I’d like to think our ability to get the co-sleeper assembled (albeit standing on its side in a corner of our bedroom until needed) somewhat balances out my cavalier attitude toward having Mike drive two and a half hours to Charlotte to visit IKEA on Thursday night — three days before my due date.
To be honest, my only concern about him taking the trip was that I couldn’t figure out a way to do it with him. For all the laxity we’ve shown in actually preparing for the new baby, the one regret I have is not planning a day trip to Charlotte to visit Trader Joe’s. A set-up co-sleeper I could do without. Washed infant clothes? — they were washed a couple of years ago. But a lack of tart dried Montgomery cherries to tide me through those shut-in weeks? Akin to being without newborn diapers (something I am proud to report I purchased a full two weeks ago).
At any rate, I knew that if I did go into labor Mike would just have to turn right around and sweat out the drive home while I lay on the couch and hoped I had enough episodes of Sesame Street TiVo’d to keep Jake occupied. More importantly, I knew I wasn’t going to go into labor. I was just frustrated that I couldn’t take the chance with a leisurely two and a half hour trip of my own.
I also knew that if we didn’t get that king-sized, all-natural latex mattress for which IKEA charges about a third of what any place else we’ve tracked down charges by this weekend we would be sleeping in our old queen for quite some time to come. Not a big deal. Expect that our old queen is the only plan we had for getting Jake out of his crib and into a Big Boy Bed.
The plan, you see, was to pass on to Jack our old, off-gassed queen — perfectly suitable for a thirty-pound boy, a 150-pound teenager, and, somewhere along the way between the two, a parent on the nights when Jake is suffering illness or nightmares or just plain loneliness. The Big Boy Bed, then, is just our own.
Or, more accurately, as it has turned out, our brand new, king-sized, all-natural latex king — a lovely expanse of sleeping space on which I will (theoretically, since I’m not yet sleeping on it) no longer roll downhill toward Mike’s considerably greater impression on mattress springs. Yep, I can almost spot it there in Jake’s room from my jealous perch on our old, creaky, lopsided queen.
It actually makes some sense — our beautiful new mattress sitting cozily in Jake’s room while I continue to fight the pull of gravity every time I turn my belly toward the downward slope that leads to my sleeping husband. See, a co-sleeper requires a bed frame — something to which the co-sleeper may be anchored so as to, you know, keep the baby safe. Meanwhile, we decided that the bed frames being offered by IKEA: a) didn’t look so sturdy, and b) were unlikely to fit in the van Mike borrowed from his brother for the trip down to Charlotte.
So, until we find a suitable frame somewhere locally, Jake gets the cool, comfy mattress and I get to gaze longingly down at his tiny little body asleep in the middle of all that wasted space.
How Jake’s Big Boy Bed Is Helping Me Grow into a Big Girl
My first reaction upon seeing my beautiful new bed in Jake’s room, however, wasn’t jealousy. It was a jolting sense of my boy growing up.
Gone was the crib whose side could so conveniently be rattled as a wake-up call to Mommy in the morning (or, if I was less lucky, the middle of the night). True, the pediatrician counseled us to keep him in the crib until he could crawl out on his own and he never has actually done that — but I have no doubt he could if he cared to. Mostly, we’re going for the easy fix to the problem of him too frequently sleeping in our bed: have one of us sleep with him in his. (Will this appreciably benefit our marriage? I don’t see how, if sleeping with each other is the point, but at least I won’t have to go through the internal struggle of whether to try to awaken myself at some time during the night in the hopes of sneaking Jake back into his crib.)
A crib-less room is, frankly, a child’s room, not a baby room any longer. And lying on your child’s bed reading bedtime stories is sort of like spending the night at a friend’s house. My child is sharing his bed with me, rather than the other way around.
When all of this growing up stuff hit me as I stood there in Jake’s room on Saturday I expected to feel all teary and nostalgic, reluctant to give up my baby boy. But, honestly, I didn’t.
Sure, I can blame it on the fact that I’ve got a replacement baby waiting in the wings — a co-sleeper set to take its place as soon as the crib is put away. But I’d like to think that even without the impending sibling I’d still feel proud and thrilled and excited for Jake seeing his room adorned with a bed.
Resisting the Urge to Overthink when I Realize I’m not Overthinking
It just … feels right. And that word “feels” makes me proud and thrilled and kind of excited for myself too. Because it means I’m resisting the urge to think about it.
Really. How many times do you surprise yourself by not getting all maudlin over some change in your life? And how many of those times do you start gently nudging yourself toward that maudlin state, even if you feel kind of half-hearted about going there?
I looked at that Big Boy Bed and I thought, “Wow. Jake’s growing up.” And I felt a little tickle inside, wrapped up with his new ability to explain complicated concepts in multi-sentence statements delivered with great concentration and seriousness. And the way he flips through Go, Dog. Go. explaining what happens on certain pages in exactly the words written on them — not because he can read but because he has his father’s ability to recall phrases from books word-for-word while his mother is happy if she can remember the title of the one she’s reading at the moment. Or how he puts his own hats on hip-hop backwards or can play in the yard on his own or yells, “Quiet, dogs!” when they get riled up as our neighboring Rottweiler walks by before I can yell it myself.
