Jake’s little sister arrived on Friday, proving that Friday the 13th isn’t so very unlucky after all. Unless, that is, you find it the least bit unlucky to have only 3 hours of labor to produce a nine-and-a-half-pound baby. I prefer to use the word “intense.”
A good word, as well, to describe the feeling of bringing a newborn home to meet the two-year-old Big Brother you love so much you sometimes feel the air literally being squeezed from your lungs when you think about it.
The intensity, to be perfectly clear, is all my own. Jake has taken it all in stride.
He arrived home with his sitter on Saturday evening to give Mike and me both big hugs. “Baby Lily,” he said sagely when he saw her sleeping in her moses basket. “That’s my sister.”
Did I mention that I love his sitter?
He was thrilled with the toy guitar Lily gave him, and mugged greatly for us in Elvis-ian poses, showing not the least bit of interest in competing with or pouting about his sister, or even remotely suggesting we do something a two-year-old might do like throw her in the trash. Instead, that day and every day since, he prefers to pet her head — in what Mike has termed the “giving of the benediction” — and — somewhat more alarmingly — to offer her gentle head butts, which are the height of playful affection for him.
In short, Jake is doing really well with the transition.
I’m the one who’s struggling.
The Unknown
There is nothing the least bit remarkable about a five-days-postpartum mother with raging hormones feeling a bit, um, anxious about her new situation. That does not, however, make the anxiety any easier to handle when it is coming at me like an angry mob out to kill Frankenstein’s monster.
The most obvious focus of my anxiety is, of course, the unknown. How can I give Lily the same love and attention I have given Jake? Have I stolen Jake’s place in the center of my universe? WHAT IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS SANE HAVE I DONE????
But the unknown isn’t really all that bad. I mean, I can worry about what I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to make me so anxious. Maybe because most of what I don’t know is Lily. While not knowing her can be frustrating — “She’s telling me she wants to eat but she won’t EAT,” I whined to Mike last night as I tried over and over and over again to latch her on without inadvertently choking her in my frustration — but it doesn’t make me panic. Because I don’t have thoughts of what I think will happen or am afraid will happen or wish could happen again. I just don’t know anything.
For example, today, as I offered Lily a meal, she took a few delicate sips, declared it lovely, and then daintily decided she’d rather use me as a pacifier than a carafe at the moment, thank you very much. I don’t know why she did this. Jake never did. I’ve never heard of another newborn who’s rejected a meal three hours after her last one. And, perhaps most importantly, I don’t know whether allowing her to eat on demand means I will be allowing her to shift her demand to the nighttime.
There is only one thing I do know — that I very much do not want to be used as a pacifier. Not now, not ever.
This is about the only part of the known that does not make me panic at the moment.
The Known
It is, without a doubt, the known that has sent me on several nights running like a mother hippo barreling toward the Zambezi river into Jake’s bed for a cuddle that stops my shaking and lets the tears finish in a quick, hysterical flood.
In fact, my panic attacks seem to have to do with all the things I know about Jake.
For example, I think back to what Jake was like at Lily’s age. And I panic because he is no longer Lily’s age and because I oddly miss him being Lily’s age even though I was spending nearly every hour of every day having Mike stick a syringe in the corner of his mouth as he “nursed” because he wasn’t getting enough to eat and Mike and I were both sleep deprived from having to repeat this ritual every two hours without a break and depressed and not really available to enjoy our new child. So, really, I can’t say I remember what Jake was like at Lily’s age.
But that doesn’t stop me from lamenting the infant he was and wondering how on earth I can ever go through every little excruciating step it took to get past the other tough times and to the point where we have this incredible, gorgeous, fun, funny child.
And knowing how great he is now makes me panic anew because I miss him and I miss taking him to school and picking him up and all the time we used to spend together, even if some of that time was spent with me trying to figure out how to keep him occupied because he didn’t seem quite so easy to take care of before I had a newborn to remind me how much easier a semi-self-sufficient toddler is. Or, if not easy, at least amusing.
And then I panic over the passage of time generally and how my children will grow up and how I will very much want to them grow up at many stages — teething, anyone? four months old and needing stimulation but unable to sit up, grab anything, or otherwise be stimulated without the help of a very bored, frazzled, guilty-feeling mother? — and how I will feel terrible for wanting them to grow up at the same time.
And I panic because I know there will be more difficult times ahead. And I panic because I know there will be happy, beautiful times that I will miss when they are gone. And I panic because I will one day not have chidren any longer, and I panic because for a long, long, long time I will have children and will have to calibrate the rest of my life for that.
