Full Circle

I’ve been writing YogaMamaMe since Jake was younger than Lily is now.

This makes me think a lot of things:  How quickly time passes when you have kids.  How scary it is to watch time pass so quickly, especially when you have kids.  And how I seem to be repeating myself.

Take last night, for instance.  I could write yet again about the conflicted emotions that arise when a baby awakens me in the middle of the night, about the battle of wills that leaves me angry, weepy, and simultaneously needing someone else to take care of my baby and missing her terribly once I do get someone else to take care of her.

But it turns out I’ve written about losing sleep thirty-one times already.  And that, apparently, is not counting the fifteen essays I’ve written about bedtime or the whopping eighty-four I’ve written about “expectations,” of which it seems I have many.

And while I know that each story I have to tell is different and each time I tell it I am a different person — while I recognize that put together all these stories tell of a path — I also have come to believe that at some point enough is enough.

When Is It Enough?

It’s not that I want to stop writing about my children.  Even if no one else is particularly interested, I am.  And, being, at best, inconsistent in my use of the camera and incompetent when it comes to the Flip these posts are some of my clearest accounts of my children growing up.  They are my therapy as well, my chance to work through feelings that I may at times (often) exaggerate but that I also genuinely believe I share with other people I love and admire.

This, perhaps, explains why I am crying as I write this last bit of letting go.

Because, as much as YogaMamaMe has offered me that I cherish, there are a few other things it has offered me that are perhaps not as healthy.

Like the stress I sometimes feel when I haven’t written in a week — that looming sense that I am losing my hold on the one thing that is still one hundred percent mine in a world of responsibilities and kids and, you know, having to pay the mortgage.  Or the nagging sense that I should be doing more or doing differently — marketing; writing shorter, zippier pieces; finding a large enough audience to make me feel legitimate.  Then there’s the book proposal that was supposed to be the goal of this whole thing.

And that’s where I see I have to let go.  If I am to have time to really write — to put together the book proposal, to edit Long Beach Baby, to get acquainted with the yoga teacher detective who’s been patiently awaiting her chance to make it to the page — I need to let something go.

In short, there is not enough time.  Not enough connection to the writer I still — forty-three years into my life — want to be.

It would be far easier to hold on.  I have, to be honest, been contemplating giving YogaMamaMe its deserved rest for months now.  But there is comfort here, familiarity, something I dare call love.

I love doing this.  And yet it’s also time to take that next step toward doing what I love all the time.

There’s Yoga In This Too

What this is, I can see clearly, is one of those times when I have to make a big change.  I have to trust myself to step off the edge of the precipice and confront the fact that for all my lazy fantasies dreamed from the safety of my little corner of writing alone — the ones where I am on Oprah or I guess now Ellen, where people listen to my witticisms on podcasts of Fresh Air, where I get the kind of checks that mean I can write all day without once having to use the phrase “as a matter of law” — I really don’t know what will happen if I stop.

Yes, I can start again.  I think.  We never really get the chance to go back to the point where we made a decision we might one day regret.  Which mostly means there’s no sense regretting it.  Better to embrace the new path than to look back and miss the one we left.  Branched out from. Transformed.

Often, I can see, we want to stay in that grassy little copse into which our path has dwindled.  Stop moving for a little bit.  Settle into what is and wait until change comes from somewhere else.  Or simply let our kids do the changing and just sit back and enjoy it.

But this is not one of those times.  There is something I’ve been trying to do for a very, very long time.  And I give myself credit for edging toward it — for starting YogaMamaMe as a blog and then a website, for sticking with it, for writing over two hundred posts.  But I haven’t done the big “it” yet.  I haven’t really been a writer.

I misspeak.  There was one period of several months about five years ago when every morning began taking my sweet basset girl Roxanne for a walk in Long Beach before settling down at the little desk my grandmother made, Roxanne curled up and grumbling happily next to me, to write.  And, while Roxanne is no longer with me, and two happy, happily time-sucking children are, I want something like that again.

I want, in short, to believe in myself enough to keep with it.  To make it a priority.  And, sadly, when I have only so much time for writing, I can’t spend most of it writing YogaMamaMe.

In short, I feel like I have been given a gift and I’ve never been allowed — or allowed myself –  to open it.

This is, then, one of those times when I need to look clearly at where I am standing and say, “It’s done.”  I’ve written a book right here and I’ve said what it needs to say.

So I guess my point is about letting go.  Trusting.  Changing.  Recognizing that being sad is not the same thing as being wrong.

And, probably, my point is every other point I’ve made over the past two-plus years.  Only this time following my own advice is the true challenge.

Just Practice Your Own Yoga

I can think of so many poses, so many approaches to asanas, that would fit here.

But more fitting than anything is to make this a gift, a thanks, a moment of true gratitude to you, the people who have shared and let me know you were reading and been a source of belief in myself.

So, my final gift (unless, one day, I decide it’s the right thing to come back here):  find your happiness in whatever way works for you.  That, when all else is said and done, is yoga.