And then, as the last drops of feeling trickled off my shoulders and my mind took over again, I thought, “How sad! My boy is growing up! He’s out of a crib! It’s a rite of passage!”
And then I thought, “Oh, come on.”
I don’t blame my mind — it’s what minds are supposed to do. Think. Analyze. Make reasoned decisions. And place strictures on life, ways of organizing the world, means by which we can simultaneously mark change and pretend that we don’t have to change if we don’t want to.
The truth is, change happens. In ways we recognize immediately — the Big Boy Bed — and in ways we don’t — when exactly did Jake start looking so much like a boy? It’s scary — and perhaps impossible — to contemplate all that change without trying to place an organizing theme around it. Stages of life. Stages of parenthood. Calendar years, school years, fiscal years, work weeks, weekends, daylight savings time, seasons, holidays.
I remember, in particular, one new years day in high school, when I was feeling all tragic and melancholy and generally fifteen-year-old-girl-ish. I blinked some wetness off my eyelashes and told a friend’s mother how sad it was to see 1981 gone, just like that. (In retrospect, of course, I’m glad to see all of the ’80’s gone, but that’s a different issue entirely.) An accountant, my friend’s mother just laughed. “It’s just a book keeping device,” she said, as if that solved the whole over-emotional teenaged mind-set thing.
It didn’t, and it doesn’t. But the very fact that human beings created the calendar for practical purposes is a useful concept. It’s a reminder that we create rituals where they don’t always exist, often with good reason, but always with repercussions. We become so comfortable with the concepts we use to structure life in a complicated world that we forget they are nothing more than concepts — things we made up that don’t exist but for our making them.
In other words, yes, the seasons will always change, whether we label them the seasons or not. But it is our labeling of them that renders the changing seasons so meaningful (or, when the season we’re changing to is winter, so soul-crushingly, why-did-I-consent-to-leave-California depressing for me). If our minds stayed out of it, we’d wear tank tops when we felt hot and winter coats when snow fell out of the sky and we’d just adapt and live and move with the changes.
Instead — since our minds are most certainly not out of it — we think about what lies ahead. Ah, warm days, the opening of the pool at the JCC, late summer evenings with the neighbors and grilling dinner on the deck.
See, thoughts can be good, happy, filled with gratitude. But they can also be anxiety-inducing: April 15 and taxes due; another birthday in August and aren’t I supposed to feel both upset and defiantly not upset with each year I creep past 40?; mosquitoes and sunburns and, inevitably, the sad end of summer and the threat of dark days and biting wind.
This, then, is very much how my mind was trying to work when I took a step back from adorning Jake’s Big Boy Bed with the body pillows designed to keep him from rolling off the edge of the mattress and spending the night on the hard wood floor. Happy thoughts: Wow, Jake is going to be so proud of himself. His room looks great. I can see the day, distant as it may be, when he will not want me in his bed any more than he would dream of getting into mine. And then, just as I’m lulled by the exercise of thinking, daydreaming, mulling it all over: But he’s growing up! He’s going to be a teenager soon! He’ll move out and leave his mother and I won’t have that sweet little head on which to plant kisses as he sits in my lap and I struggle to tie his shoelaces around my pregnant belly.
And don’t even get me started on the pregnant-for-not-much-longer belly or I’ll really go over the edge.
So, I guess, the yoga solution would be to work toward — always toward, never expecting complete success — training my mind. Not shutting it up because that’s not what minds are for. But not letting it run wild over what I’m feeling. Encouraging it to take a step back and let my feelings take the lead. Let me feel proud and happy and excited about Jake’s new bed.
Because, I’m pleased to report, he surely was when we settled down to read stories in it on Saturday night.
Pincha Mayurasana (Forearm Balance) — Giving Your Head a Break
You can stop right here, go the the Meditations page, and give your mind a lovely break.
Or you can consider taking on the challenge of pincha mayurasana (forearm balance), which not only gives your mind a break but does so by having you focus on opening your heart.
Your mind gets a break in part because, quite literally, you keep your head off the floor even as you turn upside down. Cool. You find your balance by focusing intently on the wall in front of you, not thinking about what you’re going to cook for dinner tonight. (If you don’t need to use a wall, you are advanced enough to focus without having one to look at.) And, as with any inversion, you’re turning yourself upside down in part to gain a new perspective — a new way of looking at and, yes, thinking about things. Then there’s that whole part of not listening to your better judgment about — gulp — turning your body upside down. What a rush when you do it despite your fears.
At the same time, pincha mayurasana requires a great deal of heart opening. Even if you feel comfortable only going as far as the preparatory stages, you are opening your heart. Jumping up and using the wall requires you to open your heart. Balancing — all about opening your heart.
And what better way to give your mind a break than by focusing on your heart?