Actually, I don’t really know that it’s H1N1 with whom we’ve tangoed over the past week. But I’ve been told that right now anything that looks like flu must be of the swine variety.
Like most of the H1N1 lore I’ve been hearing, there’s no telling how accurate this information I’m spreading around is. But no one is going to confuse this site with the CDC’s and, besides, H1N1 makes for a timely and eye-catching title.
So, full disclosure: No bodily fluids, no soaring temperatures, no stories about persevering despite record-breaking dehydration here. Just trying times and trying to be mindful. And yoga.
The Easy Part (As Parenting Goes)
It started as a simple story, really. Jake and Lily spent last Monday evening being entertained by one of their teachers while Mike and I went out to a real dinner at a real restaurant that we did not choose because of its ability to double as a toddler playground. We were with another couple who could talk about things other than whether Stan bit their finger on the playground after lunch. A childless couple who politely spent five minutes discussing the fine points of breast feeding with me and then moved on to life’s more interesting topics. In other words, it was a very special night for us indeed.
Jake had a bit of a cough when we arrived to pick the kids up at a quarter to ten. This hour is embarrassingly close to his usual bed time, so perhaps I should have been more concerned that the coughing was due to something other than sheer exhaustion. But I was tired myself and I have come to believe that even the best parent slouches in the parenting department when she is tired. I think it’s called “self-preservation.”
In fact, these days when I hear Jake’s nightmare cry of “Moommmmy!” in the middle of the night I pretty much roll over and let Mike take care of it.
This sounds crueler than it is. Honestly, I do give a moment’s thought to going to him. But then I imagine what will happen when Lily wakes up in the co-sleeper hungry and in my half-asleep state determine that in the time it takes for her to awaken Mike and for us to switch positions — I will have been long asleep in Jake’s bed by this point, I imagine — Lily will be wide awake and will, for the first time, discover the joys of keeping her parents up for hours in the middle of the night. Best to avoid that scenario.
And, so, our middle-of-the-night parenting responsibilities are evenly split right down the middle: I pat Lily gently on the chest if I deem it not time to eat just yet or, on that one special nightly occasion, sit up and nurse her. Mike bolts out of bed at Jake’s cry, falls into Jake’s bed, and sets up the body pillow between them in the hopes of sleeping the rest of the night free of bruising.
But on this particular night we had the added attraction of Jake’s hacking coughs.
I got out of bed and squinted at Mike as we nearly collided in the hallway.
“His temperature is over a hundred,” Mike informed me. “But I don’t know whether to give him Tylenol.”
“Dose him so he can sleep,” I said, having traveled a million miles from Jake’s early months when I insisted he would remain medicine free as I treated his various baby ailments with love and old fashioned remedies. Then I discovered Tylenol. And Zantac. And the antibiotics that got him through about an ear infection a week during his first winter in day care.
The Tylenol worked its usual magic and Jake felt fabulous in the morning, though Mike and I were a tad hungover. It would have been really, really easy to send him off to school, his fever a secret safe with us.
But there’s the matter of the H1N1 flying through the halls of Jake’s school. Not to mention my own pesky sense of moral responsibility.
“We should keep him home,” I said to Mike with remarkable good cheer. Normally, a sick day cuts into my scant work time like Halloween’s Mike Myers hacking into a hapless teenager — savagely and with maximum havoc. But today I didn’t have any pressing deadlines and was feeling like a pretty good mom. Plus, Mike was working the evening shift and would be around to watch Jake until 1:00. How bad could it be?
Not bad at all, it turns out. Jake took a three-hour nap after Lily went to day care, and when he awoke I discovered a heretofore unknown ability to write jury instructions while Jack’s Big Music Show plays in the background.
I had, I decided, achieved a yoga-inspired peace with the twists and turns of motherhood. I had learned to accommodate and adjust to my children’s needs as gracefully as I enter a difficult asana.
And then came Wednesday.
Sick Days and Half Days and Sad Days
“Twenty-four hours fever free,” I said cheerfully to Jake’s teachers as I dropped him off at school Wednesday morning.
Just as cheerful, I put Lily down for her nap at home and sat down to write about my graceful, impressive handling of Jake’s sick day.
I had just finished the first paragraph of this piece when the phone rang.
“Jake says his ear hurts. And his temperature is 101.5,” his teacher said. One of the things I love about his current teachers is that they manage to sound truly sorry when they send my child home with a fever. I, in return, promised to drop everything and head right over.
When I arrived, Jake was curled in the pile of “quiet time” pillows, one of his teachers gently watching over him. “He didn’t want to go out and play with his friends,” she said, a skillful way of telling me my child would not be returning to school the next day.
