A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
The triple crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent, as I have just now decided, is a marathon consisting of what at this moment strike me as the most frustrating parenting moments:
1) Staying home with a sick child. For a week.
2) Staying home with a child who is finally well on a snow day.
3) Dealing with an eleven-and-a-half-month-old who has decided she can feed herself and is wrong.
Continue reading ‘The Triple Crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent’
There are times — many, many times in the life of a mother of two children under three — when you know that whatever it is that is making you cry is a normal part of parenthood. The incident that has driven you to tears of despair is, you could easily tell yourself, a positive sign that your child is developing properly. No other parent has ever cried in similar circumstances, you may even lie to yourself, so buck up.
But you will cry anyhow, and you will feel good and sorry for yourself as you do it.
By all rights, my latest bout of tears should not have been induced by the simple fact of Lily awakening twice in one night. Because who would cry over something most other mothers of infants I know take as a fact of life? And what sort of ingrate would not be able to take a few days out of the five-and-a-half months of her daughter’s life when she loses a little more than a little sleep?
By all rights, in other words, I should instead have been crying when I was sitting on the dirty floor of a Target bathroom at eight o’clock last night, my baby strapped to me in the Ergo, the toilet paper dispenser empty, and my son’s brand-new Big Boy underpants, shall we say, soiled.
But I didn’t cry then. In that moment, I could find quite a lot of humor in just watching myself. It’s in the middle of the night that my outlook on life is more than a little bit less inclined toward laughter.
Continue reading ‘Sometimes You’ve Just Gotta Cry (Especially at Four O’Clock in the Morning)’
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)’
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’
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?’
On Friday afternoon, I was lucky enough to be invited to the dedication of a lovely meditation space in downtown Asheville, the WriteMind Institute. And even more lucky to have a mother-in-law in town and an infant feeding schedule that allowed me to attend.
It felt pretty darned great to take a shower, put on real clothes, and actually pick Jake up from daycare, from which I have officially been banished until the end of flu season, still a week hence. I made an exception on Friday, feeling somehow loose and free by dint of my very ability to walk out of the house for two hours without my baby.
This is not something first-time mothers should try, by the way. I don’t think Jake was ever more than fifty feet from me until that time we were visiting Mike’s mother when he was four months old, and three adults physically pushed me out of the house to take a walk without him. He was crying when I got back, which pretty much convinced me I couldn’t leave him again for another four or five months at least.
But now I’m sane and balanced and the mother of an inevitably neglected second child (have I mentioned that I’m a second child?) so off I traipsed to the petri dish of Jake’s daycare and off he and I sped downtown for an outing that brought back guiltily pleasurable memories of what it was like to have only one child. Manageable is the word I think I’m looking for.
The meditation space was absolutely beautiful, with a peaceful pull that reminded me of how long it’s been since I’ve practiced any form of yoga. (That would be 24 days, since the day before Lily was born.) The head of the WriteMind Institute, Jonathon Flaum, gathered us around to talk about the space and how welcome we all were there. He invited us to sit in silence for five glorious minutes — during which Mike and Jake wandered the street outside, far enough away so that our silence would not be broken by a small child yelling “NOOOOO!” as is frequently Jake’s wont these days.
And then Jonathon talked about refuge. He told some beautiful stories, and what it boiled down to was this: Refuge as he defined it is a place where no one asks anything of you other than that you be yourself.
This idea traveled straight to my heart, already steeped in the easiest five minutes of meditation I’d ever experienced and the warm energy of a room full of people who shared the love and excitement of this new space. A place where no one asks anything of me other than that I be myself.
And in that moment, I felt as if I knew myself, in a clear and simple way that I hadn’t for a very, very long time. In one telescoped moment, I remembered how long it took me to find that self and how I had lost her in that first year of motherhood, and I experienced a pleasurable jolt of wisdom in recognizing that the birth of my second child — far from tossing me back down the rabbit hole of lost mindfulness I had expected — has brought me more strongly to that self.
A self I can be in places of refuge. Where no one asks anything of me other than that I be myself.
I had a hour of heaven in front of the television last night.
Normally, I don’t think of anything having to do with watching television as particularly heavenly, unless it involves putting my pregnant feet up for an hour of total rest before picking up my son from preschool. Those days, however, are no longer with me, and watching t.v. with an infant in my lap is neither satisfying nor a particularly good idea, as it seems to disturb her sleep, both while the t.v. is on and for pretty much the whole night afterward.
But I do like snuggling up with Jake to watch an hour of Sesame Street, as long as I enthusiastically yell out the numbers flashing on the screen in an effort to make it a learning experience. Plus, it’s not really an hour, since many of the segments provoke a bored/demanding, “Watch Sesame Street, please” from Jake, which translates roughly as, “TiVo has destroyed my attention span.”
And so, last night, when Mike resorted to Sesame Street as a way to free himself to cook dinner, I decided I needed to be near my son as much as I needed to feed my newborn daughter, and I committed what the lacatation consultant I saw when Jake was an infant deemed one of the Seven Deadly Sins — breastfeeding with the t.v. on.
