From the category archives:

gratitude

The World Has Shifted

November 5, 2008

My baby will be born in a world where an African American man is President.
My twenty-two-month-old son will grow up knowing nothing but a President who is black and a Governor who is a woman.
Overnight, everything has shifted.
My children live in a much better world than the one I grew up in.

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Travels with Toddler (Low Country Edition)

October 14, 2008

“Elmo!” Jake crowed the second he saw the portable DVD player set up in the back seat of the car.  Plainly, he was ready for a driving trip, as long as we had Elmo’s Big Outdoors at the ready.
As was I.  After a year of living in the mountains, I was craving some beach time [...]

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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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Why Practicing Yoga Is as Simple as Sleeping with a Sick Child

July 15, 2008

I’m assuming there are women checking out the YogaMamaMe community who don’t practice asanas, don’t know what the word means (it designates the physical poses you see people practicing on the cover of Yoga Journal when you’re waiting in the check-out line at Whole Foods), don’t intend ever to practice them, and yet are kind [...]

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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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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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Why I Can’t Take a Compliment (Even of My Kid)

April 18, 2008

When I picked Jake up from school yesterday, one of his caregivers told me he’d been “doing much better lately.”
Since I thought he’d been doing just fine for some time now, I found this cheery message about as welcome as one of Jake’s epic morning poops.
“Better?” I asked, carefully modulating my voice to sound like [...]

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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 I [...]

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Making the Little Choices

April 14, 2008

I’m on my way to the Carl Sandburg house, and wondering if I learned anything at all yesterday.
It was Saturday, I’d been cutting into my work time entertaining relatives, and I really just wanted to stay home and get some work done. Still, there’s a difference between deciding to get some work done and [...]

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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 [...]

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Being Open to Change

April 2, 2008

I was stuck in the back of yoga class again yesterday.
This is not my favorite spot, for no particular reason, other than habit. I like being in the front, in my own world, diving into empty space instead of someone else’s mat. No doubt books (or at least lengthy articles) could be written [...]

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Breaking from Break, Part II: Back to Being a Mom

April 1, 2008

So, it turns out it’s not as hard as I had anticipated to jump right back into mothering, working, and living at breakneck speed.
Except, that is, for those five minutes this morning when I was trying to change Jake’s poopy diaper. He has now decided that a choice between lying down and standing up [...]

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How Getting Knocked Off My Feet Helped Me to Grow

March 25, 2008

Yesterday I surveyed the field of unexpected obligations suddenly stretching between me and my YogaMamaMe website and declared myself okay. Getting published, I realized, had become too much of a goal, and I should feel deep gratitude to the Universe for throwing a bunch of other things at me as a reminder that I [...]

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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, [...]

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I’m Finding a Way to Practice in the Time My Life Allows for It

March 20, 2008

Today is Thursday, a yoga day. This means at noon I will dash away from my computer to throw on yoga clothes, sweat through a 12:15 class, and return home to shower some time between 2:00 and 3:30 in the afternoon, an exercise that will never cease to feel, just, wrong. I did [...]

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