YogaMamaMe.com

Here is how not to get ready for your baby girl’s first day of daycare:

First, while it might seem like a good idea at the time, I do not recommend spending the previous week visiting your mother-in-law in St. Louis, having a lovely time, receiving lots of help with child care, and generally forgetting why you so desperately wanted to leave your baby somewhere you are not for a few hours every day in the first place.

If you insist on having that lovely vacation talking to adults and taking showers whenever you’d like (if, say, like me, you are facing a week when your son’s school is closed and you do not feel the least bit equipped to care for a two-and-a-half-year-old in addition to a three-month-old all by yourself to the point where you are kind of even looking forward to an airplane ride with the two of them if it will free you from this prospect), try very hard not to have the airline lose your bags on the way home.  I seriously doubt the vintage-1983 car seat United loaned us was the cause of Jake’s sudden awakening to howls of apparent pain on the long ride back from the Greenville airport, but the situation was far from an ideal end to our trip.  Furthermore, I suffered a general sense of discombobulation on my one-day buffer between travel and the start of school and, worse, didn’t get a chance to wash the darling dress in which I had planned to have Lily begin her new adventure, having rather stupidly packed it.

Try, too, to approach your last day before school starts on more than five hours of sleep or, if that is simply  not a possibility in your infant-caring days, consider not dragging yourself cheerfully to the swimming pool to thoroughly exhaust yourself, your three-month-old daugher, and your two-and-a-half-year-old son.  Especially do not follow this frivolity with shopping for groceries on your last few molecules of adrenaline while your husband whips up a beautiful meal for a visiting friend with whom you sit on the deck enjoying the evening air until past nine o’clock only to face the prospect of cleaning up and making your son’s lunch in a sleep-deprived stupor that greatly disappoints the friend who was quite reasonably hoping for a little conversation as he loads the dishwasher.

Most importantly, however, you should never, ever, ever wait until ten o’clock the night before your daughter’s first day of daycare to discover that you own only a single bottle suitable for her dining enjoyment while at school.  Because that means you will spend the morning before she starts in a bit of a panic trying to fit her nap in before a mad rush to Target to buy more bottles, which must be sterilized at home while she waits patiently in her car seat (on the kitchen floor, not in the car; no need to call Child Services) so you can rush unceremoniously into her new school out of breath and utterly disorganized.

Of course, I could have done everything right, taken all my own advice, had her diaper cream purchased and labeled twenty-four hours in advance, and none of it would have mattered.  Because nothing else in the world matters when you leave your darling, tiny infant sleeping in a strange crib and walk across the street without her to your car, your heart singing in pain as something that feels like a serrated paring knife neatly severs it into big, raw, hurting pieces.

Is There Any Way It Could Hurt Less?

I am about as lucky as a mother leaving her child at daycare for the first time could possibly be.  Jake spent over a year with these wonderful women, and I trust them with all my heart.  It’s even possible that I cried more when Jake left their care than I am crying now putting Lily in it.

So, too, I live a mere half mile away and am clutching my cell phone close to me so I can be ready to return for any reason at all — to bring that blanket from home they suggested, to nurse her when she won’t take a bottle, to hold her in my arms when I just know she needs her mother.

And I have no reason to think she will awaken frightened and alone.  She’s still at the age when a stranger holding her is merely a coveted new experience — and new experiences are something of which she simply can’t get enough these days.

Indeed, during the hour and a half I spent settling her in she made it amply clear that this is a place she loves.  She offered her best impish grins for everyone, opened her eyes as wide as they could go as if to let in even more new sights, and demonstrated loudly for all just what a good talker she is.  She watched her new colleagues — all many months older than she — with a focus that suggests she is figuring out just how to keep up with them even as she relishes her status as the baby girl of the infant room.

In short, I am sure that Lily will be just fine.  It’s myself I’m trying to make more comfortable in the transition.

The Highs and the Lows and the Sweetness in Both

This is one of those situations where you logically know that you should feel disheveled and overly emotional and like you might just throw up the watermelon you ate for a late lunch because it was the only thing you could imagine ingesting when you walked in the front door all alone, the memory of the soft lines of your angel’s sleeping face making your arms ache to hold her weight even if it means never going back to work again.