Not that the television stayed off for the first four months of Jake’s life, during which I was using an evil supplemental nursing system that involved a collection of tubes, bottles, formula, and the patience of a saint. There’s only so long you can spend an hour and a half per feeding staring silently at the wall because your baby isn’t any more interested in gazing up into your eyes as he nurses than you are in gauging, ad nauseum, whether he is swallowing properly. But I don’t think I broke down for at least six weeks or so. And I know I wasn’t watching anything quite as stimulating as Sesame Street.
Lily certainly didn’t complain or seem to register any difference in her dining experience. And when she finished and remained wide-eyed I figured that was just a nice little bit of alert time that I’m trying to shift to my waking hours anyhow. So I propped the moses basket toward what seemed to be a particularly fascinating lamp and invited Jake to sit in my lap.
Oh, how my world became complete when he accepted my invitation.
Jake, you see, has adjusted rather stunningly well to the new baby. Sure, there are tantrums and Ignore Mommy moments. But the clinging to Mommy and screaming as she tries to feed the baby that I had been dreading has never materialized. Instead, Jake has neatly shifted his expectations of primary caregiving to his father.
And, in the process, broken my heart even more neatly than if he were making my life impossible by being less cooperative.
How lovely, then, to feel the solid toddler-ness of him in my lap, to be able to reach around once again to kiss his firm toddler cheeks, to wrap my arms all the way around his chest and squeeze as he puts his thumb in his mouth and moves in closer.
Lily tolerated all of this not-holding her for the rest of Sesame Street and a bit of Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies, but I sensed something was shifting by the time Mike had dinner on the table. Indeed, although I placed her in the sling and invited her to sit with us, the tectonic plates were already in motion, and the earthquake was about to commence.
Yep. Mommy didn’t get to eat much of her dinner. I forgot about those days. And now they’re back.
Continue reading ‘Is a Toddler in the Lap Worth an Infant Who Can’t Sleep?’
Jake’s little sister arrived on Friday, proving that Friday the 13th isn’t so very unlucky after all. Unless, that is, you find it the least bit unlucky to have only 3 hours of labor to produce a nine-and-a-half-pound baby. I prefer to use the word “intense.”
A good word, as well, to describe the feeling of bringing a newborn home to meet the two-year-old Big Brother you love so much you sometimes feel the air literally being squeezed from your lungs when you think about it.
The intensity, to be perfectly clear, is all my own. Jake has taken it all in stride.
He arrived home with his sitter on Saturday evening to give Mike and me both big hugs. “Baby Lily,” he said sagely when he saw her sleeping in her moses basket. “That’s my sister.”
Did I mention that I love his sitter?
He was thrilled with the toy guitar Lily gave him, and mugged greatly for us in Elvis-ian poses, showing not the least bit of interest in competing with or pouting about his sister, or even remotely suggesting we do something a two-year-old might do like throw her in the trash. Instead, that day and every day since, he prefers to pet her head — in what Mike has termed the “giving of the benediction” — and — somewhat more alarmingly — to offer her gentle head butts, which are the height of playful affection for him.
In short, Jake is doing really well with the transition.
I’m the one who’s struggling.
Continue reading ‘It’s a Girl! and Thoughts on the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable’
“Enjoy this sweet time as a family of three,” the midwife said to me at the end of our appointment on Friday.
Of course, I panicked.
Was she suggesting that life for Jake was about to be rendered far from sweet? Soured? Curdled? Bitter enough to take away his constant smiles and laughter and remarkable goofiness?
I’ve never really bought into the fear of how the first born will be affected by a new sibling because, let’s face it, an awful lot of first borns have gone through it and come out just fine. And holding Jake gives me such joy that I can’t imagine I won’t find a way to sneak in some hugs between infant feedings, even if they might not always be at Jake’s preferred hug times.
Still, I can’t continue for much longer in the same sort of fuzzy, nonreality haze in which Jake lives, where “having a baby” mainly means you get to yell with great pride, “I am!” whenever someone asks who’s the big brother.
And so I started collecting the sweet times: Curling up in front of the fire at the hotel Mike and I treated ourselves to last Monday night, getting lost in a good book, and later cuddling with my husband in a king-sized bed with lots of pillows and a view of the mountains. Jake’s joy at seeing me the next day and his nearly equal joy at recounting how much fun he had had at his sitter’s house. Arriving at school to pick him up a few days later to find him sitting on a stool, mini guitar in lap, shiny pink sunglasses completing the look, strumming away like a rock star and warbling, “Shabbat! Shalom! HEY!” He and Mike returning home from a Saturday trip to the Health Adventure so Mommy could finish one last work project and Jake catapulting into my arms babbling with remarkable clarity about his day. And Sunday afternoon snuggled with him on the couch napping together while a blizzard of fat wet snowflakes fell outside.
By Sunday night, armed with several layers of love, I was ready to introduce Jake to the joys of siblinghood. And, not incidentally, myself to a long-awaited Monday of nothing, nothing, nothing to do but put my feet up, rest, and contemplate whether I could dip into our maternity leave savings for a facial.
Until, that is, the Snow Day announcement.
Continue reading ‘The Sweet Times, and Remembering to Savor Them’
