I’m still ashamed, even though I now recognize it was a December Mom thing.
There’s simply no excuse for being — I can still recall the out-of-body experience of watching myself do this — the mom screaming across a crowded coffee shop at her child. “Jake! Jake! JAKE! DO YOU WANT A BAGEL?” As if no one sits hunched over a laptop trying to experience a little peace and a nice cup of coffee between her and her child.
Yep, that was me.
On that early December Saturday afternoon, I became someone I never thought I’d be. The mother all us peaceful coffee drinkers hate. The woman oblivious to the fact that others do indeed occupy the somewhat inappropriate space to which she has spirited her children.
The one who is finally shamed by the sweet older man passing her as she gathers compostable forks and napkins and cups of water simply saying, “Quite a handful, isn’t it?”
I Become a December Mom
I was, to my credit, feeling rather stressed at the time.
It had begun as a simple enough concept — a play date with Jake’s friend Daniel at Health Adventure, Asheville’s (for the time being) low rent version of a science museum. Not that either Jake or Daniel appreciates the science available for learning there. But it was a cold day, and Health Adventure offered the chance to slide down a fake esophagus and crawl out a tunnel dressed up to look like a rectum. What better way to get a three-year-old out of the house?
Parking for Health Adventure is a couple of blocks away, a bit of a bummer when inclement weather is exactly what has inspired your visit. And something even more monumental than a bummer when said inclement weather includes high winds. Because the wind is always high on the hill by Health Adventure. Add an arctic blast in even the lowlands of downtown Asheville and you get a three-year-old nearly swept off his feet by gusts of what feel, even shielded as I am by the baby girl in my arms, like nothing so much as jagged pieces of ice jumping at me with a violence and intensity to rival Norman Bates’.
Jake did the only sensible thing under the circumstances. He cried.
“I don’t like it!” he wailed as we were pounded yet again.
I struggled forward, Health Adventure a distant beacon across the street. “It’s right there!” I yelled at Jake, fighting the natural urge to press on without my son, to leave him to the elements like a weak, frostbitten hiker on Mount Everest.
“NO-OH-OH!” Jake wailed. “You carry me!”
“Come on,” I urged. “I can’t carry you! You HAVE to walk!”
Somehow we made it. And yet, even as Jake and Daniel played happily indoors, the howling winds silenced by thick walls and blessed heat, I knew that somehow we would have to make it back to the car.
Hence the stop with Daniel and his mother on the way back. Lunch at an easy, kid-friendly coffee shop with the sausage Jake adores. Seemed like a good idea.
But for the wailing and the wind on the way there. The arriving with my ears still ringing. The sighting of people we knew and the distraction of Daniel’s mother Ellen chatting away while I tried to figure out whether to order my son a bagel.
You can appreciate the pressure I was under.
After the man pointed out to me that only a woman dealing with “quite a handful” would so rudely claim the entire coffee shop as her own in which to yell to her son, I sought solace from Ellen. “Was I terrible?” I asked, duly chastened I thought.
“You were pretty loud,” she said thoughtfully.
And, lo, December Mom reared her head and laughed.
What Exactly Is a December Mom and Is She Confined to This Month?
It has actually been some comfort to me to look back on this month and see that the yelling-in-the-coffee-shop incident was not isolated.
There were the multiple times I broke down crying because there was just no time to write. The agitated running late dashes to Jake’s school hampered by all those coats and hats to be secured to children’s bodies, even though there really is no “late” in preschool, just a suggestion by harried teachers that your treasured one arrive in time to eat snack before the 9:30 start time of their much-needed playground break. And, my personal favorite, the last morning of school before vacation when a foot-and-a-half of snow dumped on us, forcing me to find room in the freezer for ten bowls of spiced nuts intended as teacher holiday gifts and confronting me with a mighty long, mighty cold day dealing with two restless children, one of whom does not appreciate the finer points of several hours of back-to-back episodes of The Backyardigans and one who perhaps appreciates them a bit too enthusiastically. When Mike rolled over in bed as I nursed Lily and moaned, “I’m sick,” my December Mom response was a muttered, “Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any worse.”
There were, I am relieved to report, moments when all that pent-up, bitchy tension released and the festive sense of holidays freed me to hope I was returning to myself again. Like the holiday party down the block on a snowed-in, no-electricity-for-six-hours day when neighbors gathered to vent, let their kids run around together, and generally feel human again. Or the Sunday afternoon when I made the kids go out in front just to get out of the house and neighbor after neighbor sauntered by to chat and breathe the cold air. And, of course, there was Jake’s birthday two days before Christmas when he and his friend Wendell splashed in the very non-December environs of an indoor water playground.
In other words, there were moments of joyous Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday spirit and moments when that joy slammed against a wall of anger and annoyance at the whole thing.
The thing is, I like the holiday season. Not so much the faux cheery goodwill to all people stuff. Not the suddenly care about feeding the world (and get your charitable tax deduction before year’s end) thing either.
I just happen to like the project-ness of it all.
To me, buying presents for approximately twenty assorted family members — including carefully chosen stocking stuffers that I hope will not go directly into the junk drawer to be thrown out in a year or two — is a big, fun project. I like matching people to the gift that says something about our relationship. I like checking off the purchases in my mind. I like planning when to go downtown, when to brave the mall, and how to spend enough money on the Animal Rescue website to contribute a whole lot of bowls of food to animals in shelters.
