Lily Goes Full-Time

Today is Lily’s first day of full-time daycare.

Just writing it is making me cry again.  (As is wandering past my bedroom and the empty bed on which she is not napping and knowing that I will not have that unspeakably joyful moment of my day when she first wakes up from her nap and grins at me and I lie next to her pulling her still-sleepy body against me and kiss every part of it I can find.)

It is, I know, time.

I have been spending months injecting little veins of longing to return to the things I have put on hold in my life into the warmth of our mornings together, like the marbles of fat that add richness to those pieces of red meat I have eschewed for the majority of my life.  Maybe that’s why it’s not taking — because I don’t eat red meat the bits of fat that are my longing just aren’t sticking in my gullet.  Instead, they hover out there as a concept that I don’t feel right now.  Time for my own life?  Pshaw.  Who needs it?

And yet I soldier on in a direction I know in my core is right even if my surface emotions — the ones that made me start wailing when I put away a carton of formula this morning in a house empty of her — can’t bring themselves to agree.

I dress her before breakfast.  I pack up lunches for both her and Jake.  I unload on Jake’s teacher in a babble of still-postpartum hormones how I am freaking out about her starting full time.  (“You have to do it,” she says kindly.)  Even when Jake begins to scream and grab onto my leg, even as I walk stoically down the hall away from him abandoning my older child as I prepare to abandon my younger one, I stay on plan.

I drop Lily off with a smile spread across her pudgy cheeks.  When it is time for me to leave, she looks at me for a moment as if she is going to cry, then turns around and gives a shriek of pleasure to the line of doll people her teacher has set up for her and never looks back.  I have to turn off the radio on the drive home because my mind is feeling cluttered and unhinged.  “Just make it home,” I tell myself.  “Write about this.  Start that legal project you’ve been putting off.  Go to a yoga class.”

Now I’m home and I’m writing.  And — I can see the humor in this, like a mediocre romantic comedy — I am still running from my desk to grab a box of tissues, the muscles in my jaw pulling the corners of my mouth into a clown frown as I cry in a hyena-like warble and whine to no one in particular, “I miss my baby!”

Ch-ch-ch-changes

It’s not as if I haven’t been planning on this for some time.

In that early December rush of putting off work and writing for the major project of holiday shopping and enjoying (and the holidays in this household include two birthdays as well, so it is a major major project) I told myself that once all this celebrating stuff was wrapped up it would be time for me to start working more.  Pushing my writing to a point where maybe, just maybe, it could become my livelihood.  Returning to the regular yoga that keeps me sane.  Building up that cushion of a salary that will allow me to stop ferreting away bits of savings to supplement my maternity leave.

The time is perfect for Lily as well.  She has become a master of the commando crawl and this very morning made it halfway across the living room in proper hands-and-knees style.  She demands only one nap a day (except on those busy weekends like yesterday when a couple of hours in the noisy game room at Asheville Pizza and Brewing Company cause her to pass out for half an hour during evening nursing).  She makes dashes for the door of the infant room at daycare every few minutes in mostly thwarted attempts to join the fun of the toddler room.

In short, Lily is transitioning to the toddler room, where I know from experience she will be best off staying most of the day — or will end up doing so one way or another.

This experience came with Jake.  At just around Lily’s age, we found him unexpectedly accepted into a daycare program with a waiting list that typically stretched up to a year or more.  While I hadn’t been planning on starting him in daycare until he could walk (did I have any inkling that he wouldn’t reach that landmark until he was a solid fifteen months old, and if I had known, would I have made up such a meaningless rule?), I jumped at the opportunity.

I started him on the same part-time afternoon program.  And he hated it.  I would pick him up a few hours after dropping him off to find him, splotchy-faced and glum, flopped in the bouncy seat his teachers told me he had occupied for most of the afternoon — the only place he stopped crying.  I would walk him home in the stroller — seat facing me — so angry at me that he would twist his head around so as to avoid looking me in the eye.

“This just isn’t my happy child,” I moaned to his teachers until, finally, I was willing to take their advice to switch him to full-time.  It didn’t make sense to me that more time at daycare would make him happier, but i was willing to at least try dropping him off in the mornings, when there was more structure to absorb him into snack-time, art, not being the last kid to arrive to a roomful already engaged in play.  Anyhow, I told myself, I’ll just pick him up early in the afternoon.

Only, pretty quickly, I didn’t.  He was happy at school and I had so much I had to do and though I wrote about the guilt it didn’t stop me from settling right in to a pretty full full-time schedule.

True, I was not as content with spending time alone with baby Jake as I am with Lily.  A big part of it, I’m sure, is that I didn’t have part-time care for him.  You know, that time away from our kids that — no matter how young they are or how little we are willing to admit it — makes the time we spend with them so much more enjoyable.  I tried to get part-time care in our house with a sitter who would, theoretically, keep him so happy and occupied that I could work upstairs in my office for a solid twenty hours each week.  But every time I snuck downstairs for a glass of water only to hear him start screaming for me I was confronted none too gently with the fact that this arrangement just wasn’t working as I had hoped.

