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I thought I had it under control.

A couple of years ago I had that breakdown over Jake’s fifteen-month evaluation at preschool — the kind where they determine whether said fifteen-month-old can say anything more than “Mama” and “Dada” and pick up a Cheerio with his fingers.  And that breakdown, I felt, brought me to a place where I could let go of needing to make sure everyone in the world knows that my child is a genius.  Let it go, I told myself, and everyone will figure out he’s in line to win a Nobel Prize one day without you pointing it out to them.

Since then, I’ve become firmly convinced that I’m not one of those mothers who pushes.  He’s in preschool, for goodness sakes, where mostly what he’s learning is that it’s not okay to hit your friend in the head with a bucket (especially when you are on the receiving end) and that “poopyhead” is a potty word that will make your friends crack up and will make adults frown and tell you not to say it before they crack up too.

Plus, I tell anyone who will listen that Jake won’t be starting kindergarten until he’s nearly six because I’d rather he be older than the other kids than younger.  Subtext:  Even if he is a genius, I recognize it will not hurt him to spend that extra year in preschool.  Or a good Montessori school where he’ll probably learn so much he’ll end up skipping first grade anyhow.

And so it was that I was truly pleasantly surprised when the head of Jake’s school told me that he would be moving up to the next class.

Until this weekend, when I found out he’s not moving up quite as quickly as he was supposed to.  And, behold, the pushy mom popped out of my relaxed mom facade like the creature in Alien who, it turns out, was only biding her time, incubating until she could erupt with maximum, frightening force.

How I Turned Scary

It was all going so smoothly for a while there.  At the end of every school day Jake would tell me about his visit to the new class and every following morning his teachers would tell me how well it had gone.

Until the day one of them mentioned that he had refused to wash his hands.  “It wasn’t like him at all,” she said in a slightly nervous, puzzled voice.  “He had a complete meltdown.”

There are a few things I didn’t notice about this conversation.  I didn’t notice that it had any connection to his transition to the new room — I assumed it was something that had happened in his current class, an out-of-character reaction, perhaps, to his sister’s newfound ability to crawl across the living room and steal his toys.  Nor did I notice the now apparent connection between the conversation and Jake’s insistence for the next several mornings that he did not want to visit the new classroom because it scared him.

“What are you scared of?” I asked, not particularly concerned because of all the stuff I wasn’t noticing.

“The dinosaur book,” he murmured, his voice quiet and uncertain as if to point out — if I hadn’t already figured it out on my own — that the dinosaur book was probably just an excuse.  After all, he plays in that room at the end of every school day with the other ragtag group of kids whose parents milk the 6:00 pickup deadline for all it’s worth.  And not once has he told me about the scary dinosaur book.

By the time I went with him to check out this dinosaur book and assuage his fears at yesterday’s pickup I was onto the game.  I knew, for example, that Jake had not been to visit the classroom since the hand washing meltdown.  Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal except I knew — as did the rest of the school — that the little girl from his class transitioning with him had been advanced while he had not.

Allow me to clarify.  My son was LEFT BEHIND.

Surely you see why I felt I must be pushy.

Actually, to give myself a big pat on the back, I wasn’t even particularly upset when I read in Friday’s newsletter that his friend was moving up.  Perhaps, I figured, they were staggering the transition.

But on Monday the head of the school told me what was actually going on.  Jake’s teachers, she told me, thought he was perhaps not ready to be advanced because of the Hand Washing Incident.

Now fed with information like a Chia pet slurping up water, the scary Alien mom began to unfold her long neck and to gnash her carnivorous fangs.

“Oh,” I said, still unaware of the creature stirring inside me.  “Thanks for letting me know.  We were wondering what was going on.”

That was it. And I meant it.  After all, she had assured me the move was still happening.  Just in a way that was perhaps more suited to Jake’s cautious temperament.

And then, a little while later, Pushy Mom breathed hot breath into my ear.  “One temper tantrum?” she hissed.  “You’ve spent enough time with enough kids in that new class to know that they ALL have temper tantrums.  In fact,” she continued, gathering steam, “they have worse meltdowns than Jake.  It’s unusual for Jake to have a tantrum at school.  Why,” she began to spit, “he’s being PUNISHED for his tantrum!  Held back unfairly because he’s so YOUNG and BRILLIANT!  HE’S READY AND THEY ARE STUNTING HIS DEVELOPMENT!!!”

