Never Say Never, and Never Say, “What Is That?” if You Plan on Picking It Up

There are times, I’ve found, when, no matter how certain I was of my choice, the Universe was right there daring me to stick to it.  Telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I would be foolish to be that stubborn.

Take, for instance, bath time Thursday night.

It was then, in one, parenthood-requires-a-good-sense-of-humor flash that it became clear to me.  Despite my passionate explanation of the decision to stop writing YogaMamaMe posts, despite the fact that it was awfully soon to be breaking my pledge, despite how I was wasting the good will of those kind enough to send me off on my new writing endeavors with words of encouragement — in short, no matter how stupid I was going to look for reversing course this quickly — it became apparent that there was no way — NO WAY — I could not write about this particular moment of the unique joys of parenthood,

It was our usual bath time ritual — Jake hurriedly (for him) undressing while Lily held onto the edge of the tub bouncing up and down in such excitement that I had a difficult time easing her out of her clothes.

I paused to enjoy a moment of soft, bare baby bottoms and curved bellies with their still-fresh belly buttons.  And then I lifted them in — one gangly-legged three-year-old boy followed by a pinwheeling-limbed thirteen-month-old girl.

I lathered up my son’s  sweat-and-sunblock clogged hair (he of the head-sweating gene) and then helped him lean back into the suds of the bathwater to rinse as his sister squawked every time his too-long legs kicked into her, cornering her against the spigot.  With Jake clean, I moved on to polishing Lily’s still nearly bald head, assuring her with peals of praise that what hair she does have is getting SO long!

As I rinsed Lily’s head, I noticed something greenish-brown and suspiciously mold-like in the tub, a tiny chunk of what appeared to be dirt.

“Hold still!” I scolded Jake as I tried to scoop the dirt up with my hand.  Each time he splashed, it jumped away like a tadpole escaping a predator.

Finally, I got it and tossed it in an arc into the toilet.  Not for the first time, I cursed myself for lacking the fortitude to throw away the soft plastic bath toys that are older than Lily, the ones that we frequently forget to empty of water at the end of baths, leaving them moist and warm on the bottom of the tub to grow bits of mold  that Jake frees on subsequent baths when he squirts himself or his sister in the face.  Once I even noticed Mike using one of the mold-producing squirt toys to rinse the shampoo out of Jake’s hair.  Though I told him about the mold danger, I didn’t bother to toss the toy even then.

Or now, though I did note unhappily as how this had to happen just hours after the tub had received its first proper cleaning in months.

To make it worse, as I continued to rinse Lily’s head, I noticed more bits of dirt.  “Were your feet dirty when you got in the tub?” I asked Jake, figuring even I couldn’t have missed that much dirt  in advance of running the bath.  “Did you play in mud today?”

“No,” he answered innocently.

Which was when I saw I really big bit of dirt-mold, easily the size of a tennis ball.  “What is that?” I murmured fatefully, as I picked it up for a closer examination.

It felt smooth, firm.  It had the bumpy, greenish-brown look of mold.  And of something else that belatedly occurred to me.

“Out of the bath!” I yelled, throwing the now-identified Lily poop at the toilet in a panic.  “You need to get out right now!”

I was reminded — then and now — of my sophomore year roommate holding in her hand with the same puzzled yet disgusted expression a petrified dead bat that had fallen out of the opening in our boarded-up fireplace and attracted her attention as her mind wandered from the comp lit reading she was doing on the floor nearby.  I’m sure she would disagree with me, but this was arguably worse.

I pulled the plug and swept my soaking darlings out of the tub, trying hard not to think about the fact that I had been rinsing Lily’s head with poop water.

“Why do we have to get out?” Jake asked, not without good reason.

“Because Lily pooped in the tub, and now we have to wash you,” I explained, ready to succumb to despair at how much longer parenting takes than we plan.  If it were just me who had inadvertently bathed in poop water, I could get away with a scalding shower followed later — maybe the next day — by a scrub of the tub.  But with small children, I had no choice but to clean the tub while they stood patient and naked, rinse it well enough to feel that I was not simply replacing poop water with detergent water, and put them back in the tub for a good soapdown.

And yet, although it was one of those nights when I was feeling stressed out over all the things I had yet to do — pack for a trip to my sister-in-law’s house the following day, put together lunches for school and snacks for the afternoon drive, print out instructions for the dog sitter and put out the portable DVD-player to keep Jake entertained in the car (we almost forgot it and never did bother to bring along comparable entertainment for our neglected second child, but that’s another story) — despite being more than a little bit stressed out, I took the poop water incident in stride.  With good humor, even.

And this, I realized, was the real reason I had to write another YMM post.  It wasn’t the irresistibly only-in-parenthood story, although it sure would have been tough to keep this one to myself.

Really, it was the way I found myself in a truly yoga-inspired moment, a moment of letting it all be.  That extra set of chores added to an already too long to-do list — clean tub, fill tub, clean children — tipped me over the edge from anxiety, not to breakdown, where I surely expected to find myself, but to clarity.  I saw, in that moment, that there was nothing I could do but what needed to be done.  And I found my sanity in that.

I saw, in short, that it doesn’t really matter what you plan or how well you plan it.  I could have been the most organized of parents about to go on a trip or the least prepared.  At that moment that I realized my children were playing in poop water, my priorities became clear.  And in that clarity was beauty.

And, so, just as I saw that Lily’s decision to relieve herself at that moment altered my path for the evening, so I saw that it altered the path I had chosen for YogaMamaMe.  “Maybe later,” I thought to myself as I signed off in my last post.  “Maybe when my novel’s closer to done and I can share bits of it with my readers.”  (To this end, you will note the new look of the website, still with some work to be done.)  “Maybe one day, but not now.  Later.”

No, not later.  No, as much as I thought it was done, I’m not quite done.  I don’t expect to write as often.  I don’t think the posts will be as long.  I’m unlikely to offer the specific yoga pose that sums up the yoga precept my children taught me this time.  But poses — and the precepts — are there for you, still in the sidebars, and perhaps — I don’t know because I’m making this up as I go along — dropped into a future post or two or more.

For now, YogaMamaMe is just what I have here.  Another story to share, another moment when yoga explains parenthood, makes it a little bit easier, a little sweeter, certainly clearer.  More life that I just wanted to share.