2008 November | YogaMamaMe.com

Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Do I Really Have Any More Control Than a Two-Year-Old?

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on November 24, 2008

in Mama instinct, awareness, communicating, compassion, expectations, letting go, practice, surrender, toddler tantrums and you can't control everything

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Mike does not believe in the Terrible Two’s.

I wish I were as certain that Jake is not, in fact, entering his Terrible Two’s as my husband, even though I know it would do me no good. (Witness Mike’s frequent less-than-patient exchanges with Jake in which he variously commands, wheedles, and begs Jake [clench teeth here] not to whine like that.)

In a sense, though, I don’t believe in them either. By which I mean that I don’t believe Jake has been rendered “terrible” by his newfound ability to flip from laughing, sunny child-of-mine to vibrating board of angry baby body in the blink of an eye — or the unfortunate utterance of some word he does not wish to hear.

But, truly, we have run out of any other explanation for those frequent moments when he starts making that whirring sound that signals the onset of a full-fledged tantrum unless the offending parent immediately stops what he or she is doing and gives him EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTS RIGHT NOW. He’s not running a temperature or showing any other signs of illness. He seems to have all his teeth (although I ventured to Mike this morning that I have read they get TWO sets of molars, which would explain the continuing flood of drool, like the particularly distressing stream that descended from Jake’s mouth to the top of his father’s head as Mike carried Jake on his shoulders through the Grove Park Inn yesterday evening). He’s sleeping well, eating well, and, yes, pooping well, as parents like to see and to tell people who really don’t want to hear about it. In short, he has no reason for being so cranky.

Except, of course, that he’s almost two years old. Old enough to have his own wants and desires. Old enough to communicate them with reasonable clarity. But not, alas, old enough to control his disappointment when he doesn’t get what he has so clearly communicated as a want or desire.

It’s at the moments when I find myself responding in kind that I wonder whether, in fact, it is too much to ask that he control his tantrums when I’m not so sure I’m capable of controlling mine.

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Giving and Receiving Toddler Style — In the Bathtub

Published

Melissa

on November 21, 2008

in Mama instinct, awareness, bath time, being connected to everything, communicating, compassion, expectations, following your heart, gratitude, inner beauty, inner peace, intentions versus goals, karma, opening your heart, the bigger picture and toddler tantrums

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Jake took a bath last night for the first time in a week.

This fact is notable for three reasons. First, he is generally quite fond of the tub, so a one-week boycott is a serious thing indeed. Second, the fact that I was able to ease him back into the tub wearing a swim diaper adorned with Winnie the Pooh suggested that he might one day overcome the Poop in the Bathtub debacle I inflicted on him, oh, last time he voluntarily took a bath. Third, of course, is that he has taught me a big lesson about giving and receiving.

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Just Let It All In

Published

Melissa

on November 19, 2008

in chattering mind, compassion, discomfort verus pain, inner peace, letting go, letting instead of making, opening your heart, practice, sleep, surrender, toddler tantrums and you can't control everything

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I experienced a whole new way of thinking at the end of yoga class yesterday.

I’d spent the past several days mulling over how I wanted to approach writing about continuing toddler-inspired sleep interruptions; guilty, crying morning-afters; plummeting four-season temperatures; and that frustrating in-between period where the choice between too-big maternity clothes and too-small normal person clothes reawakens all my body image issues, only now in a surround-sound, super-sized version.

The possibilities for enlightening lessons were plentiful. If nothing else, I reasoned, my struggles with winter, approaching-two-years-old, and pregnancy would be fodder for many a YogaMamaMe essay. I could offer endless pearls of wisdom about surrender and letting go of the myth of control and listening to your heart instead of your head.

And then, as Baby Lamar and I settled into savasana for our final relaxation, my teacher invited us to not only let it go, but to let it in.

This was a stunning concept to me, the last thing I wanted to do. I had made my way to class huddled deep in my beloved new winter coat, the faux-fur-lined hood pulled low over my eyes as if to mimic the direction in which my spirits plummet when cold weather approaches. In the last couple of years before I retreated from St. Louis to southern California — largely inspired by a Christmas day landing at LAX when I emerged from a frigid and snowy St. Louis morning into perfect 80-degree weather — I greeted with cries of despair the slightest bite in the autumn air, the brilliance of the changing leaves, and even the chance to wear a scarf casually draped around my neck (a style I love to curl into but one which makes you feel a bit silly when walking the streets of L.A. in flip flops). I dreaded those nights when I would wander through my house wrapped in a duvet avoiding the kitchen despite gnawing hunger pains because it was the coldest room in the house — and that was saying a lot. I cringed at how easily I would be reduced from a strong, independent woman who could steam the wallpaper off her own walls to a helpless little girlie who felt no shame in asking a visiting guy friend to take her trash cans to the curb on his way out on a particularly wintry afternoon.

The road from more recent California winter afternoons so mild I recall walking seven miles in a skirt and bare legs the December day I went into labor with Jake to persuading me I could survive The Rest of My Life back in winter was not an easily negotiated one. Mike promised me an air tight home where we gave no consideration to utility bills or the environment once the thermometer dipped below 50 degrees. He reminded me of how during our St. Louis courtship he gladly shoveled my walkway, scraped my windshield, and started my car for me in the mornings, and promised such chivalry was not dead. I considered the fact that our current car even has seat warmers, blessed, best-invention-ever, aptly named seat warmers. He regaled me with images of Jake going sledding, building a snow man, having snowball fights — all the things of which my warm childhood had deprived me.