“Don’t be pushy,” Mike said when I recounted my conversation with the head of school.  And I didn’t even tell him about my conversation with Pushy Mom.

This, too, made me angry.  So much so that when I dropped Jake off at school the next morning I was certain his teachers were avoiding my eyes.  Because, I thought, they expected me to be one of those pushy moms who’d be mad that her son wasn’t being advanced.  Which, I reasoned, did not describe me.  I hadn’t pushed for my son to be advanced, after all.  They told me he was ready, and now suddenly he was stuck in this place he had outgrown.

I looked around the room with vision distorted by the hint of hurt tears, my chest aching the way it did when I was six years old and my sister and her best friend wouldn’t let me play Barbies with them.

Suddenly, it was so young, this classroom where, up until seventy-two hours before, Jake had seemed so stimulated.  Never mind that several of the kids I was looking at are, in fact, older than he is.  Never mind that he had spent much of his weekend playing with another of the classmates now urging him outside to the playground.  Jake looked to me like a middle school kid sadly folded into one of the toddler chairs and forced to read Dr. Seuss books when he was really longing to tackle Macbeth.

By last night I had worked myself into a rage.  At the teachers, the school, and, most of all, Mike for being a whole lot more reasonable than I was being.

“Why don’t we just ask them for a timeline?” he said when I stopped breathing fire long enough for him to broach the subject himself.

“That’s a good idea,” I said, pretending to be reasonable myself.  “But if they tell me he’s stuck where he is until the spring or fall, I’M PULLING HIM OUT AND SENDING HIM TO A MONTESSORI SCHOOL!”

I paused for a moment to imagine a scenario in which the head of school asks if we don’t find the Jewish education he’s receiving valuable and I spit back that it’s nice and all but it doesn’t matter that much to me.  Take that! other Jewish people who make the mistake of assuming that I find some inherent value in being Jewish myself.

Really, to be honest for a moment here, while I did have many of these crazy, anger-inspired ideas racing through my head, I knew they were crazy and anger-inspired.  And I didn’t inflict them on anyone else. Instead, I just spun inside at the conflict between not trying to control everything and feeling like it is my job to do absolutely everything within my power to protect my son.

Finally, I wrote a nice email to the head of school thanking her for keeping us informed, agreeing that we want to work with her to make sure Jake moves when he’s ready, and then subtly expressing my belief that he’s ready, oh, now.

It was when I got a rather relieved email back from her that it dawned on me just how many pushy parents she must deal with.  And how I really, really don’t want to be one myself.

There Are More Reasons Than You Think to Avoid Being a Pushy Mom

It’s easy enough for all of us to recognize how unpleasant the pushy parent can be.  The one who tells you — over and over during the course of a meal at the house of mutual friends — just how brilliant his kid is, how advanced, how (said by omitting mention of your own obviously genius child) much more brilliant than your child.  All said in that matter-of-fact tone meant to suggest that he’s not boasting, just being honest.

And then your own child’s well being is at stake and you don’t really care what anyone else thinks.  You are Mama Bear defending her cub, and you (unlike the boastful dad) have a reason for pushing.

Still, I knew — somewhere I really did, I swear — that it didn’t matter all that much.  That Jake’s development is not being forever stunted by spending an extra week or month or even several months in his current classroom.  That I, for example, had managed to master algebra even though my mother refused to fight to get me transferred out of the pre-algebra class with the teacher whose best day was the one in which she spent the whole hour describing to the class what it was like being on Wheel of Fortune.

I also knew that I would hurt Jake more by exposing him to my Pushy Mom ravings than the whole push-pull of his transition ever could.  That it would be far worse for me to involve him or hint to him, as I had been, that if he wants to be in the new class he just has to tell his teachers.  A lot.  If he, you know, wants to move.

I knew, in short, that it is far healthier for him not to feel the need to be competitive.  To just chill and appreciate where he is at the moment instead of striving to be the first to leave it behind.

I know this because I have spent most of my life being competitive while pretending I’m not.  I know, for example, that most of the stuff I feel competitive about really doesn’t matter.  That I can push all I want but  my life probably won’t be much better if I get what I want.  That instead I will be tired and cranky and pushing all the time.  Which is pretty much what I’m doing and pretending not to do.

