Following Your Heart | YogaMamaMe.com

Archive for the 'following your heart' Category

Lily Goes Full-Time

Published

on January 4, 2010

in Mommy time, being connected to everything, being in the moment, breathing, centering, change, daycare, following your heart, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture, too much to do, trust, vacation, work and yoga class

.
4 Comments

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!”

Continue reading ‘Lily Goes Full-Time’

Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)

Published

Melissa

on August 18, 2009

in Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, change, daycare, following your heart, grace, gratitude, letting go, partners, practice, sense of self, social life, stuck at home with a child, surrender and vacation

.
0 Comments

Today was the end-of-the-school year potluck in Jake’s preschool class. Same summer-ish excitement that I recall from the end of my somewhat-older-than-two-and-a-half-years-old school years. Same excuse to eat ice cream instead of lunch. Same sense of happy displacement at having parents on the playground in the middle of the day.

Plus, as a mother, a little something more: Brwaaaah! My baby’s growing up! sadness.

I am not, I’m proud to say, overwhelmed by the sadness. In fact, it’s sitting comfortably beside a more solid sense of excitement. Jake’s moving into a new classroom! Jake’s nearly potty trained! Jake pontificated this morning on the progress of the garbage trucks as we stood on the front porch with Lily watching them make their way down the block!

“I think it’s across the street,” he said thoughtfully as we watched one turn around. “I see two lights,” he added, as if by way of explanation.

“Those red tail lights?” I asked, actually interested.

“Yes, the red tail lights,” he confirmed as if teaching me an important lesson about garbage trucks.

It thrills me, then, to watch my boy grow up, even though it makes me sad to know that these hefty thoughts of his will cease to be so all-consuming cute when they come out of an older mouth.

At the same time, it makes me sad to see the graduation bags in one of the preschool classrooms and to realize how quickly the time will arrive when Jake is the recipient of one, although I’m feeling pretty happy about his progression to an older class.

And then I have my comforting moments when I know that he can be growing up without being quite so grown up.

Like at the potluck today when he took Wendell’s ice cream.

Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)’

What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom

Published

Melissa

on May 22, 2009

in aging, change, compassion, following your heart, grace, practice, respecting your body, sense of self, the bigger picture and yoga class

.
0 Comments

I was initially kind of excited when I sat down to breakfast this morning and discovered an article in the New York Times Style section about a yoga class I attended a few times.

It felt like a brush with celebrity, an acknowledgment of a past life maybe not steeped in but occasionally brushing up against glamour. “I know uber-teacher Vinnie Marino,” I pictured myself saying to someone who cared. “And that’s the waiting area at the Main Street YogaWorks,” I smiled knowingly as I scanned the accompanying photo for a familiar face.

There were no familiar faces. Perhaps because it’s been at least four years since I attended a class at the Main Street studio. And I’m pretty certain Heather Graham was not in it with me, even though the article reports that she is now a regular.

In fact, the more I read, the longer ago it all seemed. And the longer ago it all seemed, the sadder I felt. It’s not that I was ever a regular in that class or that I wasn’t a regular in a local class right up until the day before I gave birth. Rather, as I read the article’s description of the mad rush for a spot, the mats placed perilously close to each other, the intimidating poses, I knew that if I were to show up for the class now I would be kind of frightened.

Four years ago I wouldn’t have been frightened.

Four years ago I would have confidently spread out my mat. I would have had at least a bit of a grasp on any pose Vinnie threw my way and a healthy sense of confidence if it was one still beyond me. I wouldn’t have been the tiniest bit intimidated by the other practitioners. I would, in short, have belonged.

Continue reading ‘What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom’

Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit

Published

Melissa

on May 12, 2009

in Mommy time, being connected to everything, compassion, expectations, following your heart, grace, gratitude, inner beauty, opening your heart, partners, practice, traveling with toddler and vacation

.
1 Comment

Last week, Lily was awake during my acupuncture appointment.

Her newfound alertness was one of those developments you look forward to in theory, only to realize once you get there that it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sort of like when I used to stay up half the night anticipating a trip to Disneyland only to get there and find more in the way of crowds and heat than personal audiences with Mickey Mouse.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the way Lily and I now make my already favorite chore of folding laundry into a game where I wave each item of clothing in front of her rapidly darting blue eyes on its way from basket to drawer. I cherish the puckered little smile that blooms across her face when I bluster, “B-B-B-B-B,” to her. And I’m pretty proud of how I cobbled together parts from two partially functioning mobiles to make one under which she kicks and coos in wonder.

But what you gain in moments of unexpectedly woozy love when your infant approaches two months you lose in sleep time. Hers. My own is, thank goodness, increasing. Which is a good thing because I’m reduced to a pretty complete state of exhaustion at the end of a day spent trying to cram just as much dish washing and cooking and, yes, writing into the shrinking hours during which she now naps.