So, too, Jake just wasn’t one of those babies — like Lily — who would happily play with a wooden spoon on the kitchen floor while I took care of essentials like unloading the dishwasher.  And I had a full dose of those first-time-mother pain receptors that made it utterly impossible to let him cry for three minutes while I, say, went to the bathroom.  Lily has experienced my second-time-mom selfishness since that day when she was about four weeks old and I had to choose between her wails and Jake’s poopy diaper and left her lying on the bathroom floor next to us screaming until she was red in the face and Jake’s bottom was clean.

But I also feel a different sense of camaraderie with Lily.  The logical part of me hesitates to say this — and what place does my logical brain have on this website? — but I think maybe it’s a daughter thing.  Jake is my yes-I-can love, the child who opened up to me my ability to be a mother, to love and be loved unconditionally, to play with unfettered joy and silliness.  He is the one I grab when I’m feeling anxious and jittery, the still-soft three-year-old cheek I lay my cheek against every night before I go to bed so I can let out a big, deep sigh of happiness and calm.

But until he was two years old, Jake also kind of scared me.  I could play with him, but I had to match my play to his.  I had to learn how not to get bored tossing a ball back and forth.  I had to rouse energy for pushing a tricycle down the street and — with far more difficulty — back up again.  He has always been my pal but until he was old enough to cuddle up against me in front of the television ours was a friendship of action.

Lily, on the other hand, feels like a part of me.  While having Jake in this world makes me feel more complete, it’s holding Lily’s solid baby body against my chest that makes me feel most whole.  The way she looks up and grins with sheer pleasure when playing with some toy I have handed her nearly bowls me over with a blast of happiness as formless and expansive as hot breath blown on a fire to fan the flames.

I just feel like I understand Lily, and like she understands me.  She has allowed me to slow down, even in those crucial morning hours I have, for years, used to start working immediately so as to keep anxiety at bay.  Now I miss coming home with Lily after dropping Jake at school, turning on the t.v. for both of us to watch while Lily has a little pear with mango, giving her a bath in the claw-footed tub, and wrapping us both under the duvet to put her down for a nap.  Somehow, during the past six months of part-time daycare, I have become comfortable with not sitting down to a good, uninterrupted period of work until 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon.

Which is perhaps why, sitting down to write this morning as soon as I was finished wailing over the sight of Lily’s formula sitting out on the butcher block in the kitchen, I found it scant comfort.  I miss the guilty pleasure of watching the TiVo’ed shows Mike doesn’t like in the mornings while kissing Lily’s soft head.  I want to hold onto that lovely in-between state of working part-time while maintaining the comforting knowledge that I will one day return to full-time.

Now that day has come and — despite all the reasons I know it is, indeed, that very day — I am having a hell of a time with it.

Is It Lonely For You Too?

Much of what I’m feeling is just that terror of change, especially the kind that comes at the end of a vacation.  There’s something delicious about letting go of those routines that keep me going most days — like breaking a diet with a big, huge hot fudge sundae.  It wouldn’t be nearly as pleasurable if I ate a hot fudge sundae every day.  But the fact that I don’t think I’ve had one since my forty-first birthday (that’s two and a half years ago, for anyone who’s counting) means my next will be that much more delicious.  Sort of like that enormous bowl of three flavors of ice cream I ate last night because Lily’s tummy just recently allowed me to return dairy to my diet.  With a vengeance.

So I walked into my empty (but for two lazy hounds) house this morning with a sense that I could collapse at any moment because my long, postpartum vacation has ended.  Gone are my slow, lazy mornings.  Gone are my stolen minutes of reading a book while Lily spends the beginning of her nap snoring in my lap.  Gone is my excuse for working only part-time.  Even the shaggy-dog nature of my yoga practice is suddenly enticing, like not being able to take some time to focus on my body and soul is something to be cherished.

Compound that with the end of the holidays.  The end of perfectly valid reasons to put off that legal project whose due date now looms before me.  The end of company in the house, gifts to wrap and to watch being unwrapped.  The Christmas tree came down yesterday, and though it made me even sadder to see it lit up a week after Christmas was over I’m crying now about it being gone.  I’m missing that fresh joy of setting the tree up before the holidays have expired like a bouncy ball that has gone tired and slightly deflated with too much play.

I am, in short, scared to plunge myself back into the rhythm of life.

And in wondering why this is, it hits me that I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s really going on.

I happen to feel good with a structure, a something to place me in the moment, a reason to keep my mind from wandering and planning and wondering.  Before Lily was born, I dropped Jake at school in the morning, put away the clean dishes in the dishwasher, and sat down to write or work or answer emails.  I went to a yoga class in the middle of the day.  I came home and worked until it was time to pick Jake up from school.  And then we had our evening together, our time with Mike, our dinner, our bed time.

I had healthy time for myself and blessed time with my family.

So, really, I should be looking forward to a similar structure reasserting itself.  After the first guilty tears have cleared, I should acknowledge the many months in which I’ve been happy to spend my mornings with Lily but also acutely aware that my core being would eventually need more time for me.  Time for the writing that gives me life.  For the yoga that saved me.  Time to do the things that keep my life reasonably uncluttered, with room for clarity and calm both for myself and for my children.

