On Friday, Lily will be the same age Jake was when we moved to Asheville two years ago.
Just typing those words is sending me into a shower of I-don’t-know-whether-to-explode-with-joy-or-cry-uncontrollably emotions. For months after Lily’s birth I had to consult Jake’s old baby pictures to remember what he was like at her age. Now, however, I have stumbled into a landscape littered with mile markers that make Lily’s every new trick — waving good-bye, handing me toys, figuring out how to remove the Robeez boots I dug out of the bottom of a pile of Jake’s old clothes — into a reminder of just how little Jake once was and how soon I will lose both of my children to time.
This makes me more than a little sad at how quickly indeed the time has passed. And then even sadder because missing baby Jake makes me feel as if I am wishing away the remarkable boy Jake is right now. Not to mention the potty-trained one. Why on earth would I ever go back?
Mostly, though, putting eight-month-old Jake next to eight-month-old Lily collapses two points of my life, like a Wrinkle in Time tesseract. And while it makes me a little bit seasick to contemplate how unstable I was in the first round of motherhood and how not exactly solid I am now, it also allows me to see how comfortable I am with the whole “I’m a mother” concept.
Which, honestly, is a good thing.
Until I take a step back and wonder how the single yoga gal going out drinking with her friends turned into the mom who thinks Sunday morning on the playground is a big, hot social hour.
The Crossing
When we first moved to Asheville two years ago, before we discovered Jake’s preschool, I was, by default, a full-time mom. The kind who unwisely thinks, “Hey, I’ll just do my work while Jake naps or plays quietly at my feet like a well trained puppy.”
Anyone who has tried this knows how it turns out.
I found myself listening to classical music for hours on end because that’s what fills in the long gaps between segments of NPR on the local public radio station. I took disheartening walks in the heat and hills with a child who would not have described these jaunts in his stroller as “joyrides” had he the verbal skills to describe them as anything. Mostly, he just cried.
And I took him to the park a couple of blocks away in the hopes of finding some adult company.
How, one might ask, is a mother supposed to talk to anyone when she must follow her crawling child along the play structure and go down the slide with him in her lap? Apparently, she’s not.
Instead, I gazed longingly at all the parents sitting on benches, chatting away while their mobile children tired themselves out, no doubt on their way to five-hour naps during which those parents could finish their work, read the paper, and catch up on TiVo’d episodes of The Amazing Race. This thought would further depress me as I recalled the days when I fantasized about being on that show, back before I would have spent every second of my travels clutching my stomach in pain at being separated from the very child to whom I was, at the moment, feeling so fettered.
I thought about those days yesterday as I bopped around the very same park catching up with other parents like the hostess at a very un-hip party. Jake was a speck at the other end of the softball field, where he and his friend Wendell cavorted within rescue range of another parent. They would, I concluded, be fine long enough for me to exclaim how long it had been since I’d seen the dad I used to run into all the time at the ice cream store.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, when I apologetically approached the mom who had been watching my child for me it occurred to me that maybe I was at the park more for myself than for Jake. Maybe I was encouraging my child to take advantage of perhaps the last warm fall day because I wanted to hang out in the sunshine having my own social life. And maybe it was kind of pathetic that a social life was just what this amounted to.
It’s sad but true. Aside from the very occasional double date with childless friends, my social life now consists of my child’s.
This is, as I said, not a bad thing. Lucky for me I really like the parents of Jake’s friends. In some instances, I imagine I might have found my way to being friends with them even if I didn’t have kids. They are the sort of interesting people I very well may have befriended in my unencumbered youth.
Except for one thing.
I sincerely doubt I would have hung out with these cool people at the water playground in Waynesville on a lovely Saturday afternoon.
In other words, the social events with which I eagerly mark my calendar, the things that get me out of the house these days, pretty much range from Trick or Treating to pizza and ice cream at the kid-friendly strip mall. Worse, I look forward to them with the zeal I once turned on parties reputed (falsely it always seemed to turn out) to be full of interesting single men.
This is how I know I’ve crossed over from the realm of the reasonably hip to the land of the mommy jeans minivan.
Loving Where I Am
To be perfectly fair, I don’t own a pair of mommy jeans and I fervently believe that a Honda CRV is a long way from a minivan. In fact, as I approach that magical turning point where Lily has been out of my body for as long as she was in it, I am culling the stretched out tee-shirts from my drawers, investing in new shades of fall make up, and committing to having a pedicure once every month, even if no one in yoga class bothers to look at my toes.
Still, I get a little bit queasy when I step back and watch myself, say, following around some three-year-olds as they Trick or Treat.
