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Shabbat starts in ten minutes.

In ten minutes, Jake will sing and dance.  He will yell, “Shabbat, shalom, hey!”  He will smile and mug and everyone there will tell me what fun he has in Shabbat.  He may even sit in another parent’s lap with one of his friends.

He will not sit in my lap because I will not be there.  I will be home with my daughter who seems to have developed a weird aversion to going to sleep at the times she normally does.

For example, much as she may have been fretting and telling me she was ready for her usual 9:30 a.m. nap this morning, after happily nursing herself to sleep her eyes popped open the moment I tried to shift us off the couch.  We tried nursing again.  She pacified without eating and once again those eyes popped wide open the moment I tried to move.  She is at this very moment very much awake in her swing and not looking particularly primed to fall asleep.

Which makes me moan even more about missing Shabbat because there is no way I can get dressed and to Jake’s school with his wide awake sister in the six minutes remaining.

Instead, I must sit here writing about how I want to go to Shabbat.

Why Plenty of Time Never Is

Jake has been attending Shabbat every Friday morning for six months now, so you’d think I would have snuck in, say, before Lily was born.  Except that Jake expressly forbade it.

He did not begin inviting me until his little sister diverted much of my attention — a matter about which he has been remarkably, if not perfectly, patient.  For the past several weeks now, he has graciously invited me to Shabbat.  I have considered the fact that it usually falls right in the middle of Lily’s morning nap and have had to graciously decline.

“I promise I’ll go to Shabbat one day,” I say, my mind racing ahead to figure out when that one day will be.  When Lily is in full-time daycare, I suppose, and that’s not something I’m anxious to rush.  Unless, that is, she gives up her generous morning naps, as she is currently advising me she intends to do.

One could point out that Jake will be going to Shabbat every Friday morning for the next three years, so there will be plenty of opportunities for me to go.  But he will never be two-and-a-half at Shabbat again.  He will never dance with the same lack of self-consciousness or sing the songs more based on pronunciation than any understanding of what the words mean.  He will soon figure out that “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” goes “up above the world so high,” not “up, up, up the world so high,” accompanied by appropriate hand gestures.

Jake will, in short, never be what he is again.  And neither will Lily.

I suppose it would have helped to remind myself of this sweetly devastating fact last night as I tried to appreciate both of them for an evening of single parenthood, as Mike worked the night shift.

It started off rather promisingly.  Lily fell asleep in the car on the short drive home and had a lovely snooze in her car seat on the front porch while Jake and I ate watermelon and talked on the phone with his aunt in Los Angeles.  This, I reckoned, I could handle.  No need to hire a sitter.

Then Lily woke up.  Which required a tad more juggling, as Jake was unwilling to cede any of the space in the chair we were sharing to accommodate Lily’s nursing, and I found myself without a free hand to swat at the mosquitoes dining off of me at least as voraciously as my daughter.

This was also the moment she began to express displeasure at being removed from the breast when she had finished eating.

I have a conflicted relationship with the breast-as-pacifier concept.  I was warned soon after Jake’s birth not to tolerate it.  Easy advice to follow because he was never terribly into the whole nursing thing.  So I didn’t think much about applying the same principle during Lily’s first few months, when she was willing to accept the substitute of my pinkie finger.  Or at least too young to protest with much force.

Lately, however, she looks at me cross-eyed when I offer her the pinkie.  And it just seems so simple to give her the boob if that’s what it will take to get her to sleep.  If, say, I am all alone and must get Jake fed and into bed — a process that I was certain would be made infinitely simpler if his sister were not a part of it.

So I surrendered.  I let her chew on me while I chewed on my pasta at dinner time.  She stayed awake.  I put her in the swing when it came time to get Jake ready for bed.  She stayed awake.  I took her in the bathroom with us for teeth brushing and face washing.  She loved it.  She loved hanging out on Jake’s bed while we read books as well.  The first few, anyhow.

But when it came time for Curious George, Lily was having none of it.  She cared not a whit about the little monkey who was always very curious.  She was tired and she wanted to nurse.

“Go to sleep, Lily,” Jake suggested, as he had heard me suggest many, many times already during the course of the evening.

“Please go to sleep,” I pleaded, cursing Mike’s employers and drafting his resignation letter in my mind.

Lily preferred to nurse.  And nurse.  And nurse.  While Jake sadly flipped the pages of his Curious George book carefully whispering questions about why George was hurt (”He jumped from the fire escape and landed on the pavement instead of the soft jungle ground,” I explained) and then yelling excitedly at the picture of all the pigs escaping.  (”Shh!” I hissed rather too harshly as Lily’s eyes popped open yet again.)

Finally, Jake had to give up on having Mommy read Curious George.

“Do you want to turn out the light and try to sleep?” I asked hopefully.

Jake reaching for the light switch was the first moment of relief I had felt all night.  And it was almost complete when Lily’s eyes closed and she relaxed — finally, finally, finally — into sleep.

It was quite enjoyable lying on Jake’s bed in the dark, the slant of the ceiling overhead, the cooling night air shifting through the windows, and, best of all, Jake pressing himself against me while Lily dozed on top of me.  I thought about how lucky I was to be lying there with my children and told myself I had no reason to be frustrated.

