What I Learned in My First Mommy and Me Yoga Class

I’ve had this day marked on my calendar for weeks.  My first Mommy and Me yoga class.

It’s been just two days since Lily officially reached the Age Where I Can Take Her Into Public Places, and the prospect of the class was even more exciting to me than Monday’s foray into Target.  Purchasing diapers and Z Bars I could live without for another month if I had to; the only thing keeping me from Mommy and Me yoga this past month were those pesky flu viruses still floating around Asheville on the chill winds finally chasing winter away.

What I was looking forward to wasn’t so much a practice for myself.  I can manage those at home if need be — and did for all of six sun salutes and five rounds of navasana yesterday before Miss Lily intervened.  What Mommy and Me yoga offered that I hadn’t before experienced was a practice for the two of us, a time to share something beyond our daily routine of eating, holding, taking the occasional walk, and greeting Jake’s boisterous evening arrival with joy (me) and cries of annoyance (Lily).  And, of course, I was very  much looking forward to the company of adults who speak in real sentences, even if most of them are devoted to talking about their babies.

What I found, however, was something different, a lesson I haven’t yet approached in quite the same way in all the YogaMamaMe time I’ve devoted to the relationship between me and my children and my Self.  What I found — as, if I’m being honest, I so rarely find — was forgiveness.

Plan All You Want, But Be Ready for Something Else

The whole morning was geared to the big event.  My yoga clothes waited in the bathroom in case Lily should give me time to take a shower.  (Not a necessity when you are sharing space with other mothers of young babies, I know, but still the preferred mode in which to meet new people.)  I calibrated her feeding time to a before-and-after class precision.  (If there is any place I can feed her in public, surely it is in a Mommy and Me yoga class, but how much better to lose not one moment of our yoga-together time doing what we already do together nine or ten times a day.)  I even dressed her in her new pink bell bottoms with the ruffle at the ankles.  (The only long-sleeved top that matches is the dark brown one about which my mother complained at least three times during her weekend visit, but I happen to think she looks quite fetching in it.)

We dashed into the studio just a couple of minutes before 11:00, Lily snoozing in her car seat, swathed in her new furry blanket with the chocolate brown polka dots against the  — yes — pink background.  She complained as I took her out of the seat, but I hardly noticed as I happily spread out my yoga mat for the first time in a month.

I wasn’t even particularly put off by the fact that she kept complaining as the class went on.  True, it seemed as if she was the only one who found no pleasure in lying on the yoga mat as I leaned over her in a lunge.  But her crying was as accepted by all as the visits from the scoot-crawler with a fascination with smaller babies whose mother took appropriate care to head off any unfortunate expressions of over-enthusiasm around those too young to defend themselves.  Instead of the pointedly annoyed looks one’s crying child elicits at restaurants and on airplanes, the only attention Lily’s yells got her was a question about my finger-pacifier method.  Ah, how I love the accepting space of a yoga class, especially one full of exhausted, desperate-for-company, even-more-desperate-for-reassurance mothers.

There was a brief period when Lily seemed to really be digging yoga in a way her brother — he of the looped Krishna Das soundtrack during a protracted birth — emphatically did not.  (Only recently has Jake discovered the joy of yelling, “Plow pose!” as I pull his feet over his head.)  Reclining on a stack of blankets at the top of my mat, Lily locked eyes with me as I kneeled in table position over her, a liquid wisdom filling them as I lifted my right leg and left arm and felt energy course from one end of my body to another like a canopy over her small body.  “You’re doing yoga,” I cooed to her joyfully as I switched arms and legs.

Then we stood up for a Virabhadrasana I sequence and she decided she didn’t like this so very much any more.

Happily, the teacher took her for a walk around the room just about when we were getting ready for urdhva danurasana — the upward bow that no pregnant woman can perform.  Oh, the heaven of resting flat on my belly, then lifting my arms and legs to the sky, stretching stretched-out abdominals, lengthening a spine crunched by constant nursing, having my body be truly my own.  (Well, all of it except those milk-makers.)