And if someone else were suffering what I am right now, I would talk her through it with the same words I can conjure up for myself just as easily.  The difference is that we all know words of comfort are nothing more than some low dosage Bayer when some good old emotional Percoset is what we really need.

And so I remind myself of the alternative.  The never working again part.  The only reason I’m offering it to myself is because I know it’s the last thing I want.  Or need.  No matter what my hormones are telling me.

This is not, of course, the first time I’ve listened to my own needs since Lily was born.  It is, for example, a whole lot easier with your second child to acknowledge your bladder’s existence even if your helpless little one is screaming like her lungs are on fire for a slug of breast milk.  Nor am I above shifting the baby sleeping in my lap to her father’s arms so I can go get him a free beer at Grant’s Farm (Mike already having exhausted his own two-free-beers-because-we’re-owned-by-Anhauser-Busch limit) even though I am quite certain the move will wake her up far short of the full nap she needs.  And I’m even willing to admit that I leave the swing on to keep her sleeping well past her necessary nap time if I have something I’d like to finish writing.

So, really, how different is it to acknowledge that I need a few hours in the day when I don’t have to be a mother and can instead be a writer, a lawyer, or merely someone with clean laundry?

Life isn’t all about clear, easy choices — green grass and happiness over here, cold, hard cement and broken dreams over there.  There is an element of sadness in everything that makes us happy — the greater the happiness the more intense the sorrow when it’s over.  As I tell Jake every time we drag him from a friend’s house or the pool or Grant’s Farm in a flourish of tears, it’s sad to leave something you love.  It’s even sadder when that something is a someone.  Like your baby girl.

But there couldn’t be the happiness without the sadness.  If happiness were our constant state, how would we know we were happy?  How can you have a high when you’re never low?  How could life be sweet — as sweet as children and lovers and good, long-lasting friends can make it — if we didn’t sometimes have to wander through some parts so bitter it makes us want to spit?

This is a very small part of what I think Buddha meant when he said that to be truly enlightened one must let go of attachments to all earthly things, especially those that make us feel good.  In choosing these attachments — especially the really important ones like family and friends — we are accepting the pain that comes from losing them.  If we don’t want to face the pain — if we are truly ready for enlightenment — then we have to be willing to forgo the kind of happiness that makes the pain necessary.

I, for one, am definitely not ready for enlightenment, not in this life.  The joy of discovering motherhood is too much what life is about for me right now — my path toward enlightenment but not of it.  Sure, it provides me with a seemingly bottomless bounty of opportunities to suffer from angst and self-doubt and just plain paring-knife-in-the-heart pain.  But I make the bargain when the happy stuff is facing me — the positive home pregnancy test; the quiet time to write at my desk instead of in stolen fifteen-minute-chunks on the couch; the promise of everlasting life offered by the devil himself.  (No, I haven’t made that last one, but the analogy is apt.)

It’s a deal I’ve made, and one I don’t for a moment regret.  I know in my heart that, for me, a few hours a day to be something in addition to a mother will complete me.  Just as I know that every day for a long, long, long time, I will cry when I leave my darling Lily at daycare.

Sun Salutations Save Me

I didn’t have much time for yoga this morning, what with Lily going down for her nap later than usual so that I knew I’d have to wake her up early to make it to Target for the bottles I didn’t buy during those three months when she wasn’t starting daycare today.  But the very fact that I didn’t have time for yoga meant I needed it more than ever.

So I promised myself just a dozen Surya Namaskar, or traditional sun salutations.  Nothing fancy, no add-ons, no pushing.  Just the rhythm of breathing in and out, opening my heart to the world around me and bowing deeply inward to myself, offering and surrendering.  And as I focused on the beauty of each step, as I fell into them without thinking, I let the pressures and worries and bottles leave my consciousness — imperfectly and in small moments but gone nonetheless — and achieved what yoga is really all about:  some time to meditate on the moment in which I find myself.

Surya Namaskar Instructions