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’
Actually, I don’t really know that it’s H1N1 with whom we’ve tangoed over the past week. But I’ve been told that right now anything that looks like flu must be of the swine variety.
Like most of the H1N1 lore I’ve been hearing, there’s no telling how accurate this information I’m spreading around is. But no one is going to confuse this site with the CDC’s and, besides, H1N1 makes for a timely and eye-catching title.
So, full disclosure: No bodily fluids, no soaring temperatures, no stories about persevering despite record-breaking dehydration here. Just trying times and trying to be mindful. And yoga.
“Yep,” Mike confirmed the other day. “Lily’s acting like a normal baby.”
He said this after our first sunny fall day in the park. After Lily and I arrived with her pouting in her stroller because I decided that much as she was demanding it I was simply not up to the task of walking to the park with her in the Ergo. After yet another night of our power struggle over when she got to wake me up to nurse (as opposed to just waking me up) and how many times. And after I summarily dumped her in Mike’s arms and walked away to chat with some other adults.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with acting like a normal baby when you are, pretty much, a normal baby. You get to fuss. You get to yell at your mother for not holding you enough, not nursing you enough, having the audacity to put you down on the floor so she can, say, put on her sweater for a walk to the park. And you definitely get to refuse to sleep through the night and not care that the books say by six and a half months you probably should be doing so.
I know there is nothing wrong with all of this. I know — I think I know, I tell myself I know — that just because Lily can be a little grumpy with me now and then it does not mean that she will come to hate me in thirteen or so years. She will hate me then regardless of what I do right now.
What I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around, however, is the notion that there is nothing wrong with me responding to her grumpiness with less than perfect equanimity and nurturing sweetness. There is nothing wrong with telling a baby at one o’clock in the morning that you want to sleep and she should stop crying at you. Especially if you are offering a tone of voice and a back rub that are a great deal more gentle than the words you are saying because you know she can’t understand them anyhow.
In short, I spent the past several days beating myself up because Lily’s crankiness made me cranky as well.
Continue reading ‘Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months’
We got our first, “Are we there yet?” in the car on Wednesday.
Mike and I both grinned at each other like kids taking their first bite of a Quarter Pounder — thrilled but also queasily aware that we shouldn’t be.
The great, grin-inducing thing about Jake’s “are we there yet?” is that it lacked even the hint of a whine. It wasn’t a poorly coded way of telling us he would rather be just about anywhere than in a car with us heading away from home for a long weekend with his extended family to celebrate his grandmother’s eightieth birthday. No, Jake meant exactly what he said — he wanted to know if we had arrived in this curious place he had been promised.
“Is that Grandma’s birthday?” he asked, pointing out the window at one of the countless tourist traps lining the main road in Cherokee. It displayed Southwestern Native American blankets even though we were in North Carolina passing through a land trust belonging to the Cherokee tribe, whose members, to my knowledge, have never resided in the Southwest, except perhaps once they retire.
“Not yet,” I said. “If you close your eyes, when you open them we’ll be there.”
Fat chance of getting him to nap, I knew. But I didn’t much mind. I was off on a mini-vacation (if anything that involves bringing your two children under the age of three qualifies as a vacation of any magnitude). My husband was characteristically cheerful at the prospect of spending time with his family. And, perhaps most importantly, I was pain-free for the first time in days.
Amazing how good not being in pain can feel when you’ve recently been reminded of the alternative.
Continue reading ‘Are We There Yet? (Part One: Internal Version)’
When I was in eighth grade, my two best friends and I had an inexplicable obsession with the movie Kramer vs. Kramer.
We pined for Dustin Hoffman (must have been the feathered early-eighties hair). Pre-VCR’s and DVD’s, we sat through it in the theater multiple times trying to memorize the dialogue. We tracked down and then immediately discarded the book on which the movie is based when we came to the passage early on that said something about Ted fantasizing about having sex with fat women. None of us were fat and, more importantly, I don’t think we were ready to think about our matinee idols in such carnal terms.
We also cried during the scene where Billy falls off the play structure and gets stitches. I can still see Dustin Hoffman running, panting, through the streets of Manhattan with his injured child in his arms and his shirt smeared with blood. I can see the worry and pain on his face as a doctor sews through his child’s skin.
And I wonder, as I see these images, why I was nothing like Dustin Hoffman yesterday when I took Jake to get his stitches.
Mike and I had one of those glorious Asheville Saturdays yesterday. We took Jake to Plow Day at Warren Wilson College, a small school just outside of town with — as the Plow Day moniker would suggest — a working farm.
Yes, one year of living here, and I consider Plow Day at Warren Wilson College the height of family-friendly entertainment. And I say that with an honest lack of snarkiness or sarcasm.
Clearing still-late-summer skies greeted us as we hiked past the chickens living as chickens ought to, with a spacious hen-house equipped with easy access to a grub-filled yard and a positively stunning rooster, resplendent in his glinting green tail feathers and magnificent wattle. “Cluck, cluck,” Jake remarked. “Cog-a-oo-l-oo!”
We continued past haphazardly collapsed stacks of slumbering pigs, apparently not the early risers who had curiously monitored our approach when we visited them one August morning with our out-of-town friend Kali. (”Let’s go visit pigs!” we must have said that Sunday morning. I’m sure she responded most enthusiastically.)
And then we saw them: teams of horses and mules of various equine ethnicities hitched to rustic-looking plows. I wondered if there have been any advances in horse-drawn plows in the past few decades, and, if so, whether there was a picturesque-ness requirement for the locals entering their teams in the College’s plow day. As the farm is run entirely with natural methods and subsistence farming, it didn’t seem unreasonable that they would ban an approach that might be more efficient but less quaint-American-pastoral than the one we were witnessing.
