chattering mind

Surrendering When You Can’t Decide How to Put Your Child to Sleep (or How to Make Some Other Important Parenting Decision)

April 23, 2008

The worst part of lying awake in bed at 4:30 this morning listening to Mike’s deep sleep breaths was not knowing if I’d done the right thing. I’ll bet we all have that one area of parenting that refuses to yield a clear course of action. No matter what we decide, we find ourselves wondering [...]

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Sometimes It’s in Your Nature to Take Your Toddler to Play at the Mall

April 22, 2008

A good friend told me yesterday how difficult she finds it to spend a whole day entertaining her twenty-month-old alone. That, she realized, is what those weekly Target outings are about. “Target?” I thought to myself. “Target? Honey, you haven’t sunk to the depths of toddler entertainment desperation until you become a regular at the [...]

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A Temper Tatrum Teaches Me to Be in the Moment

April 17, 2008

I am feeling deep gratitude for Jake’s* latest temper tantrum. [*Upon a well reasoned request, I am adopting pseudonyms for those discussed in my stories. Because you never know when I will become a celebrity YogaMamaMe, and we have all read about the need to protect the privacy of celebrities' family members.] I can’t say [...]

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How Being Kicked in the Face by a Baby Reminded Me that Energy Is All Around Us

April 16, 2008

I’m really tired right now. And not just because I spent most of the night being hit in the face by my baby. Usually, when Jake wakes up crying at night, the family engages in a practiced shuffle. Mike and I drag ourselves out of bed. He heads for the daybed in the office while [...]

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When Family Visits Cross Paths with Our Personal Journeys

April 8, 2008

Any moment now, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and niece are going to arrive at my house. I am, I report with pleasure and a little bit of pride, not in complete meltdown mode, despite just now sitting down to write when there’s really no time left to do so. While this was my priority when I [...]

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Honoring Where Your Heart Has Taken You

April 7, 2008

I was sitting at the local ball park with Mike and Jake yesterday, enjoying the spring day and the buzz of peanuts and beer and baseball gloves, when “Here Comes the Sun” came over the loudspeakers. Normally, I resist writing essays built around a song that someone else has written. (I haven’t ever written a [...]

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Shopping for Groceries without Jake, or Following the Path I Have Chosen

April 3, 2008

Wednesdays are my no-yoga-class days, when the 7 hours Jake is at school (and I’m not) stretch ahead of me like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s waiting to be eaten without interruption. I imagine productivity the likes of which have never before been seen in a middle-of-the-week frenzy to do all the things that [...]

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Breaking from Break, Part I: Why We Are Allowed to Take a Break from Being Mothers

March 31, 2008

It began before I left to take my friend Sam to the airport at the end of his weekend visit. Panic. Anxiety. An unsteady feeling, as if the floor beneath me had disappeared, leaving me spinning my legs in an ethereal nothingness. I thought about what was causing this feeling half an hour later as [...]

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Practicing Not Yoga with a Glass of Wine and 2 a.m. TiVo

March 23, 2008

There are days when you don’t have time for a yoga practice but can still practice yoga. On these days I still eat in a way that nourishes my body (mostly — we went to Trader Joe’s in Charlotte last weekend and walked out with three packages of Droste dark chocolate pastilles that aren’t very [...]

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Learning to Let Go of the Saturday Morning Baby-Free Panic

March 22, 2008

Here it is again. It’s Saturday morning, I’m gloriously still in my pajamas, and Mike has taken Jake on an expedition. We should both be thrilled: he gets the Jake Time of which he manages only snippets during the work week and I get a morning free to practice yoga. The problem is, I spend [...]

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Silencing Your Mind When Your Mind Is on Your Child

March 21, 2008

“Keep it short,” my husband Mike told me, not for the first time, last night. It’s been his advice about both of my blogs. “People don’t want to read anything really lengthy.” Usually, I ignore him. It’s just not in my power to be brief, I shrug to myself. It’s part of my writing style [...]

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