The fact that these things seem important but NOT RIGHT NOW suggests to me a greater fear.  Loneliness.

It hit me when I walked in the door this morning and made a beeline for Audrey, our bloodhound mix curled up in the green armchair, her face a mass of fuzzy wrinkles, her big, thick tail drifting off the edge of the armchair, the one part of her big frame she couldn’t make fit.

“Ease my anxiety,” I said, as I stroked her.  And then I cried more because it made me miss Roxanne, my first child, she of the four short basset legs and impossibly soft ears.  Roxanne kept loneliness and anxiety at bay for years before yoga came along to shift some of the burden off her then-graying shoulders.

So I wandered the house lonely for her and even lonelier for Lily, feeling like bits of myself were crumbling off and dissolving into the air around me.

“Loneliness is my hardest thing,” I thought to myself.  Not something to write about, not something subject to the wisdom of yoga.  Just the one feeling that reduces me to a puddle of something quivering and aimless and sad.

I always figured everyone had their own feeling that did the same thing to them.  Something shaped from their own individual circumstances.

But this morning it hit me that maybe what hits us all where it hurts the most is some form of loneliness.

The heart of yoga, after all, is connection.  The part of a yoga practice that eases us, allows us to feel safe opening our hearts, the part that saves those of us who have chosen the wrong path from the cramped, bitter feeling — it’s about connection.

Meditation frees us from a mind that separates us from the energy surrounding us, the mind that makes us think we control everything and therefore are responsible for our own unhappiness.  An asana practice helps us transcend the physical space of our bodies, to open up to something bigger that brings us through our poses.  Living consciously and kindly makes us aware of our impact on the world around us — the environment, the animals that share it with us, the other human beings whose paths we cross.

In other words, what hurts so much as humans can often be reduced to loneliness.  Feeling unconnected, out of control, alone in our hurt.  And when we feel happy — isn’t there always some sense of being part of something larger, wanting to smile at strangers as if we know them, appreciating friends, family, the pets who keep the anxiety at bay?

So missing Lily — it’s just a clearer manifestation of feeling adrift right now as I step from the vacation feeling of holidays and baby care into the world that awaits me.  It’s being alone at my desk in a quiet house with half a mile of concrete and cold winter air between me and my kids.  It’s the sudden panic at finding myself living in Asheville, North Carolina, far from old friends and just beginning to knit into memories with new ones.

It’s a trick of parenthood, I now see.  Anything that is part of the topsy turviness of life — any familiar panic or sadness or wishing to be free of the responsibilities of adulthood — we can pack any of it into guilt over not being a good enough parent.  I can take this moment of having to put into action the past ten months of dreaming about getting back to the thick of my good, strong path and pat it all down into a little ball of missing Lily.  I can take the reluctance to face the frightening reality of action — as opposed to the soft comfort of imagining a hazy future — and make it into a sudden terrifying sense that maybe it isn’t time for her to go full-time.

And, being a good parent, I can take a breath and miss my girl.  But also being a good friend to myself, I can take that little ball of missing and peek behind it to see the bigger picture.  The one that is life, in all its I-don’t-know-ness.

And, still missing my girl, figuratively holding her absent hand, I can jump right in knowing that I’ll be okay.

Just Do It — Choose Your Yoga Practice

When I was fretting last night over whether to postpone the start of Lily’s full-time daycare (I couldn’t even bring myself to prepare a morning snack and bottle for her lunch bag) I began trying to figure out if I really needed these extra few morning hours.  “Why can’t you just focus on the legal project?” I asked myself.  “You could work on it while she naps and again when she goes to school.”

This would, of course, mean no writing for a while.  Which I didn’t want to give up.

“Or you could write during her nap and have plenty of time to do legal work in the afternoon,” I reasoned.  Which was appealing, even if it meant giving up a yoga class.  Because, really, how selfish is a mother who would send her nine-and-a-half-month-old daughter to daycare just so she can go to yoga?

But yoga for me is the time that is truly for myself.  It’s a time so few of us take and that all of us need and that I often can’t do without.  It’s that scary leap into letting go of the things I can grasp — my baby girl napping in my bedroom while I snatch a short little yoga practice across the hall — and trusting that I will receive something even more if I let go.

So as I let go of Lily and trust that she is actually happy as can be right now (and napping just as she would be at home anyhow) I am holding onto the fact that it is, really, okay for me to need a yoga class.  That it is not about abandoning my child — as just about anything I do for me can be in my mind.

It’s about taking time for myself, finding calm in being calm rather than in distraction.

So rather than distract yourself with all the things you think you should be doing — whether for your child or your partner or just some life you think the world demands of you — I invite you to practice your yoga today.  Take a class.  Spread out a mat at home.  Go for a walk.  Get a pedicure.  Just do something that is wholly and unabashedly for you.

And use the time well to banish that loneliness, no matter what form it takes.

Tagged as: daycare, yoga and motherhood