Except, of course, I was.  Objectively, it shouldn’t be any big deal to deal with two young ones on my own.  People do it all the time.  It shouldn’t be difficult to nurse as often as Lily wants it.  Maybe I’m not the norm (and, to be honest, I suspect I’m more the norm than I think), but I get a bit resentful after a certain amount of having my nipples chewed on.  Just doesn’t rouse the maternal instinct somehow.

Most of all, I think, I shouldn’t need time alone in the house with my children asleep.  I have time alone when they’re at school, don’t I?  So what that I’m working and grocery shopping and running back to pick them up for every second of that time.  So what that I haven’t had more than 10 minutes to read or watch television or just stare at the ceiling in months.  So what that when I stumbled downstairs at 9:30, half asleep myself, I faced a kitchen of dirty dishes and bottles and lunches to be made.

And so I face another evening on my own tonight and I tell myself I will not set myself up for frustration by expecting any of these things.  Except, of course, I know I will expect them, want them, need them.

At least I can feel a little bit better since Mike just told me there was no Shabbat today.

Structure, Expectations, and Sanity

I am a naturally anxious person.

I clearly recall lying awake at night in the third grade worrying about the fact that the Encyclopedia Brittanica didn’t have the information I needed for a report due a week hence.  (Would I be a far less anxious person today, I wonder, if only I had been raised in the age of the internet?)  I worried about homework in middle school and boys in high school — the prospect of a date sent me into paroxysms of fretting so painful I canceled most of them.  I worried a lot less in college, thanks to a love of my classes and the easy availability of alcohol.  I worried about what to do with my life after college when I was briefly and unhappily working in advertising, and I worried about how much I hated law school when I went to law school.  I worried about finding a job after my clerkship and about freeing myself from my job when I worked at a law firm.  I worried about having any friends at all during graduate school and about having single friends or, alternatively, a satisfying relationship when I was living in St. Louis.  And since then I’ve been able to worry about my career, my marriage, and, most of all, my kids.

The way I deal with all this anxiety is by creating some structure to my life, a comforting rhythm much like the soft swoosh of the swing in which Lily is finally asleep (after an hour-long break on the front porch).  I like to do my yoga in the morning.  I like to have some quiet, non-work time at night.  I like it when Lily takes a two-hour nap as soon as Mike and Jake leave for work and school.  I like it when she settles down to sleep before I do in the evening.

But when the structure must give way — when I don’t have time for yoga if I want to take a shower or when Lily simply can’t or won’t sleep when she needs to — the anxiety rises up again.

Last night, then, was a real challenge.  Mike wasn’t here to help with our rituals, the easy handing-off of one or another child, the divide-and-conquer that seems exhausting only when you don’t realize what the alternative is.  Lily wasn’t sleeping as easily as she usually does, and I was feeling guilty for being upset that she was acting more like most babies.  Jake was incredibly accommodating, but I still lost my patience with him for needing me when I didn’t have any of me to give.

It was the loss of my structure, the failure of my expectations, that was frustrating, not my children.

Okay, my children were frustrating, but only because they were being children.  And because I had some unrealistic notion that as their parent I should unconditionally honor their legitimate needs without needing anything myself.

I could have done one of two things with this information as I lay in Jake’s bed with my sleeping beauties.  I could have berated myself for making such a fuss over an evening that wasn’t all that bad.  I could have beaten myself up for every exasperated word I spoke to Jake, for every time I refused to respond to Lily’s jolly smile and told her to go to sleep already.

I wanted to do all of these things.  I was ready to.

But then, instead, I practiced a little yoga.  I took a step back and observed myself.  I saw my expectations and I immediately recognized the problem.  I had set goals for my evening, things I thought I needed to have happen.  And, as we often don’t meet our goals, I didn’t meet some of mine either.  The easiest solution, of course, is not to rely on unrealistic goals.  Like telling a baby when she must fall asleep or expecting a boy who must share his only immediately available parent with his three-month-old sister to be able to wait his turn.

Obviously, this is easier said than done.  But that just makes it possible to practice more yoga.  To forgive myself for setting goals again and again and again.  For needing some structure.  And to observe what happens when I do and tell myself that maybe next time I won’t need them so much.

Yoga, as I’ve said a million times before, is a practice.  The point isn’t to complete the pose.  The point is to be honest with yourself about where you are in your practice, to honor that place, and to let the act of honoring yourself carry you forward.

In this sense, I should be looking forward to tonight and the opportunity to try doing it without the expectations that caused my frustration last night.  I should be, anyhow.

Mostly, though, I’m planning on using a little homeopathic teething gel on Lily’s gums.  Because I can’t resist the hope for an easy solution, even if I know such a thing doesn’t exist.

I Think I’ll Work on My Core — Navasana (Boat Pose)

I’ll be honest here.  I don’t have a whole lot of time for a yoga practice today, and navasana has been pretty integral to my postpartum yoga practice.  So it’s what I want to do when I’m done here.

But it’s also an apt asana for the contemplation of where we rely on structure and expectations to maintain our sanity.  It’s a way of observing how strong and solid we are in our core, of what it is that weakens us.  And it gives us a chance to trust our own foundations and make them stronger.

So start by letting go of every expectation you have of navasana because for most of us those expectations aren’t great.  Instead, trust in your core strength, take the pose a step at a time, and honor where you are in your practice.  You may find you’re a lot further along the path than you think.

Navasana Instructions