Today was the end-of-the-school year potluck in Jake’s preschool class. Same summer-ish excitement that I recall from the end of my somewhat-older-than-two-and-a-half-years-old school years. Same excuse to eat ice cream instead of lunch. Same sense of happy displacement at having parents on the playground in the middle of the day.
Plus, as a mother, a little something more: Brwaaaah! My baby’s growing up! sadness.
I am not, I’m proud to say, overwhelmed by the sadness. In fact, it’s sitting comfortably beside a more solid sense of excitement. Jake’s moving into a new classroom! Jake’s nearly potty trained! Jake pontificated this morning on the progress of the garbage trucks as we stood on the front porch with Lily watching them make their way down the block!
“I think it’s across the street,” he said thoughtfully as we watched one turn around. “I see two lights,” he added, as if by way of explanation.
“Those red tail lights?” I asked, actually interested.
“Yes, the red tail lights,” he confirmed as if teaching me an important lesson about garbage trucks.
It thrills me, then, to watch my boy grow up, even though it makes me sad to know that these hefty thoughts of his will cease to be so all-consuming cute when they come out of an older mouth.
At the same time, it makes me sad to see the graduation bags in one of the preschool classrooms and to realize how quickly the time will arrive when Jake is the recipient of one, although I’m feeling pretty happy about his progression to an older class.
And then I have my comforting moments when I know that he can be growing up without being quite so grown up.
Like at the potluck today when he took Wendell’s ice cream.
We All Scream for Ice Cream
Jake has recently discovered the joys of chocolate ice cream with sprinkles.
I don’t know who introduced him to this all too tempting wrinkle in our program of the occasional dish of plain vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream, for some reason, seems like a healthy enough food option, especially when it’s organic. Make it chocolate flavored, though, and in my eyes it crosses the line from nutritious calories to junk food. Add sprinkles and my yoga-eating heart collapses in shock.
This, like all things, is, of course, a sign that Jake is growing up and growing able to speak his mind. One Friday night we’re handing him a kiddie cup of vanilla ice cream as he dashes off to watch a Pixar DVD at the local ice cream shop and the next he’s insisting on a big cup of chocolate with sprinkles and cone on top at the Cold Stone Creamery near the REI where Jake made a pretty nifty playground out of the camping tents display.
So I didn’t even flinch when someone started handing out ice cream at the pot luck even as three-quarters of Jake’s mac and cheese and all of his watermelon remained uneaten. The dogs, I thought, will have a good dinner tonight.
Jake dug in as I chatted with other parents and Lily swiveled her head non-stop from side to side taking it all in.
Within minutes, he was finished and yelling for more.
“You get only one,” I said in my best watch-me-parent tone.
“I want more ice cream. I do,” Jake said. “I do,” seems to be his way of clarifying what plainly isn’t clear to his parents if they are saying no.
“That’s all there is,” I repeated, and returned to my conversation.
And then I noticed Jake eating a second cup of ice cream. I looked around. Was someone really giving the children more than one cup of ice cream? Someone who would have to deal with the meltdown and nap refusal after the parents were long gone? It didn’t seem likely.
No one else seemed to have two cups of ice cream. Wendell, in fact, had none where just a moment ago I was quite certain he had been eating one of his own.
“Is that Wendell’s ice cream?” I asked Jake suspiciously.
“No,” he said. “It’s mine.” He wasn’t lying, after all, since, at that moment with his plastic spoon smeared with it, it was pretty clearly his.
I turned to Wendell. “Did you give Jake your ice cream?” I asked. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. Michael, after all, had given Jake a few tiny little bites of his when Jake first began demanding more. Three-year-olds can be surprisingly generous at times.
Wendell, however, was not in such a generous mood. He shook his head with the forlorn expression of a child who has just seen the family pet given away to friends as he heads off to a new, unwelcome, and apparently dog-unfriendly home.
“Jake, this is Wendell’s,” I said, snatching it away perhaps more brusquely than I might have had Wendell’s mother not already departed, leaving him defenseless.
And then my boy who was clever enough to appropriate more ice cream even after being told that no more was available did what any two-and-a-half-year-old would do under the circumstances. He started crying.
A room full of parents’ heads turned. “Is Jake okay?” asked more than one.
“He took Wendell’s ice cream,” I said, secretly kind of proud that for once my kid wasn’t the one on the receiving end of the bullying. “He’s crying because I gave it back.”
And right there I saw that even as he moves up through the preschool in an inexorable march toward kindergarten and college and children of his own, Jake still needs me both to teach him the hard lessons in life and to comfort him when he finds out just how hard they can be.
Although in this case, the bunny cookies his teacher dropped in front of him did the trick just fine.
Wanting to Get There and Dreading It at the Same Time
It’s how I spend much of my life: counting the days forward in a comforting roll call of planned activities and then stopping short at the stabbing sensation of sadness as I count myself right into Jake’s third birthday or, worse, Lily’s first. It’s as if I’m running along letting the day-to-day beauty of life flash by and then suddenly glance down to see blood seeping from a wound in my gut. “Where’d that come from?” I ask in bewilderment before dropping to the pavement, the victim of my own failure to enjoy the ride.
And, of course, it’s even worse now that I’m a parent. I spend the first years moaning about how I can’t wait to sleep through the night again before realizing that just as the bags under my eyes finally go away so do those nearly edible fat little baby legs. I stare dully into space nursing a five-month-old who is now distracted from eating by so much as the rustle of a magazine imagining the day when Lily will sit at the table eating food without any help from me even as I know that if she doesn’t need to me feed her she may well not need me to cuddle her either. I fear my children becoming teenagers even as I look forward to the chance to read all the books on their English class reading lists. (I have, I confess, oddly been looking forward to this since Jake was born.)
