Yesterday afternoon, I was like the Cheshire Cat, grinning and purring contentedly about how smoothly the first four weeks of Lily’s life have slid by.
Yesterday evening, I was Alice herself, “shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep, and reaching half down the hall.” Unlike Alice, who was understandably crying because she had suddenly grown to about nine feet high, I was less understandably sobbing about what a terrible mother I am and how bleak the prospect of my being any better at it over the next many months appears.
Primarily, I was crying because my girl wouldn’t stop crying. And I wasn’t trying to stop her, which merely led to more heart-rending screams on her part (and maybe on mine — no one else was around to witness them, so I can’t be entirely sure). Her screams led me to remember all the times I let Jake cry the same way when he was an infant. Which made me cry more instead of reassuring me that good mothers sometimes can’t deal with their babies’ crying and those babies turn out just fine anyhow.
Worst of all, I was feeling — how could any mother feel, much less admit, this? — resentful that Lily wanted to use my breast as a pacifier. (Perhaps, I discovered later, because the nail on my pinkie finger was just a sliver too long and likely slicing the top of the poor girl’s mouth when I offered her a finger pacifier as a substitute. Which thought makes me want to cry a little bit now.)
All this crying in front of my impressionable young infant made me — what else? — cry some more. Even though I knew, despite my state of utter unreasonableness, that she will not remember her mother crying hysterically in front of her. Didn’t matter. Surely I was damaging her delicate new psyche in permanent and insidious ways.
In short, in the space of a few hours, I went from thinking I had finally put all the pieces of my life into place to being quite certain I could not manage life or motherhood, especially the next two to four years of it.
And I realized that It Is Hard. Even when you find a place where it doesn’t feel like it.
What Really Changed?
It’s not that nothing changed between yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening. It’s that nothing but me changed.
Unlike yesterday afternoon, yesterday evening I was tired. Very tired. At about 5:30 it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a nap during that otherwise quite pleasant day. And that I need to take naps if I am to maintain a moderately sharp state of mind on even the generous-by-mother-of-an-infant standards of six and a half hours of interrupted sleep a night.
So I plopped Lily on my chest, rearranged clothing until we had achieved a lovely, warm, skin-to-skin status, snuggled my feet into the snuggle sack one of Mike’s co-workers made for us (the Partridge Family version, he explained, adorned with bright bricks of color bordered by thick black lines, like the Partridge Family bus), and settled back for a good, deep, my-body-aches nap. I was aiming for something like the ones I had managed on the two previous days, where you open your eyes and can’t quite swim into a present where an entire hour has somehow passed in the space of a few minutes.
Lily, however, had other plans. She scrabbled at my chest, pumping her arms and legs as if ready to crawl. She snuffled against my breasts in that rooting action that inspired my unfortunate resentment over her desire to use my breasts as pacifiers. And she cried.
None of this was unreasonable. Lily, as she was plainly telling me, was not on board with this nap. She had, after all, napped peacefully through an entire therapy session and my first foray into Target since her birth. She had slept through an episode of Brotherhood on the DVD I received because Mike wisely refused to cancel the Netflix membership I declared was making me anxious during that first week of Lily’s life when everything — especially the idea that I had a queue of DVD’s I had to wade through — made me anxious. She saw no reason to nap again now when the night was just getting started.
You’d think I would have figured this out, or — since it’s likely I knew what was going on but just chose not to acknowledge it — tried to find out what might stop her cries. But being dead tired and set on a nap — desperately, needfully desirious of a nap — can interfere with higher brain function.
Instead, I snuggled her in different positions. I stuck my pinkie finger (with the wickedly outgrown fingernail) into her mouth. I spoke to her sternly. (Oddly, this did quiet her down for several moments, during which the guilt I felt grew so great that sleep became impossible.) I put her in the swing and slept for a blessed ten minutes on the couch next to her before she decided she’d had enough of that particular diversion. But mostly, I listened to her cry. And when Mike got home, I cried to him.
As I said, the only thing that changed was me. Lily has been remarkably consistent about choosing evening as her fussy time. Usually the part of the evening when I would like to sit down with my husband and son for dinner. Most nights, I help her find a comfortable position in my lap and awkwardly try not to spill spaghetti sauce on her forehead as I lean over her to reach the table. But some nights — about twice a week as it’s shaping up — I find a much bigger crisis to focus on.
Last Thursday, it was the fear that I’m suddenly not producing enough milk, dooming my baby to a choice between starvation and some truly evil-tasting formula. (I know. I’ve tried it.) The time before that it was the certainty that the brief period during which I could boast a good sleeper had abruptly ended, and the next six months of my relative sanity with it. And last night it was the plain fact that my child needed more of my attention than I was willing or able to give her. Because, don’t you know, I am not fit to be the mother of a one-month-old.
That each of these episodes had a complete logic to it, as well as a crushing forecast of the many, many days until we reach toddler-hood and the power of speech, does not make any one of them any more or less real than reality.