Perhaps this was the clincher: the memory of when I was 26 years old and living in D.C. when snow shut the whole city down for the better part of a week. I was walking by a group of people lined up to sled down a perfect hill near my apartment. They carried flattened cardboard boxes, cafeteria trays, cheap plastic sleds I could easily have purchased nearby and which someone no doubt would have loaned me had I asked. But I didn’t ask. I was afraid to. Because, tempting as those whoops of childlike joy were, unexpected as this sense of urban community was, I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to sled and was convinced I would crack my head open running into a tree because no one would think to show me how to steer.

So, upon Mike’s suggestion, and after careful consultation of charts on weatherchannel.com, I proclaimed Asheville mild enough for me to winter there. At least until Mike and I become rich and famous and can spend whole winters in our second home near Santa Barbara.

There is, however, as we often forget until it’s too late, a big difference between imagining what 18-degree winter nights in a poorly insulated house feel like and actually feeling what they feel like.

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Zzzzz, or Do I Wake Myself Up or Honor My Exhaustion?

Published

Melissa

on November 12, 2008

in aging, change, compassion, expectations, letting go, nonharming, partners, practice, respecting your body, sleep, surrender and you can't control everything

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I do not deal well with exhaustion.

I feel demoralized, lazy, like I am squandering opportunities, watching the economy sweep the can-I-get-published? bus off the road and into the deep muck of a future in which Mike and I are — we know — crazy to imagine raising our children on freelancing and, even worse, journalism.

Mostly, though, exhaustion makes me crazy. Lying in bed in the middle of the night sobbing about my life gone wrong crazy.

Here’s the formula for a good dose of Losing Your Mind: start with a pregnancy that somehow doesn’t seem like an adequate excuse to, you know, feel tired sometimes. Add a toddler who, for reasons unknown, has suddenly shifted from champion sleep habits (for a 22-month-old) to a rash of 2 a.m. screams for parental affection. And, for good measure, toss in the fact that you never quite managed to get your act together to have storm windows installed last winter and are well on track for another several months wandering through the upstairs wrapped in a down duvet and avoiding blasts of arctic wind coming from the baby’s room.

That last bit requires some explanation. But, first, the background.

When Jake began yelling for me in the middle of Sunday night — Night One of our latest round of sleep struggles — I approached him with my usual strict and unsympathetic words. Phrases like, “It’s the middle of the night!” “Mommy’s tired!” and “Tell me what’s wrong!” produced little but a more stubborn gripping of the side rail on his crib and that heartbreaking attempt to glom onto me when I felt my job was to refuse such glomming lest it be seen as a reward for unacceptable behavior. My background in parenting, you must understand, stems from dog training, where such simple one-to-one ratios are generally accurate and effective.

Instead, I spent the next hour or two in my bed with a pillow wedged between me and my flailing and unhappy boy, waiting for him to fall asleep so I could plop him back in his crib and pray for him to sleep until 9. My prayers, incidentally, went unanswered.

Night Two, I pitted my own obstinance against his. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong,” I said sternly to his addled, sleepy face. “Use your words.”

He refused to speak, probably because he didn’t have many words in his half-asleep state.

Stubbornly, I refused to hold him. I sat on the floor in my tank top and underwear, certain I could wait him out.

“Does something hurt?” I asked periodically, more to keep myself awake than out of any sense that I would receive a meaningful answer. “Did something scare you?”

How, I still wonder, do I expect a 22-month-old to understand the concept of “nightmare”? I imagine him trying, with his impressive yet still limited vocabulary, to explain to me what exactly is wrong when it has vanished into the darkness of his familiar room. Can I blame him for giving up and instead seeking a warm, safe hug?

Yes, if it’s 2:00 in the morning and my son has won the battle of the wills, I certainly can.

After 20 minutes or so, I picked up him up by his armpits, holding him away from me as if he were one of the stinky diapers that had, these past few days, been causing a nasty rash that just might have been the culprit for this episode, and dumped him none too gently on the bed.

Not surprisingly, he wailed.

“Go To Sleep,” I commanded, turning my back on him.

Sadly, he tried. There is a certain distressing irony in the fact that my son’s strong desire to follow instructions is far more upsetting to me than if he were to ignore me and continue to try to scale the pillow barrier to burrow against me. Frankly, I’d rather lose the fight and have my son sleeping in my bed until he’s 16 years old than have to listen again to the whimper and frantic thumb-sucking that accompany the near-silence when I hiss at him to Go To Sleep.

And this sorrow, perhaps — this desire to fix the problem so I can sleep through the night and no longer feel exhausted and not take my exhaustion out on a not-yet-two-year-old who is probably awakening because of dreams of his mother abandoning him and is met upon his screams of sadness with further, real-life abandonment — is what led me down a deep, dark, crazy, I-want-my-old-single-life-when-my-biggest-responsibility-was-my-dog-back tunnel of depression.

You know just what I’m talking about, don’t you?

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