From the category archives:

following your heart

Giving and Receiving Toddler Style — In the Bathtub

November 21, 2008

Jake took a bath last night for the first time in a week.
This fact is notable for three reasons.  First, he is generally quite fond of the tub, so a one-week boycott is a serious thing indeed.  Second, the fact that I was able to ease him back into the tub wearing a swim diaper [...]

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“Read My Lips . . .” Oh, Wait, You’re Still Learning to Talk

October 28, 2008

There are few things worse than having “The Heart of Rock and Roll” stuck in your head at two o’clock in the morning.
Except possibly having this catchy ’80’s ditty replay itself over and over as your child reaches out across the pillow you have erected as a barrier between your bodies because you refuse to [...]

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Could Yoga Really Have Led Me to the Americans with Disabilities Act?

September 18, 2008

Yoga, I have always thought, saved me from the law.
I became a lawyer, in the narrative I have set up of my life, because I was blind to my heart.  It was the path my mind led me down, the safe, manageable world of knowledge and surface communication and clear organizing principles.
Sure, I told myself [...]

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When Families Happen

September 10, 2008

The remarkable thing about my taking Jake to visit my sister-in-law Maureen last weekend was that it seemed so very unremarkable to me.
Mike, you see, had brilliantly realized that even if three of us couldn’t travel to Napa for three days to attend a wedding I had, quite frankly, been dying to attend, he could [...]

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Twice Bitten: More of the Wisdom of Toddlers

September 4, 2008

Not long ago, I arrived to pick Jake up from school to find not one but two incident reports awaiting me.
“He got bitten,” one of Jake’s teachers said apologetically.  “Twice.”
From the deliberately pared-down details they provided — perpetrators’ names and identifying characteristics are omitted from incident reports to protect those too young to deserve the [...]

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Careful What You Google For

August 14, 2008

About a week ago I googled an old boyfriend. The one I thought I’d marry but didn’t.
It wasn’t a stalker sort of thing. It wasn’t, amazingly, a raging case of misplaced nostalgia brought about by panic over finding myself a work-at-home mom living on a neighborly street in Asheville, North Carolina. I [...]

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The Friendship That Doesn’t Change When You Do

August 12, 2008

I took my dearest friend — Kali I’ll call her and she knows why — to the airport this morning. And I started crying — again. Not just because “Carolina in My Mind” was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in [...]

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The Moment Jake Went Down the Slide by Himself

July 18, 2008

Jake and I decided to go to the park after school on Tuesday. Usually we go home and play with the hounds or draw with chalk on the sidewalk or fast forward through Sesame Street on TiVo until we find good songs about dogs or the beach. But on Tuesday the weather was [...]

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MIA Part Three: Not Doubting Your Path

July 11, 2008

Sometimes there are good reasons you don’t have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don’t mean “good” in the “eat your spinach, it’s good for you” sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.
I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog [...]

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MIA Part Two: Learning Who You Are

July 9, 2008

So another reason I was missing in action for two weeks (even though, I say again to the empty echo-chamber of a deserted readership, I don’t think anyone really noticed): a visit to Louisville for my grandfather’s funeral.
Sad as this sounds — and much as the past couple of posts might, um, bring the [...]

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I’m Really Here, Now (Even in Wal-Mart)

June 23, 2008

What surprised me as I stood in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina, was not so much that I was standing in a Wal-Mart off I-40 in Hickory, North Carolina. The exigencies of a Blankie left far behind at school can leave one in some pretty surprising places. What surprised me was [...]

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Mothers, Daughters, and “The Eye of the Tiger”: How a Bad Song from 1982 Moved Me Closer to Stillness

June 16, 2008

On Father’s Day morning, when I started the car in the parking lot of EarthFare (Asheville’s local Whole Foods-ish place I love to shop for groceries even though we really can’t afford it), I had one of those delicious moments that happens when I hear “Eye of the Tiger” on the radio.
Immediately, it was 1982. [...]

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Booster Seats and Boosting Yourself

May 25, 2008

Thursday’s life lesson took place in the unlikely location of a Babies R Us in a strip mall off the exit just past the Asheville Mall, second-rate real estate where the stores squat sadly as if aware they have been banished.
I entered already full of the anxiety large, glowing box stores induce in me, determined [...]

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My Child Broke My Japa Mala

May 19, 2008

What does it mean when your child breaks your japa mala?
A japa mala is a set of prayer beads some people use when chanting to Hindu or Buddhist deities. I got mine during my month of is-this-me?, Indian-print-skirt-wearing, chanting-at-five-in-the-morning, living-on-an-ashram yoga teacher training. I can’t say I’ve used it a whole lot since [...]

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Geez, I Haven’t Had the Hip Replacement Yet, or Thoughts on Age and Youth

May 14, 2008

Something occurred to me yesterday in yoga class as I observed the places where I feel just a tad tighter and achier than I did before my pregnancy.
“Maybe,” I thought with a rush of horror threaded through with an unsettling warmth of acceptance, “I’m just getting older.”
For the past couple of years I’ve had these [...]

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Trust with a Capital T: How’s That for a Mother’s Day Gift?

May 12, 2008

“Think of what you’d like to do tomorrow,” Mike said Saturday night. “I want to do something special for you for Mother’s Day.”
A perfectly reasonable request. But I am not, as it turns out, a perfectly reasonable person when it comes to being feted on Mother’s Day.
As Mike headed off for an evening [...]

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Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat’s Maze

May 5, 2008

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong.
It begins with a weird sense of displacement — in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. “What am I doing here?” or something like it started the internal conversation. [...]

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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 [...]

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Taking Some Time on Sunday Morning to Honor My Heart

April 20, 2008

I woke up in a cranky mood this morning.
“Great,” Mike said when I informed him of this fact, and I don’t blame him, even though I sort of did at the time. One of the hardest things about being cranky for me is knowing that I am taking it out on him. (I [...]

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What Not Being a Real Buddhist Has Taught Me About Motherhood

April 19, 2008

Last night as I was washing the day’s sippy cups I listened to a podcast of Fresh Air featuring Pico Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama for 33 years and recently wrote a book about him.
The only one awake in the still house on a soft spring night, fresh from dinner out at Marco’s, [...]

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