Which is simply this: Lily is a baby. Babies are happy one moment and not happy the next. Babies don’t know what it is that will make them happy. Neither, often, do their parents. This is why babies cry. This is why parents cry. How far we want to spin out those tears, however — that is the differential factor.
When I’m well rested, you see, when the sun is shining and the house is warm and, yes, I have time to sneak in a YMM essay, a little fussiness means nothing more than that I will have to get creative. Try out the swing in my office (where my beautiful girl is sleeping peacefully at this very moment). Set up the mobile that provided me with the time for many a blessed shower during Jake’s early months. Manage to shift my butt from my favorite spot on the couch to a perfectly comfortable chair in the very same living room with a perfectly decent view of the t.v. set and a new window to fascinate Lily even though moving there seems so very, very difficult sometimes.
Nothing’s changed. Except my ability to act calmly, quiet the doomsday premonitions ricocheting through my brain, and not devolve into tears just because I have a fussy baby. Who, by the way, so tired herself out crying last night that she and I got a full five hours of uninterrupted sleep. In mother-of-a-newborn years, that’s like a fourteen-hour night of dreamless slumber. So maybe I’ll remember that next time and not cry so much myself.
Or maybe — probably — not.
Not Getting Caught Up in Your Circumstances
It is a cruel trick of our modern life to believe that we can change our circumstances. Pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Fulfill our Horatio Alger potential. Be in charge of our own destiny.
And who wouldn’t think this way? Half the front page of the newspaper is devoted to articles about the stimulus plan that will fix our broken economy. The other half covers the government programs the new Administration is patching back together in an effort at fixing our broken world — programs ensuring people’s health, education, housing. Many of us went to college and even grad school at a time when a degree meant you got a job and a job meant you could afford a house and a Mazda Miata (J.D. 1993, anyone?) and a Mazda Miata meant all would be right with your world.
But the truth is, we can’t change our circumstances so much as our approach to them. Sure, we can switch jobs if we’re miserable in one. But first we have to assess where the misery is coming from and whether a new job will truly banish it. Not if what’s really making us miserable is letting a job define who we are.
We can move to a new city (I know a thing or two about this one, having done it, oh, eight times since college graduation), find a new partner, buy a hot new outfit, start going to yoga more regularly. All we’ve really done is put ourselves into a new set of circumstances. We haven’t actually changed the ones that were bringing us down, just left them behind.
Sometimes that’s what we need to do.
But we also need to see clearly that this is truly the solution. Because sometimes — most of the time — it’s not the circumstances that are bringing us down so much as the space we let them take up in our lives and our minds.
For example, when I was working at a law firm, I didn’t have the space to be anything but unhappy. I was there a lot of hours. (Not 80 a week, and not even that many weekends to be honest. But still the majority of every waking day.) I was thinking like a lawyer most of the time — which means thinking and manipulating events and distancing myself from reality without even knowing it. I was wearing suits that literally constricted my motion and heels that made me walk a different way and kept my feet from touching the earth. I was spending way too much time under fluorescent lights and in recirculated air and gazing out tinted windows that don’t open into the world outside. No wonder I was unhappy. And no wonder I had to leave those particular circumstances behind.
Yesterday evening, on the other hand, I had the space to find my happiness. Maybe I needed a little bit of sleep to help with it, but all the evenings Lily has been fussy and I haven’t are proof that it wasn’t about the circumstances. It was about my state of mind.
It’s not always easy to distinguish when your mind is telling you you’re unhappy and when your heart is. Which is where the aforementioned yoga class comes in. Your circumstances won’t change when you start going to it regularly. But, if you practice, your mind will calm, you will learn how to experience discomfort without running away from it, and you will — slowly, always as a practice — learn to observe your circumstances rather than being caught up in them.
So, with a little rest and a little practice, I can see that mothering a one-month-old is hard. It is always hard, even when I feel good about it. I will be tired until Lily turns twenty. I will constantly question the choices I make as a parent. I will cringe every time I lose my patience or my temper or my mind. And then I will feel better and I will feel joy that I have two children and I will see the pieces of my life fall into place.
Nothing will have changed, really. Just my ability to observe with wonder the circumstances in which I find myself.
Virabhadrasana III (Warrior III) — Observe and (Maybe?) Balance
It is likely that Virabhadrasana III, or Warrior III, is, for me, the most difficult of all asanas to observe with detachment. Because when I’m doing it I never know if I’m really balanced. I never can tell if my body forms that perfect T that almost everyone else seems to achieve effortlessly. I’m never certain if my hips are square, my gaze is focused, or, dammit, if I’m going to be able to maintain the pose beyond the very nanosecond in which I find myself.
Perhaps you have another pose that this describes. If so, feel free to use it for this exercise.
What I invite you to do — whether in Virabhadrasana III or some other asana — is simply to observe. Not to judge yourself based on your ability to engage the pose. Not asssess your entire yoga practice based on your ability to perform a single asana. Not let yourself get caught up in the circumstances of this one pose.
This is truly yoga: to take a practice (in this case an asana practice) and to find the practice of your life in it. To recognize, over and over again, where your circumstances end and you begin.