I panic because I remember just how desperate I was to find myself again by the end of my first year of motherhood with Jake. And, therein, I find one little security blanket of hope to grasp as the hormonal tide of panic washes over me yet again. Because it was at the end of that year, in the throws of losing my mindfulness, that I found YogaMamaMe.
Who would ever have imagined it? Not me. Not the concept, the execution, and how good and centered and, yes, mindful YogaMamaMe makes me feel.
Which just goes to show that it’s the unknowable — not the known or the unknown — that rules how our lives unfold.
The Unknowable
The unknowable is really what we strive to surrender to in yoga.
Sure, we surrender to the things we know but can’t control, and the fact that we don’t know the things that are unknown to us.
But the unknowable is more than either of these. It encompasses what we know because in our limitations we think we understand what we know. We don’t. The unknowable is what will come from the known.
So, too, as much as we may think there is nothing more to the unknown than what is — unknown, duh — in fact what is beautiful about the unknown is the unknowable part of it, the stuff we still wouldn’t know even if we were perfectly prescient.
The unknowable is how it will feel as our family gels, how Lily and Jake will become siblings, how my life will be sweeter despite the hard times that parenting brings. It is, as I think about it, the reason we become parents. As I said to my sister-in-law yesterday as I whined about my small children growing up one day, it’s not like I had kids because I am particularly into kids. I’m not. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just like grown people — I like some of them and others leave me flat.
No, I had kids because of some unknowable sense that it made me happy to do it. Because of an undefined feeling of the family that I would create — not one I could see years ago any more than I can see it now with the children right in front of me. Just that feeling of family, of what path my life is taking, of what feels right.
It’s a feeling, I suppose, the unknowable. It’s certainly not a thought or anything else that comes from the head — like the known or the unknown. Nor, like the known or the unknown, should the unknowable cause the sort of panic the known and unknown have been causing me. Because panic is generated in the head — especially the hormonal kind that is laying me low these days.
The unknowable, I think, is what keeps us going, even as so many of us find it easier to pretend there is no such thing. Those pesky minds can’t wrap around the unknowable. Instead, they feed us the known, they dwell on the unknown, and they tie us up in knots, distracting us from opening to the unknown, the divine, the Universe that always has a path for us, even if it does sometimes take us through murky, hormonal, anxiety-stricken times.
Sleep and Yoga
Since new parenthood is best known for a lack of sleep, it seems worthwhile offering a few words about how important sleep is to a full, living yoga practice.
Plus, we all like to sleep, so here’s one bit of practice I can offer to anyone who reads this.
The wisest words I heard about sleep came, not surprisingly, from the Dalai Lama. I went to see him speak when I was pregnant with Jake and still attribute Jake’s sunny easy-going-ness to the fact that he meditated in utero with the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama told us a story about being in Germany to give a talk. He described — in that sweet, gentle, giggling way of his — how he settled down to sleep early in the night, as he does. And then he heard it: “BOOM, boom, boom, BOOM.” Apparently, a nightclub occupied the lower floors of the hotel where he was staying. A nightclub that was open, as is no doubt the norm in Europe, all night, or nearly so.
The Dalai Lama described feeling some sense of frustration over his sleep interruption. But, being the Dalai Lama, he turned his story into one of compassion for the people in the nightclub. “How can they stay up all night?” he said he asked himself. “How will they function in the morning?”
Only with proper sleep, he explained, can we find ourselves calm and centered. Without enough sleep, we succumb to the over-demands of a life lived by cell phones and blackberries and too much to do in too little time. Which suits sleep-deprivation pretty well, since you sort of careen from task to task shallowly doing what needs to be done without having the energy to really focus or maybe care.
I know this because it is what I am doing right now, which means I should probably apologize for what I have written and for taking your time up as you read it in fruitless search of something entertaining. Probably not my sharpest post to date.
And this, perhaps, proves my point. I have no choice but to move slowly in deference to my sleeplessness right now. But one day (one day far in the future, which very thought makes me want to cry and throw up and generally panic again), I will have the opportunity to sleep. Eight hours every night.
Will I take it? If my mind is on the path of yoga, of having the wisdom and the energy to slow down and treat my body well, I will.
If I’m still in the throes of the part of parenthood where you don’t get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, I will take a deep breath, remember that it is all about the beautiful unknowns of family, and look forward to a day where I might sleep again.
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I’m trying to describe to my beautiful girlfriend what it’s like to be a parent. No one describes the ups, downs, ins and outs better than you. Your blog is a breath of intelligence tempered with emotion!
What a beautiful thing to say. And so appreciated right now as we deal with the possibility of feeding problems, the definite sleeplessness, and the other wonders — beautiful and not so beautiful — of a brand new baby.