Naturally, Lily started crying the moment the teacher returned her to me because, I figured, she needed to make me look bad.  Or maybe she just needed the pinkie pacifier I gave her as I chatted with the teacher about the things I thought I had learned in my first Mommy and Me yoga class:  surrender, giving up the need to know what is wrong and how to fix it that had been filling me since another long, long bout of fussiness last night, letting myself try things that might not work to calm her, letting motherhood be a yoga practice.  And, as the teacher beautifully added, letting my children see my own process of trying and sometimes failing so they learn about the course of life firsthand.

It was not, however, until I got into my car fifteen minutes and several new friends later that I discovered the true lesson.  As I turned the key in the ignition and glanced at the clock, my heart did a backflip.

It was not, as I had expected, a little after noon, the perfect time to head home and feed my baby girl.  No, it was 12:45 — fifteen minutes of chatting after the end of a class that lasted half an hour longer than I had thought.  In other words, I was very, very late in feeding my child.  And those cries that I had interpreted as over-stimulation, getting used to this new activity, needing a nap but fighting it — they were nothing more than the cries of a hungry baby falling on the not-really-listening ears of a mother who was horribly, no way to sugarcoat it, just plain in the wrong.

Forgiveness

The lesson, thankfully, came to me relatively quickly, as a matter of self-preservation if nothing else.

Much as I would have enjoyed spending the rest of the day moaning about how I had starved my hungry, crying girl, withholding the very boob for which she was asking so clearly, I had already done too much crying over my unforgivable lack of patience with my newly fussy girl, already tread plenty over the worn path of spinning out a one-month-old’s normal crying into a life of mother-daughter tension in which Lily, with the onset of adolescent hormones, will grow to hate me so deeply she will start bringing home rednecks with names like Jeb and Dix who listen to Rush Limbaugh and call me Ma’am.

So instead I tried something radically different.  I forgave myself.

Forgiveness, I realized as I sped down I-240 to my finally sleeping girl’s meal, is a different animal from letting go or accepting your limitations or being in the moment instead of reliving the past.  It’s not just moving on, recognizing the flow of life that is not all happiness and not all success but that marks these highs by the low points of pain and mistakes.

Forgiveness, I saw, is about actively handing yourself a gift.  It’s about acknowledging the mistake even as you allow yourself to move on.  Not merely saying, “Next time I’ll know,” or “She’ll be just fine,” although certainly there is beauty in doing all of these things.

On top of these gifts, forgiveness is looking your mistake square in the face, accepting it as your own avoidable, harebrained miscalculation, and … forgiving yourself for it.  Telling yourself that it is just plain okay.  That, yes, this tiny being who depends on your for food was disappointed.  That it is indeed your fault and no one else’s that she was hungry and fussy and angry.  And that it is simply okay.

So now, as I sit beside my girl sleeping away her full belly, I am not merely moving on from my mistake.  I am embracing the humanity in me that made it in the first place.  I am allowing myself to make mistakes as a mother, even though they will affect my children.

If my job is to never ever hurt my children, my only other option will be to hurt myself.  And while that option seems the more appealing of the two, the truth is that it’s just not possible.  I will make mistakes, my children will suffer some brief discomfort because of them, and I can choose to move on in the frenzied hope that I won’t do it again or I can calmly observe that — whoops — what I did was kind of stupid and probably avoidable and I can love myself anyhow and know that my children love me just as much now as they did before I — just for example — neglected to feed them because I thought the Mommy and Me yoga class was an hour long rather than an hour and a half.

The cool thing about forgiving myself in this way is that not only will my children continue to love me (as will my partner and my friends) but I’ll have an opportunity to acknowledge that I do, indeed, love myself.

Two-Way Heart Opening Pranayama — A Chance to Focus on Your Own Self-Love

Two-Way Heart Opening pranayama is in general a way to open your heart to the energy all around you. To me, this concept more often than not means connecting to the Universe, opening up to something larger than myself, taking in something from somewhere else — and offering my heart’s energy back in return.

For this round of the exercise, I offer you the opportunity to make it all about you.  As you connect to the energy that moves through your heart from the Universe around you, recognize your place in that Universe.  As you send out your heart’s energy, celebrate the beauty of your love.  Let it be about You.

And start to see that being all about You doesn’t have to be a selfish act.  Not when what you’re recognizing and celebrating is your ability to love yourself.  Because loving yourself makes it that much easier to love everyone else as well.

Two-Way Heart Opening Pranayama Instructions

Tagged as: mommy and me yoga, self-love, yoga and motherhood