“Hey, sweetie,” I murmured as I knelt down by my beautiful boy, his grubby white-ish blanket pressed to his sleeping face. “Do you want to come home with Mommy?”
Jake’s eyes shot open just long enough for him to wrap his arms around my neck and press against me in that way that makes me understand the attraction of Munchausen Syndrome.
And here’s where I got a little too giddy about my newfound ability to calmly ensure I met my needs while meeting my child’s.
“Jake,” I whispered in his ear as I carried him to our car. “The doctor’s office is closed for lunch right now. Do you want to go home until they open? Or do you want to go to Target! with me?”
Was the little emphasis of excitement enhancing the Target option unfair? I thought not. Especially when Mike — still grateful for how willing I was to stay home with Jake the previous day — reassured me with a happy childhood memory of going home from school sick one day and having his mother take him to the store to buy a pair of boots he coveted. “It felt really special,” he said, giving me permission to take my sick child to Target. It was, after all, only an ear infection. Not H1N1.
To be fair, Jake was eager to pick out his jaguar costume for Halloween, although he had already when not sick nixed the little girl leopard print dress I bought anyhow. And I bought him the black tee-shirt with the sequined jack-o-lantern on it just because he asked. And because I figured it would be a good back-up when he refused to put on the leopard print dress he told me he didn’t want.
But by the time I was running down the hardware adhesives aisle in search of the Super Glue necessary to repair his broken Hadleyware “JACK” mug, I was probably a prime target for Child Protective Services. Lucky for me they don’t lurk in the aisles of Target searching for mothers who bring their flushed, heavy-lidded, sweaty-headed child to Target and say, “Just one more item!” as he moans, “I want to go to the doctor to get medicine.” (I’m not kidding. This is how sick Jake was.)
Happily, by the time we were back in the car, lunchtime was over for the doctors, and they invited us to come right over.
This is when I discovered that, quite possibly, I am the source of an H1N1 epidemic traceable to the Asheville Target.
Not, once again, that we had an official diagnosis. The swab, in fact, was negative, which means approximately nothing. But Jake was coughing a wet, heavy cough reminiscent of his bout of viral pneumonia two years ago. And, his doctor said with gentle concern, his lips were cherry red, a sign of the flu.
It did cross my mind that Jake’s lips are pretty much always cherry red. But, much as I don’t entirely get the H1N1 hysteria, I’m not immune to it (or, presumably, the disease). And, hey, I hear that we’re going to run out of Tamiflu before the end of the year, so it seemed foolish not to fill the prescription and dutifully squirt it by the dropper-full into Jake’s willing mouth.
In fact, it worked so well that Jake really wasn’t the least bit sick on Thursday. Just banished from school. And bored in the way a boy used to being entertained by friends and teachers and people far more interesting than his mother gets bored by a day with said mother.
As a result of being so bored with me he could spit, he was also kind of whiny.
And, this being now my third day absent of anything resembling Mommy Time, all this bored whining was turning me into someone very unlike the graceful, compassionate mother who stayed home with Jake just a couple of days earlier.
Lost Grace and the Beauty of Moving Beyond It
I doubt I would have broken down with the unfairness of it all if Friday — when Jake was finally back at school — weren’t a half day. The half of the day when Lily does not go to day care.
And so, yet again, I left my one paragraph of writing languishing on the computer as Lily took the world’s shortest nap, embarked on a three-day campaign of squinching up her face unattractively and yelling unhappily about a stuffy nose or teething or frustration at wanting to crawl but not knowing how or maybe, just possibly, in response to the tepid mothering of her harried, unsympathetic, unhappy, and definitely not graceful mother.
I broke down crying in front of both of my children during that long afternoon and the weekend that followed, even though Mike was around to help out by then. In fact, I broke down crying in front of Mike too, and then apologized so much for being a crank that he probably started praying for dark, moody silence from me again.
I knew I was tired. I knew that I, too, was fighting the illness that brushed up against Jake, be it H1N1 caught so early that the Tamiflu slugged it right out of the ballpark of Jake’s body or something less.
Whatever it was, though, I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not being able to put aside my own exhaustion and achiness and the loss of my own life for a week. I blamed myself for not being endlessly patient with Jake’s overly excited and constant questions, with Lily’s screams of anger when I didn’t satisfy some unexpressed need. I blamed myself for ever thinking I had figured out how to be a graceful mother.
Even worse, I blamed myself for blaming myself.
“You’re just falling into a habit of self-hatred,” I’d whisper furiously to myself as I dragged my feet up the stairs for the fifteen-hundredth time that day to retrieve some necessary piece of child paraphernalia. “But I can’t help it!” I’d cry, tears tucking out the corners of my eyes as I pressed my lips together in denial. “I can’t help thinking I’m fat and ugly and hopeless!” But, of course, I could help it, and knowing this just made me mad at myself and crazy and before I knew it teetering on the edge of that oh-so-seductive sense of gloom called postpartum (or any other kind of) depression.