This conflicted push and pull of present and future collapsed together a bit during my kidney-stone-hobbled weekend with Mike’s family.
Jake’s cousins range in age from ten years older than he to seventeen years older. In other words, Mike and I were the only ones there dealing with children who couldn’t pretty well be ignored by their parents.
This had distinct advantages, especially around family. There were cousins willing to play endless rounds of “frisbee” with Jake. Aunts and uncles aplenty willing to hold Lily when I needed a break and even when I didn’t. A grandmother who would pick up the child care slack every moment I couldn’t find someone else to do the heavy lifting.
But, of course, more even than small boys, five-month-old girls need their mother. For eating. (Every hour or so with so many distractions giving her an incentive to snack only until the hunger pangs dissipated so she wouldn’t miss any of the fun.) For comfort. (Cutting teeth or just way, way, way over-stimulated by all the commotion? We’ll never know.) And just for reassurance that, yes, Mommy is here.
I love this. I love the way she fits around my side with her little fingers clutching at my arm. I love the perspective on her beauty I get when I’m holding her, the availability for kisses of that firm, cool, round cheek, the way I can absentmindedly squeeze her bare feet.
So, for example, I didn’t mind it much when everyone else left for the swimming hole our first morning there while Lily was still napping.
“Call me and tell me where you are,” I shrugged to Mike. “We’ll catch up.”
Only it turned out that Mike didn’t have cell phone service at the swimming hole and the walk to the swimming pool with Lily in the Ergo was hot and uncomfortable and an empty vacation house isn’t nearly as hunker-down-and-read-a-book yummy when you’ve got a baby to entertain.
And so I felt just a little bit sorry for myself for missing out on the swimming hole. And the evening walk to the dumpster. (Yes, to the dumpster. Because it was still a beautiful night and a bit of exercise despite the unorthodox destination.) And the early morning bike ride around Cade’s Cove. (Even after I heard about the awfulness of the bikes that were rented and the hills they had to be pushed up.) And the five-mile hike that would have been challenging with a sixteen-pound baby in an Ergo even had my kidneys not been an issue.
It was this last that gave me a chance to stop asking whether we were there yet — there to the place where I will be able to both be a mother and to hike, read books, and hang out at the pool all afternoon if I want to.
Because Mike’s sister opted out of the five-mile hike to spend the day with her twelve-year-old, who, it turns out, sometimes needs her mother’s company too. Aunt Maureen’s husband stayed back as well, scoping out shorter hikes in the national park that we could all manage. And, perhaps not surprisingly, Mike’s mother decided to spend the day with us as well, seeing as she was about to turn 80 and all.
“You can go on the hike,” I told Mike once I heard with a flood of not-alone-ness that Maureen and Don couldn’t do the five-mile hike because of kids either.
“I’m not going to leave you out again,” Mike said, proving yet again why I love him because I really would have been okay with him going only I wouldn’t have been as okay as I was with him staying.
And so the eight of us headed out to the national park for a lovely day of exploring. I got to watch Jake getting his first lesson in standing up to pee in the great outdoors from his Uncle Don. (Didn’t take.) I got to lend a touch of authenticity to the historic cabin by nursing Lily on the front porch.
And I got to enjoy my children being just the age they are. Because, don’t you know, we are there. And tomorrow and next year and the year after? We’ll be there still.
Where’s the Yoga?
Like a good asana practice, sometimes you’re finished before you realize all you’ve taken from a story.
Right now, for example, I can’t find anything to say that I haven’t already said. I can just say it again in different words.
Enjoy the journey.
Don’t rush toward the future lest you miss out on the present moment.
Don’t judge yourself by comparing yourself to others. In fact, don’t judge yourself at all.
Surrender. Open your heart. Embrace what the Universe brings you.
An Asana Practice for Embracing the Moment
On our second morning in the vacation house, when Mike wasn’t at the swimming hole without cell phone service, I plopped the baby in his lap, grabbed my yoga mat, and surveyed the wrap-around porch.
On all four sides I was greeted by the blue of the Tennessee Smokies, the patience of the evergreen trees, the machinery-free sound of earth not covered in asphalt and cement. I could, in other words, choose just about any spot for my practice.
The first day, I opted for the open sky above me and a narrow little strip of porch holding me high above the golf course below. I did a tripod headstand that felt an inch from the edge of the porch and bowed with my hands at my heart each time I dove into a forward fold because I didn’t have room to open my arms without whacking a wrist on the railing. On the second day, I chose a wide, shaded spot, and felt my practice open up in response.
In other words, I took advantage of being somewhere different. Not a difficult proposition, I’ll admit, given where I was. But a lovely, challenging, satisfying way to deal with the topsy turvy of having small children when no one else around you does.
And while it will probably be some time before I get a chance to practice in such a lovely spot again, I have decided to take from it an opportunity that is always available to me: practicing somewhere different.
It is this possibility that I offer you. If you have a regular home practice, try it in a different room. Or facing a different way. If you go to a studio, move your mat to an unfamiliar part of the room. If you meditate outdoors, try it inside, and if you’re usually inside, head out. If your yoga practice consists of just making it through every day, try to experience it just a little bit differently.
Break your habits. Take a left turn. Notice the world rushing around you and then don’t rush so much. You can stop wondering if you’re there yet.