This cramming includes acupuncture.

The first time I brought her with me she was sound asleep in her car seat by the end of our ten-minute drive there. The most stressful part of my appointment was worrying that she’d awaken as I lay there full of needles, forcing me to tug at the ones sprouting from my wrists as the acupuncturist had advised me to do in just such an event.

This time, however, she proved her new prowess at staying awake by — quite amazingly in the context of our new world together — staying awake during the car ride there. And then sitting in her car seat in the waiting room gazing suspiciously about herself as she decided whether I was going to release her or she needed to complain. And, when we settled into the treatment room, finally letting me know it was most definitely not okay to leave her in the car seat stationed in front of what I took to be some lovely shadows.

Whether it was my anxiously fluttering pulse or his own worry that he wouldn’t be able to fit a proper treatment around a fussy infant, the acupuncturist was as nervously creative as I at suggesting things that might — one could always hope — placate her for long enough to make a difference. We moved the car seat around. I took her out of it. I swaddled her. I rocked her. I spread her blanket on the floor and assured her that we were in a very safe place. He offered another blanket to put under it as if to prove how safe and welcome she was.

Lily settled back cautiously. “Pretty comfy,” she seemed to say, still reserving judgment on the larger situation.

She looked around. “Decent shadows up there,” I could hear her say to herself as she gave a few experimental kicks.

“Okay?” I asked.

She kicked again and ignored me. “Okay,” was her answer.

And, true to her promise, she didn’t utter those first clicks of I-might-cry-ness until the acupuncturist started removing the needles.

“You are a generous spirit,” he told Lily graciously.

And thus defined her and my good fortune in a few short and honest words.

Continue reading ‘Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit’

Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

Published

Melissa

on May 1, 2009

in aging, being in the moment, change, chattering mind, following your heart, friendship, gratitude, motion, opening your heart, practice, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture and work

.
2 Comments

I hung up the phone yesterday thinking I had come full circle.

We hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years, and I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve heard the laugh that brought me right back in a joyful slide to the summer I turned seventeen. That laugh, I now remember, made me feel like I’d found a new and happy part of life.

I was at that awkward age where you want to be more grown up than you are, which maybe accounts for how I’ve more or less rejected the idea that there is anything serious about myself that I’d like to hold onto from those days. My narrative of that summer has always been about a girl filled with more naivete than a Los Angeles teenager probably should be, a dreamer who hadn’t yet bumped up against the realities that ultimately flattened her dreams and propelled her to law school and decades of searching for the feeling of that laugh.

And now, in one of those rare instances where Facebook lives up to its potential, I had a fresh perspective on a set of memories I’ve pored over a million times. Maybe, I considered from the vantage of this YogaMamaMe place I’ve made for myself, I wasn’t as naive as I’ve assumed. Maybe the dreams weren’t born of youthful stupidity. Maybe, just maybe, they simply became obscured by a life in which I stepped tenderly and then forcefully away from my heart. And now that I am back where my heart wants me to be, I have, I concluded, come full circle.

It’s an appealing picture, one in which an old friend becomes a new friend and our friendship a bookend-ish symbol of the insignificance of the journey between the two points of his laughter.

The picture is also, of course, just plain wrong. Because I haven’t really come full circle at all.

Continue reading ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?’

Everything Bad for Me Is Good Again (or at Least a Few Things)

Published

Melissa

on April 27, 2009

in Mama instinct, awareness, change, expectations, following your heart, intentions versus goals, letting go, nonharming, practice, respecting your body, stuck at home with a child, the bigger picture, trust and you can't control everything

.
0 Comments

There are a few things that feel unshakably bad for me: Voluntarily being outside in the snow. Spending my work weeks in an office building (and, even worse, a suit). Wearing my pajamas all day. Watching television in the middle of a beautiful afternoon. And eating chocolate.*

* I understand that I have just alienated 90% of my audience, including a few of you I hold particularly dear, but please bear with me and my eccentricities and read on for even more horrifying evidence of my chocolate antipathy. Remembering, of course, that we vilify that which we love the most.

For the most part, my weeks of second-time new motherhood confirmed these truths by which I live. Except, most surprisingly — and, probably, most enticingly for those of us (that is all of us) who want another excuse to eat it — for the chocolate.

Continue reading ‘Everything Bad for Me Is Good Again (or at Least a Few Things)’

Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is

Published

Melissa

on April 14, 2009

in awareness, balance, centering, change, chattering mind, discomfort verus pain, following your heart, letting instead of making, motion, practice, sense of self, sleep, trust and yoga class

.
0 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I was like the Cheshire Cat, grinning and purring contentedly about how smoothly the first four weeks of Lily’s life have slid by.

