I finished my taxes yesterday as Jake napped on the couch and the last hour of Waitress unwound on TiVo.
I say this not to brag but to point out that I am now ready to give birth.
I have repeated it many times over the past several weeks: “No, I’m not ready. I haven’t done my taxes yet.” (To put into context what might appear to be a distressing obsession with finishing my taxes nearly two months ahead of time, contemplate my due date of March 8 and count forward from there to April 15. Then think about doing taxes while you have a five-week-old in the house.)
I have said this half-jokingly, but with a deadly half-seriousness. Really, how can there be a woman who’s ever given birth who still has the lack of tact to ask a near stranger who apparently can be insulted at will by dint of her prominent belly, “Boy, you must be ready to have that baby!”
I don’t pretend to know what it is about a pregnancy that makes your personal life public — “Is it a boy or a girl?” ask people who will never, ever see this baby, whatever its sex; “Are you ready?” as if they will personally run down to Charlotte to do a Trader Joe’s run for me if I say I’m not; and, the new evolution from the strangers touching your belly without asking to the query whether it, um, would bother me if someone I’ve never met before does so. Like it’s so much less personally invasive if they ask first.
Since, as I say, I don’t begin to know why people do these things to a very pregnant woman who would really, really feel much happier if someone just occasionally said, “You look great!” instead of “You look HUGE!” this is not the subject I mean to tackle here. Just a much-needed tangent.
Rather, the fact that I really did not feel ready to give birth until finishing my taxes — and several work projects — seems to me to open up a realm of inquiry interestingly at odds with my failure thus far to pack a bag for the hospital or wash the infant clothes that have been put away for the past two years.
On the one hand, I figure this lack of preparation makes me an experienced mother and, therefore, someone who understands how little control I have. No planning months in advance for a baby that will come when it comes no matter how many miles I walk or Evening Primrose supplements I down, no desire to complain about the discomforts that naturally accompany having a baby head smushed in your pelvis for several weeks straight, no need to control when this child will make its appearance.
On the other hand, I have to admit that refusing to have a baby until my taxes are done smacks of a certain amount of falsely pretending to be in control. As if the baby will graciously wait so I don’t have to apply for an extension from the IRS between rounds of breastfeeding.
So Which Is It? Control or the Ceding Thereof?
Let me point out the obvious here: There is nothing that reminds you how little control you have like a baby.
I don’t care how many books you buy with tempting titles aimed at desperate new parents like The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours a Night or The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent’s Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age Five or The Lullababy Sleep Plan: The Soothing, Superfast Way to Help Your New Baby Sleep Through the Night … and Prevent Sleep Problems Before They Develop. If any of these methods works, it is only because you were lucky enough to have a baby who happens to sleep well.
And if you are so lucky — as, I hesitate to say here (for fear of rejection from other parents reading this and of tempting fate with our next), we were with Jake — you are not going to be so lucky on other fronts. You may, for example, get a baby who sleeps great because he is so very, very terrible at breastfeeding that you spend literally twelve of your sixteen waking hours every day for the first several months of his life feeding him and count a walk around the block as a sort of nirvana in which you are reminded of the concept of fresh air and a world that doesn’t look like the wall across from your customary seat on the uncomfortable and cold leather couch your husband has just purchased.
In other words, babies are human beings, and human beings are who they are, and there is not a human being on this earth, no matter how new to it, who has nothing better to do than acquiesce to someone else’s every need. Except, possibly, the mother of a newborn.
So, in this sense, babies are the ultimate yoga teachers. You are not in control. You will survive by remaining in the moment, coping with what is right in front of you, and not wasting energy by wishing it were different.
On the other hand, what’s this wisecracking I’m doing about not having a baby until after my taxes are done? And why, oh why, am I actually contemplating taking on another work assignment instead of putting my feet up and watching t.v. for the next two weeks straight?
In my mind, I think I’m establishing my awareness of just how lacking in control I am. Aren’t I the cool mom who isn’t bothered by her advanced pregnancy? Don’t I calmly smile to anyone who asks that I really don’t have any physical complaint that I’d complain about to anyone but my husband who is in the unfortunate position of having to hear me groan every time I roll myself off the edge of the bed to go to the bathroom six times a night? Don’t I say, over and over, that I don’t expect this one to be early?
It’s true that I learned my lesson last time, when I was unduly upset about having a December baby. After a wrenching year-plus of trying to get pregnant, I distinctly remember that March of the positive home pregnancy test when I told Mike that, without a doubt, this would be our lucky month because the one thing I didn’t want was a baby born in December. When Jake’s due date came back as December 9, I simply decided I would give birth two weeks early, ideally around Thanksgiving. I put all my body-conscious yoga skills to work convincing myself it would be so. And ended up very, very, very cranky as November 30 came and went, then December 9, then even the ridiculously late date of December 21, a friend’s birthday that he cavalierly suggested would be a good one for my son as well. Even the midwives were begging us to induce by the time I climbed the fence into our backyard while nine-and-a-half months pregnant because I thought I had forgotten my keys and went into labor that night.