Most of all, I love wrapping gifts. I love the feel of plopping down on the rug in front of the t.v. with a pile of boxes, a lot of rolls of wrapping paper, ribbons and bows and tape and scissors, and transforming it all into a big, pretty mess of colors and shininess and excitement. I just do.
On the other hand, all this planning and shopping and spending takes a lot of time. Stress number one. It costs a whole lot of money I cannot be making while I am out shopping. Stress number two. And my carefully calibrated plans — designed to take into account time and monetary constraints — can fall apart at a mere whisper. Or something more than a whisper. Like, say, the biggest snowstorm in thirty years.
And that’s where December Mom appears. In that short, unexpected snap between busy-joyful and overwhelmed-depressed appears a monster who animates with anger and focuses through oblivion. The kind of person who knows that her son must be fed and therefore takes the shortest route to getting food in his mouth — yelling at him across a crowded coffee shop because she has neither the time nor, frankly, the slightest inclination to walk up to him, crouch by him with sweet, motherly care, and ask for his opinion on the bagel matter.
December Mom is, in short, a product of the intensified back and forth of forced holiday cheer, a creature who has her counterparts during the rest of the parenting year, but who brings a special intensity with her to the holiday season.
Push, Pull, Time Off, Time to Get Back to Life
I cried this morning watching Mamma Mia as I fed Lily her jar of pears with raspberries.
I was inspired by a tender Abba song between mother and daughter that was, basically, about the daughter growing up. I took one look at my smile-y blue-eyed baby and I choked right up. Suddenly, I felt stupid for encouraging her to crawl, as if holding her back would hold time back with her. I dreaded — for the first time ever — her impending all-day stints in daycare, my hassled afternoons of part-time care all but forgotten.
I felt myself sliding into that queasy valley of wanting time to pass but hating the passage of time.
The feeling, I am certain, had something to do with the December Mom phenomenon. There was the same push-pull — the sweetness of watching my daughter grow up even more exciting than a bunch of wrapped presents under a Christmas tree, the dread of my daughter growing up even more agitating than a boy howling against forty-mile-an-hour winds. Except now that the holidays are over and the regular life for which I have been wishing is finally within my grasp, my reaction to the push-pull was simply to crumple up and cry rather than to march right on through, December Mom-like, coffee-shop dwellers and their peaceful lunches be damned.
The push-pull, I think, is part of the regular rhythm of life, when we get attached to the direction in which we believe we are sailing and then find that the course has changed so suddenly we feel as if we have crashed to a standstill and are powerless to move in any productive direction. It’s about expectations, goals, those moments when we become so focused on where we think we’re going that we forget to pay attention to where we are.
Hence, for me, the fun of holiday shopping becomes a reason to hone in on what I will do when, to the exclusion of the rest of my life. So that when my last precious day of shopping is snatched from me by a major snowstorm, I feel a proper response is to sneer and snarl at my sick husband.
We have these moments all the time, big and little. With the little ones, it’s easy to let go. What? Out of plain almond milk at the store? Oh well. Will have to wait until next time.
The bigger ones are the ones that cause us angst. Suddenly it becomes incredibly important to hand out spiced nuts to the teachers on December 18 instead of December 28, after break. And not being able to stick to the plan is really, really frustrating.
The best way to alleviate frustration, as we all know, is to let it go. Just walk away. Breathe. Sounds pretty yoga-like to me.
There’s a grace to learning how not to hold on to the things we can’t control. Like our children. And whether the grocery store is stocked with almond milk.
Yes, it seems counterintuitive not to hold on to the things that are important to us. Isn’t the whole point to hold on?
Until you think about your kids. The harder you hold on, the more violently they squirm away, especially when adolescence awakens them to the fact that they can really bug you by doing so. So you learn to love them intensely while letting them go. You point them in the right direction instead of dragging them down the path you have determined is safest.
And in the process you have unfold before you a lesson in living with all that you love best in the world. The constant practice of letting go and seeing how it only intensifies your love.
Nadi Shodhana — Balance in the Breath
I feel I have not even begun to unpack the complexity of what I am so pitifully calling “push-pull.” There are a million things competing for our attention every time we turn to what we love — be it our children, our yoga practice, our work, our pets, a good hike in the woods. So many forces, it seems, blowing us in multiple directions, as if the wind that hit me and Jake on the way to Health Adventure was suddenly multiplied and blowing at us from every which way.
What makes it all seem so complicated (as opposed to merely complex) is our mind’s frantic attempt to sort it all out, order it, control it. And sometimes the only way to turn off a mind out of control is to bring our bodies back into balance.
Hence, I offer here nadi shodhana, or alternate nostril breathing. It is a pranayama (breathing) exercise that can be performed on its own, at the start or end of an asana practice, or as part of a meditation. It brings the body into balance — a balance of heat and cold, energy and passivity, inner and outer. It calms both body and mind. And, in these bittersweet, post-holiday days when we have to drag ourselves back into a regular routine, it provides a few moments of rest, clarity, and cleansing.