I saw myself standing there on Sunday morning after a particularly unpleasant experience bathing a none-too-happy Lily. And I recalled how meditation helped pull me out of the long expanse of postpartum depression I waded through until Jake was well over a year old.
And, so, sitting there on the new living room rug already strewn with toys, Little Bill blaring in the background, Lily chewing a candy wrapper in front of me, and Jake clambering over me in an attempt to sit in my lap, I meditated.
“Mommy, open your eyes!” Jake demanded.
“Mmmwwwhhhaaaammm,” Lily said, rubbing her gums on my knee.
“I can read!” Little Bill crowed on the television.
I sat. I heard. I let all the frustration and beauty of being in this loud and messy and demanding place be just what it was. Nothing more. Not a walk into a life when I will never have time for me. Nor a picture-perfect world where spending a week doing full-time childcare and nothing else doesn’t disturb me one bit.
Then I opened my eyes.
My kids looked just as beautiful as they are and just as demanding as well. And my life — my life looked like something I could continue to live with all the energy and happiness and enthusiasm that rise up, time and again, after every bout we all have with a bit of depression and despair.
The Dance Is with Life, and H1N1 Is Just One Nasty Part of It
Where I got a bit lost last week was in trying to hold onto the grace of that first day Jake stayed home from school. I wanted to make it permanent. I wanted to believe that always, from that moment on, I would be able to deal with a change in what I thought would be my schedule for the day. That I would always be the movie-perfect mother stopping what she was writing in mid-sentence and rushing off to pick up her sick child in a flurry of concern and competence.
That’s what I wanted, anyhow.
By holding onto my day of actually acting with grace despite the changing circumstances — day upon day of losing time to do what I needed to do in my life, day after day of increasingly bored children, day after day of resentment that I couldn’t just crawl under the covers and fight off my own illness — I actually made it harder to deal with each day.
It was as if with each step I took forward, a bit of my former brief awesomeness wrapped around my ankle and pulled me off course until by the end of the weekend I found myself tangled up and frustrated and very, very grumpy.
It was a reminder that yoga isn’t just about not rushing forward to the future. It’s about letting go of the past as well. After all, you can’t be in the present if you’re still patting yourself on the back about how great you were the other day. All that does is set you up for failure on the day when you’re not so great as you once were.
Hence, each day made me feel more and more inadequate as a mother because each day I took a step further away from Tuesday’s awesome-ness. Each time I lost my patience with Jake even though I knew he was just bored and lonely I lost even more patience with myself. Every time Lily screwed up her face in a frightening grimace of not-right-ness and started yelling at me I fought the urge to yell back. And spoke rudely but with a calm, firm tone that I hoped disguised my own ugliness, which I’m not sure is so much better.
In short, the more time I spent wondering why I couldn’t be what I had been, the harder it was for me to be anyone I wanted to be at all. The more I thought back to the circumstances that allowed me to handle Jake’s first day home with grace, the less I was able to see the circumstances right in front of me. And, crucially, to give myself a break when circumstances made it less than possible for me to act with the same easy acceptance.
Part of the practice of life — and of yoga — is accepting the highs as well as the lows. By “accepting,” I mean not holding onto them, not making them any bigger than they are, not letting them define you. We all have ups and downs — that, after all, is what life is about. It’s easy to focus on the practice of letting go of the bad moments, moving past them. But who wants to move past the good stuff?
Me, now that I recognize that those golden moments of mothering can drag me down just as much as the questionable ones. At least I can laugh about those. Maybe it’s time for me to have a sense of humor about the good moments too. It’s best, after all, never to take ourselves too seriously.
Especially when tangoing with H1N1.
Standing Baby Cradle — Handling the Present Moment with Grace
Just to make my life a little harder, I’ve chosen to offer a new asana — one I haven’t already described and one that is not often practiced in yoga classes. But a very gifted teacher taught me this one, and it remains a favorite for me, grounding and challenging and just right. Particularly here.
This pose combines two elements of what I’ve been writing about here — balance (which requires patience with yourself) and letting go of the past (through the hip opener). You can practice either element separately if you’d like — choose a different balance pose or do the hip opener seated on the floor. Or you can combine them and have a sense of humor about how you do — whether you fall over or look like a page out of Yoga Journal.
The point is to loosen up. Not just be in the moment. Not just let the messiness of life wash over you. But to find a way to laugh in the middle of it and realize that even when things aren’t going just as you’d pictured them, you are still having an awful lot of fun.
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