is me choking on the phrase “eighteen years.”)
What I discovered about Sam wasn’t so very surprising. It’s what I discovered about myself that tickled and thrilled and made me smile.
I took my dearest friend — Kali I’ll call her and she knows why — to the airport this morning. And I started crying — again. Not just because “Carolina in My Mind” was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in North Carolina.)
I was, in fact, able to fill up most of the twenty-minute ride home with reasons why I was crying with such a depth of feeling: The enormity and joy and impossibility of having someone who’s known you so well for over twenty years and still knows you so well now. The mingling of how it felt to be me in college with how much better it feels to be me now. The gratitude of having a friend who can honestly and truly and proudly confirm that, yes, I really have come that far. The distinct sadness that life’s possibilities just don’t seem as fresh at 41 as they did at 21. How hard, hard, hard it is to make the same sort of friends when you’re older and realize how long it takes for such love to take root and busier and rather complacently settled into a family life and maybe, too, a little bit, more complicated than you once were and therefore harder to know. All the things Kali has been through with me, carried me through, and how I never want to go through them again but am so very grateful to have been able to have her there with me. How so so so important it is to our souls to have friends and to have them close by and to spend time with them and appreciate them and depend on them and be there for them.
How much I just plain stinkin’ love her and miss her.
But one thing I’m not crying about — because I won’t let myself go down this road — is feeling like I’m all alone.
Continue reading ‘The Friendship That Doesn’t Change When You Do’
Jake and I spent the last week with his aunt and uncle and his three teenage cousins. Jake thinks teenagers are wonderful, especially 14-year-old Cousin Jeff who is as happy to throw a ball with him as to hold his hand, even if he draws the line at receiving a big mmmm-wah! kiss on the lips.
I enjoyed the teenagers as well. “Wow,” I marveled. “Is it possible tht one day I, too, will be able to hand the kids the keys to the minivan and send them to the movies while I have a nice dinner in a pub with my in-laws?” It is the stuff that the mother of a toddler’s fantasies are made of.
Not so much, it turns out, the fantasies of the mother of teenagers. My sister-in-law, not without reason, on more than one occasion expressed sadness at how plain her kids can be about not wanting her around.
It’s easy enough for me to note the less-than-ideal circumstances of a family vacation during which the family is actually together all the time. Or to recall for myself the anxiety that accompanies those last few weeks before going away to college that my oldest niece is surely experiencing. And, from the perch of mothering an exhausting but relatively straightforward toddler, I can tell myself risk-free that when Jake becomes a teenager and wants his independence I’ll just give it to him. If he’s not nice to me, I tell myself, I’ll elect not to be with him and so will my credit card.
The thing is, I’m smart enough to know that, as great a concept as my child’s growing independence may seem right now when he has very little of it, should I still be writing YogaMamaMe posts fourteen years from now they will be largely occupied with the sadness of my child gaining his independence and no longer wanting me around.