Yesterday evening, I was Alice herself, “shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep, and reaching half down the hall.” Unlike Alice, who was understandably crying because she had suddenly grown to about nine feet high, I was less understandably sobbing about what a terrible mother I am and how bleak the prospect of my being any better at it over the next many months appears.

Primarily, I was crying because my girl wouldn’t stop crying. And I wasn’t trying to stop her, which merely led to more heart-rending screams on her part (and maybe on mine — no one else was around to witness them, so I can’t be entirely sure). Her screams led me to remember all the times I let Jake cry the same way when he was an infant. Which made me cry more instead of reassuring me that good mothers sometimes can’t deal with their babies’ crying and those babies turn out just fine anyhow.

Worst of all, I was feeling — how could any mother feel, much less admit, this? — resentful that Lily wanted to use my breast as a pacifier. (Perhaps, I discovered later, because the nail on my pinkie finger was just a sliver too long and likely slicing the top of the poor girl’s mouth when I offered her a finger pacifier as a substitute. Which thought makes me want to cry a little bit now.)

All this crying in front of my impressionable young infant made me — what else? — cry some more. Even though I knew, despite my state of utter unreasonableness, that she will not remember her mother crying hysterically in front of her. Didn’t matter. Surely I was damaging her delicate new psyche in permanent and insidious ways.

In short, in the space of a few hours, I went from thinking I had finally put all the pieces of my life into place to being quite certain I could not manage life or motherhood, especially the next two to four years of it.

And I realized that It Is Hard. Even when you find a place where it doesn’t feel like it.

Continue reading ‘Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is’

I Like Pink

Published

Melissa

on April 3, 2009

in Mama instinct, balance, being in the moment, breathing, centering, expectations, following your heart, grace, letting instead of making and sense of self

.
5 Comments

It occurs to me as I type in the title of this piece that I may generate hits from some fans of the singer Pink. Who seems like a perfectly nice person but isn’t the pink I’m talking about. On the other hand, I find it fortuitous to have the opportunity to declare “I like pink” to a few extra people, given how many have heard me viciously attack the color pink in the past.

Some context is necessary here.

Starting with my first pregnancy, I had a great fear of pink. Pink little girl outfits with ruffles and ribbons. Tiny pink bows that some mothers affix to bald baby heads in a frequently futile effort to make their androgynous babies look feminine. (”My sister put a pink bow on her daughter’s head,” a friend of mine once told me. “Strangers told her how cute her little boy was and asked why she put a pink bow on him.”) Shiny little Mary Janes with paired with pink socks, and sparkly pink princess clothes, and mounds of pink doll-like dresses that I was just certain strangers were waiting to buy for my child if only she turned out to be a girl.

Jake, of course, did not turn out to be a girl. But even before we found out he would be a boy, we warned our friends and family that the sex of our child would be strictly between me and Mike. Primarily because we thought it would be nice to have at least one aspect of the pregnancy a private matter between just the two of us. But, really, what a huge side benefit to know that if we did turn out to be having a girl she could remain free of others’ gender conventions for at least the time she spent in utero.

This time, not only did the rest of the world not know we were having a girl, but we didn’t either, having decided that we had already pondered all the big boy/girl decisions during my first pregnancy (to circumcise or not to circumcise? that is the question) and therefore didn’t need to know the baby’s sex ourselves. So no worries about the dreaded explosion of pink that I feared would bury both me and my girl baby in a sea of Strawberry Quick colored blankets and dresses.

This child, I thought proudly, would arrive in the world a clean slate, no expectations piled upon … um, her.

As soon as she was a “her,” the pink card showed up on her hospital bassinet. And I didn’t much care. Maybe I was already sliding down the slope to my first Lily purchase — the pink Old Navy tee-shirt with the ruffled sleeves and Lucy Toothy decal and the hot pink polka dot pants with the ruffled ankles.

They are far from the last pink items I have purchased. And even futher from the last ones I will ever buy.

Because, after opening gift upon gift of beautiful pink dresses with, yes, bows (but no ruffles), after oohing and ahhing like the most pink-addled of mothers, after thrilling at how girl-like my three-week-old looks in her pink clothes, it is time for me to admit it. I like pink.

Continue reading ‘I Like Pink’

Of Big Boy Beds and Co-Sleepers

Published

Melissa

on March 9, 2009

in bed time, change, chattering mind, following your heart, letting instead of making, motion, opening your heart, sleep, structure and trust

.
0 Comments

I’d like to think our ability to get the co-sleeper assembled (albeit standing on its side in a corner of our bedroom until needed) somewhat balances out my cavalier attitude toward having Mike drive two and a half hours to Charlotte to visit IKEA on Thursday night — three days before my due date.