Obviously I am not going to do this again.
But, equally obviously, I might not finish my new work project. I might end up going to the hospital with a hastily and poorly packed bag, seeing as I haven’t managed even this basic project yet. Our baby might spend a night or two sleeping in a dresser drawer if Mike doesn’t master the art of unfolding the co-sleeper or I don’t get to it myself. At the very least, you’d think I couldn’t resist taking a day off to wash and fold adorable teeny tiny baby clothes and getting all jellied and watery at the prospect of holding something so small it will fit into them. Nope, those Gerber onesie three-packs remain in their original plastic wrapping and, even worse, are still in the Target shopping bag in which I carried them home.
In a sense, I am beginning to see, I am trying to exert a different kind of control, a sort of “non-control control,” where I pretend to really get what this bit of yoga wisdom means but find myself unable to put it to work in a truly peaceful way.
In other words, I understand — I really do — that I’m not in control. But I don’t know how to live with that understanding.
How Many Children Will It Take Before I Do Get It?
The point of yoga, of course, is not the mastery of the concepts or the poses or even the ability to meditate, which I have forfeited to a future life because I know I will never truly master it in this one.
No, the lessons are in the practice. The moments of clarity when it all works. And the moments immediately following, where your mind says, “Wow! A moment of clarity!” and suddenly you don’t get it any longer because you’re thinking about it too much.
The greatest lesson, in fact, is in accepting with grace the give-and-take of learning and practice, in not becoming befuddled by the desire to keep a strong grip on all that you are learning. Because, you know, that would be trying to control what you can’t control.
It’s the hardest idea in the world, in a way: The only way you will be able to hold onto the lessons of yoga is by not holding onto them. Rather, you have to trust that they will keep returning to you. And that it’s okay if they don’t.
For example, hooray for me that I can sit in the midwives’ office and say with complete honesty and calm that I don’t expect to go into labor before my due date. Whoopee for me for the thrill of making an appointment for those last-minute highlights that will have to carry me through four or five months of unwashed hair a mere week before I am supposed to have this greasy-hair-causing baby in my arms. And the lovely agony of not knowing if I’ll really make it to that facial during my planned one-week total vacation? At least I’ll really, really enjoy it if it happens. And if it doesn’t, I’ll be too busy to realize.
At the same time, I will mean it when I say things like I need to finish my taxes and that I might take on that additional work assignment because — who knows? — maybe I’ll be a week late and get my vacation time regardless. Maybe I’ll keep pretending that life will continue on pretty much as it has been right up until that moment when the truth that it really won’t comes crashing over me.
Maybe I will be in tears, too depressed to eat, wondering once again who I am and how I got here when, some time this fall, I return to those first YogaMamaMe essays I wrote when I was wondering why, a year after my first child was born, I didn’t remember how to be me and was pretty much despairing of ever figuring it out again. And maybe this will be a good thing.
I can say that now, with the distance that is necessary when we’re figuring out wisdom in our heads (instead of trusting it in our hearts). Because when the time comes, I will be miserable and frustrated and completely out of balance.
But, for now, whatever the flaws in my understanding of what it means to let go of the concept of control, especially where a newborn is concerned, at least I have achieved a kind of balance, a place where I flow back and forth between understanding and not understanding, between trusting and thinking. That place we call practice.
The place this soon-to-be-born child of mine will live — as will I and the child’s father and the child’s big brother — for the rest of his or her life.
Uttita Hasta Padangustasana (Standing Head to Knee) — Challenging the Balance
I’m thinking here of really challenging your sense of balance.
For some people — like me — that could actually mean just working on vrksasana (tree pose), the simplest of the standing balances. In fact, at one point not that long ago in my practice, if you had challenged me to anything more advanced than vrksasana you would have guaranteed I lost any lesson in balance and trust at all because I would have become insurmountably frustrated and — this has actually happened to me in class — secretly tearful over my shameful inability to balance easily on one foot.
Still, taken in stages, uttita hasta padangustasana is like a journey for all levels of practitioners. Even the lovely rhythm of the sanskrit name reminds us of the cadence of the world around us, a beauty that often recedes from view the second we take a moment to look at it.
So take this one in stages. Remember, there are myriad variations, and you should try what works for your body and current state of mind. That could mean keeping the knee of your lifted leg bent throughout. That could mean stopping at any stage. That could mean concentrating not on staying in the balance but on falling out of it with grace and good humor.
In fact, find the grace and good humor in each step before moving on to the next. I know it’s what I can only hope to do once this thing called labor really does begin.