It’s about even more than letting go of the illusion of control, I realized yesterday as I sat in yoga class trying to concentrate on breathing instead of on all the reasons Jake was being treated so unfairly. While there’s a huge bit of mental health at stake in the unhealthy need to compete all the time — the need to have everyone else see how brilliant your child is, how steady your headstand is, how much money that car you’re driving cost — your physical health is at stake too.

I felt it yesterday as I sat there trying to breathe and focus.  My pitta dosha I thought, was out of control.

The doshas are, to put it overly simply, ways of categorizing our natural energies.  In ayurvedic medicine, patients’ doshas are assessed and they are then offered a regimen designed to even out their tendencies toward their special place in the dosha spectrum.

I, for example, have a strong vata dosha, which means that I’m prone to anxiety.  To alleviate my anxious tendencies, an ayurvedic doctor would suggest I hold my yoga poses for longer, eat heavier foods, focus on grounding and being still.  All the things I don’t want to do.

A kapha dosha would be just the opposite — so grounded she has trouble mustering the energy to go to yoga class in the first place.  To balance that, she ought to engage in a more dynamic yoga practice, eat light foods, be on the move.

And then there’s pitta dosha.  The one with a temper.  The one with which I generally claim to be freakishly unfamiliar.  Except, I’m realizing more and more, I’m not.  I’ve got a temper.  I just keep it to myself.

Until my kid doesn’t get advanced to the next class.

Now, I recognized as I tried to access calm, steady breathing in my yoga practice, my heart was beating fast.  My blood pressure was rising.  My mind was racing.

In the real world — where some mom doesn’t write about doshas and letting go of the myth of control and other yogic gobbledy gook — this is what we call stress.

It is, when you stop to think about it, stressful to constantly monitor your child’s school, to make sure his teachers are challenging him, to ensure that the administration recognizes and admires his brilliance, places him in every special program designed to enrich his development, makes him live up to his fullest potential.

As with any idea that takes root inside, you can get carried away by even this most noble of projects.  Once you think it is all up to you — that anything you fail to do for your child (or yourself or your dog or whoever is supposedly benefiting from your vigilance) is going to cause irreparable harm — you set yourself up for exhaustion and disappointment.  Because, first, it is not all up to you, and you are going to spend an awful lot of energy trying to convince everyone that it is.  And, second, once you do convince them — or, at least, yourself — you are going to have to scramble constantly to make sure you don’t drop the ball.  Because pretty much everything is a ball when you’re the one juggling them all.

And the thing is, you can spend eighteen years juggling.  (Excuse me, seventeen because surely your child will sail through school so quickly he will be filling out college applications during his junior year of high school.)  You can rule with such an iron fist that your child will never throw a final exam in a pique of adolescent rebellion.  You can edit college essays and coach debate team and tell your child he is the most brilliant, wonderful, capable person the gods ever put on this green earth.  And he still may not get into Harvard.

Or, more to the point, he may get into Harvard and still not be a particularly happy person.

Success, in the end, is a whole lot less clear than we make it out to be.  It’s not about the markers of success we all recognize — the Ivy League degrees and the six-figure salaries and your name in lights.  And it’s certainly not about advancing a grade in preschool.

In fact, I’d just as soon throw out the whole word.  Because success doesn’t necessarily equal happiness, and happiness seems to me like a whole lot more than success.  And isn’t happiness really the point?

Even if I hadn’t figured this out some time between receiving my Ivy League degrees and this moment of sitting at my desk in my quiet, unprofessional, most un-limelight-like life, all I’d have to do is look at my son, and I’d get it.  Which would I rather?  That he move up to the next class?  Or that he be happy?

Put it that way, and the choice is obvious.

Nadi Shodhana — Cooling, Calming, Energizing, Warming, Alternate Nostril Breathing

Ah, nadi shodhana.  You feel so silly the first time you do it, fingers plugging and unplugging your nostrils, eyes eagerly staring internally at your third eye chakra, mind thinking, “Am I cooler now?  Am I warmer now?  Am I balanced?”

And then, eventually, you get it.  It’s a subtle shift.  Maybe one you don’t feel until later in the day when something you would expect to be really agitating isn’t really.

Nadi shodhana balances the two sides of the body — the masculine and feminine, hot and cold, right and left.  And, because it requires some concentration, because it involves the sound of the breath, if nothing else, it calms you down.  Lowers your blood pressure.  Alleviates stress.

Another obvious choice, isn’t it?

Nadi Shodhana Instructions