To be honest, my only concern about him taking the trip was that I couldn’t figure out a way to do it with him. For all the laxity we’ve shown in actually preparing for the new baby, the one regret I have is not planning a day trip to Charlotte to visit Trader Joe’s. A set-up co-sleeper I could do without. Washed infant clothes? — they were washed a couple of years ago. But a lack of tart dried Montgomery cherries to tide me through those shut-in weeks? Akin to being without newborn diapers (something I am proud to report I purchased a full two weeks ago).

At any rate, I knew that if I did go into labor Mike would just have to turn right around and sweat out the drive home while I lay on the couch and hoped I had enough episodes of Sesame Street TiVo’d to keep Jake occupied. More importantly, I knew I wasn’t going to go into labor. I was just frustrated that I couldn’t take the chance with a leisurely two and a half hour trip of my own.

I also knew that if we didn’t get that king-sized, all-natural latex mattress for which IKEA charges about a third of what any place else we’ve tracked down charges by this weekend we would be sleeping in our old queen for quite some time to come. Not a big deal. Expect that our old queen is the only plan we had for getting Jake out of his crib and into a Big Boy Bed.

The plan, you see, was to pass on to Jack our old, off-gassed queen — perfectly suitable for a thirty-pound boy, a 150-pound teenager, and, somewhere along the way between the two, a parent on the nights when Jake is suffering illness or nightmares or just plain loneliness. The Big Boy Bed, then, is just our own.

Or, more accurately, as it has turned out, our brand new, king-sized, all-natural latex king — a lovely expanse of sleeping space on which I will (theoretically, since I’m not yet sleeping on it) no longer roll downhill toward Mike’s considerably greater impression on mattress springs. Yep, I can almost spot it there in Jake’s room from my jealous perch on our old, creaky, lopsided queen.

It actually makes some sense — our beautiful new mattress sitting cozily in Jake’s room while I continue to fight the pull of gravity every time I turn my belly toward the downward slope that leads to my sleeping husband. See, a co-sleeper requires a bed frame — something to which the co-sleeper may be anchored so as to, you know, keep the baby safe. Meanwhile, we decided that the bed frames being offered by IKEA: a) didn’t look so sturdy, and b) were unlikely to fit in the van Mike borrowed from his brother for the trip down to Charlotte.

So, until we find a suitable frame somewhere locally, Jake gets the cool, comfy mattress and I get to gaze longingly down at his tiny little body asleep in the middle of all that wasted space.

Continue reading ‘Of Big Boy Beds and Co-Sleepers’

A Brief Return to a Past Life, or How (Really) Did I Get Here?

Published

Melissa

on March 6, 2009

in awareness, centering, change, compassion, discomfort verus pain, following your heart, inner peace, intentions versus goals, opening your heart, school, structure, the bigger picture, trust and work

.
4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, Mike handed me a book that had come free to his workplace.

“I doubt it’ll be very good,” he said, “but it’s a memoir about going to Columbia Law School. I thought you might be interested.”

Maybe it’s the buddha-like peace that has descended on me as I prepare to give birth. (Hardly an accurate description of my demeanor, but apparently the impression I give off in yoga class, where, I am told, women vie to practice next to me for my “beautiful energy.” Frankly, I think this has more to do with the public-ness of a pregnant belly than anything I am or am not doing, and it makes me feel a little crowded. So I guess buddha-like peace does not account for my reaction.) Or maybe it’s the passage of time, both since I graduated from Columbia and since I taught law school. Or maybe it’s just where I am in my life at this moment.

Whatever the reason, I did not take the book and throw it back at him.

In fact, I read it. Not with great enjoyment, certainly not with fond nostalgia, if anything with more than a touch of jealousy that a division of Simon & Schuster would publish something with nothing new to say, said in an occasionally amusing but mostly unoriginal way. (I realize one could say the same thing of my YogaMamaMe essays, should they ever be published, and this is no doubt a large part of what contributes to the jealousy.)

What I did find as I read was an ability to read more. And to smile when I recognized certain professors. And to sometimes nod without feeling a clenching sensation around my heart and a desire to run in the general direction of “west” so as to put a bit more distance between myself and that part of my life.

Because, I am realizing with a certain amount of awe, I no longer feel the need for that distance. I seem to have picked up perspective somewhere along the line instead.

Continue reading ‘A Brief Return to a Past Life, or How (Really) Did I Get Here?’

YogaMamaMe.com

Archive for the 'following your heart' Category

Lily Goes Full-Time

What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom

Traveling with Two: An Ode to My Generous Little Spirit

Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

Everything Bad for Me Is Good Again (or at Least a Few Things)

Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is

I Like Pink

Of Big Boy Beds and Co-Sleepers

A Brief Return to a Past Life, or How (Really) Did I Get Here?

Subjects

Poses

Chronology

YogaMamaSubscribe

YogaMamaSearch

YogaMamaNews

YogaMamaPosts

YogaMamaLinks

YogaLinks