Is that really me carrying a cute, bald baby in her skeleton costume with a big, stupid grin on my face that rivals the choppers of the fake skulls planted on the neighbors’ front lawns? 
Who is that satisfied woman practically squealing at the cuteness of her son in his jaguar costume that she handily cobbled together from a trampy little girl leopard print dress, a too-long fuzzy black cat tail, and orange face paint? 
(Only after the fact did it occur to me that he looked a tad like Josie of the Pussycats.) Could that really be my husband hanging out with another dad on our front porch carving a pumpkin while three-year-old boys dressed as the aforementioned jaguar, a devil, and Bob the Builder streak by on a sugar high? And could that be me wearing comfortable shoes and a stretched-out orange Target tee shirt instead of a sexy bunny costume with heels that I wear even though I know they will doom me to walking barefoot down some questionable sidewalks before the night is through?
I have, I think with a shiver more pronounced than any Halloween scare could produce, become one of those parents I used to watch from the other side of the door on Halloween evenings.
Many people are probably finding it difficult to understand what is so scary about all of this. And I’m having trouble conveying it. It is, I can only say, the difference between seeing yourself as young and free and still possessing the tiniest sliver of a chance of appearing in the pages of US Magazine one day (in perfect Oscars attire, of course, not slinking out to buy coffee in the morning wearing too-big sweatpants, greasy hair, and a $500 pair of sunglasses) and seeing yourself as someone who, well, doesn’t.
But here’s the thing: I kind of have to work to be scared by all of this. Turns out that the scariest thing about this scenario is that I’m not scared by it at all. I am, to the contrary, having fun.
To my great joy and surprise, I’m actually pretty good at dressing my son up as the jaguar he’d decided upon for his costume weeks ago. I fall easily into the age-old parenting pattern of saying, “You can have a piece of candy if you eat two more chicken nuggets and another slice of apple.” I unabashedly thought Lily in a tiny skeleton costume was about the cutest thing that has ever graced the face of the earth.
And, most importantly, I decided I absolutely had to write about the joy of that Halloween night. For once, I thought, I should take the time to write about something other than the challenges and frustrations of parenting — however joyful they are in their own way as well.
Instead, I’m spending my morning grinning skull-like all over again at just how much ridiculous, un-hip, heart-opening fun it is to be a parent.
Especially on Halloween.
Meditate on the Joy
There is, of course, a lesson to be learned even in the happy moments. And even if you have thus far escaped the perils of dowdy parenthood.
That lesson is to hold onto your joy.
I’m not suggesting clinging to it so hard that you scramble to stay rooted in a past that diverts you from your present. I’m not say you should try every second to replicate the moments of utter joy, or to believe that you can.
I’m suggesting, instead, that part of yoga is opening your heart in the moments when it is easiest to do so simply because it teaches your heart to remain open when you might find it difficult. I’m saying that fully experiencing joy as it happens allows you recall that joy exists when you’re having trouble finding it.
Life is, quite bluntly, full of suffering. And yoga is, at bottom, about learning how to make it through the suffering with grace. To accept it as a part of your life as much as the happy moments.
So we learn to surrender. We practice experiencing discomfort. We breathe and center and we open our hearts to whatever the Universe brings.
There’s nothing wrong, in all this letting-go-and-letting-it-be, with recalling what joy is. Not with the expectation that it will push away the difficult times. Not with the thought that the difficulties are any less legitimate, any less a part of the fullness of life, than the joyful times. But with a soul-nourishing belief that the joy will, when the time is right, return.
It’s about hope, I guess. And, even more, trust. About recognizing the beauty that is life in all its warps and woofs.
And about giving yourself a little something to hold next to you when your heart is feeling sad, like the forty-year-old Snoopy doll I grab off of Jake’s dresser on those occasional nights I need to curl up and cry with someone other than Mike.
Snoopy, after, all, reminds me of being three years old and discovering the delights of Halloween for the first time. In much the same way that watching my son do so brings me back to that same kernel of joy.
Joyful Meditation
What better way to absorb the lesson of holding on to joy without clinging to the past than to deliberately bring joy into meditation? In other words, I am offering you here an opportunity to experience joy without tying it to your circumstances.
I tried this one during savasana at the end of yesterday’s yoga class. It was so lovely, I am getting joy just in sharing it here. You don’t need a full round of meditation in that space of time you never can quite carve out of your day. All you need is a few moments, thirty seconds with your eyes closed at your desk at work — or the desire to drift joyfully off to sleep at night.
And who wouldn’t want to find the time to recall a moment when your heart leapt with happiness as much as mine did as Jake rocked out on his guitar in his leopard-print dress and Keen tennis shoes?
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Lovely entry. Thanks!
Thank YOU!
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