There didn’t seem to be much organization to the plowing. Teams entered and exited the field, plowed where they wished, and appeared beholden to no bosses. A large dog loped across the path of some stolid plowers without any sign of awareness that she might think twice about her choices. An eight-week-old brindled Catahoula puppy gave me and Jake a snuffle before tugging at his leash in a failed bid to join the bigger dog out on the field.
Contrary to our experience last month, Jake was not distressed by the horses. Instead, he identified them eagerly and repeatedly — “Hoh-se! Hoh-se!” — as if merely naming them was as satisfying as examining them up close.
It all seemed so idyllic that I didn’t think twice about allowing him to plop down in the middle of a field usually occupied by livestock to watch the bluegrass band performing atop the flatbed of an old pick-up truck or to make non-threatening attempts to climb the poles supporting one of the barbecue tents with a new three-year-old friend. Nor, to my eternal Bad Mother shame, did I consider the possibility that there could be anything the least bit dangerous about offering my toddler son cider pressed on an old-fashioned press with great enthusiasm by barefoot college students using unwashed apples gathered from the nearby orchard.
“I hope they don’t let the pigs in the apple orchard,” Mike said, with a tad too much restraint to truly catch my attention.
“It’s a farm! They don’t let the pigs in the apple orchard!” I replied with remarkable certainty for someone who knows not the first thing about farming, pigs, or — despite a few October visits to pick-your-own-applies orchards — picking apples. As if to prove my point, I sent a good swig of my own cup of cider to Jake’s still-gestating sibling.
Maybe Mike was right. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that Jake ingested most of his cider by the questionable method of sticking a dirt- (and possibly horse manure-) covered hand into the cup and transferring the few drops that didn’t slide down his arms and drip off the ends of his elbows into his mouth. But whatever did it, the results were not good.
At 5:45 that evening, Jake was in fine form, riding a stroller home from a romp in the park with me and babbling about his excitement to see Daddy back at home. At 6:00 Mike was asking me if he had seemed okay at the park. At 6:15, his temperature was beginning its climb to the 103-degree range where it hovered for the rest of the night.
All of which I am, as a mother, equipped to deal with. Liquids, infant Tylenol, cuddles, banishing Mike to the daybed in the office so I can sleep next to my sick boy are all standard modes of operation around here. I even maintained a remarkable state of calm when I awoke to my boy placing a puddle of vomit underneath his face and alarmingly close to mine.
It was a few minutes later when he began screaming inconsolably for his Daddy! that my confidence in my motherliness began to falter.
Continue reading ‘Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy?’
How about that Michael Phelps, huh? Single-minded determination, laser-like focus, conquering his body’s limitations. The ultimate competitor.
I’d like to see him take care of a toddler while suffering from a good bout of stomach flu. (Dara Torres has probably done it, but then she’s a goddess, being over 40 and an Olympic athlete and all.)
I’d heard the horror stories before: Entire family succumbs to a nasty virus that has them battling each other for the bathroom, pits parent against parent in the fight over who has to drag her or his aching body out of bed to change the kids’ vomit-covered sheets, reduces the parents to shivering skeletons sleeping in puddles of sweat while their fully recovered and now ravenous child chirps, “Pasta? Pasta?” How does anyone survive?
Honestly, I didn’t have it that bad. In fact, I had the good fortune to get hit on a Sunday, when I could lie moaning in bed and Mike could, with only a tiny bit of reluctance, take Jake to a work party. (His only complaint upon returning was that he was so busy chasing Jake around that he never got to eat any of the food.) I did, however, have the bad fortune of getting hit on the Sunday before the Monday and Tuesday when Jake’s school was closed for summer break.
In other words, like an Olympic athlete, I found myself pushing my body beyond what is probably healthy (standing dizzily in the heat of a toddler playground while Jake ran an endless loop on the slide). I kept going by tapping into that voice in my head telling me I could work through the pain (or, perhaps, Jake’s pain, as when I found my way to a shady bench to rest I refused to leave it when Jake fell and starting crying, instead calling out, “Did you fall, Mister?” and prompting a woman at the next bench to stand up and bellow, “Is that anyone’s child?” She seemed only slightly embarrassed when I assured her that — my heartless response to him falling down notwithstanding — he was, in fact, mine.) I made it through the school-less-stomach-flu day, in other words, with the utter commitment of an Olympic athlete going for the gold. (Okay, maybe I had no choice, but neither do a whole bunch of the Chinese athletes, and it doesn’t make them any less committed.)
There is one big difference between me and the Olympic athletes, though. (Okay, two, if you count, oh, what great physical shape they’re in.) A gold medal, however awesome and life-changing it might be, surely can’t compare to the feeling of sitting with my neighbors at the end of the day watching 20-month-old Jake walk, grinning, single-file along the fence in front of our house between the four-year-olds who live on either side of us.
In that single moment bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, my toddler grew into a little boy and my heart grew with him.
Continue reading ‘A New Olympic Event — Caring for a Toddler While You Have the Stomach Flu’
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 enough to join anyhow. To be honest, over the past several days, even I have begun to wonder if I’ll ever find the time for an asana practice again, and I am, after all the one person I ought to be able to count on to actually do the practices I write about here
(Guilty admission; I don’t always because by the time I’ve finished writing and posting I am already late to pick Jake up from school. See? You don’t need to practice yoga to gain comfort in sharing with others.)
Last night I was reminded that as mothers we all practice yoga all the time, whether we realize it or not. We all put aside our own discomfort to care for our children and in return we receive the joy that is motherhood.
Which, I thought as I slept with my restless, sick, hitting-me-in-the-face-and-then-asking-for-juice son, is very much what a yoga practice is about, even if we don’t use the asanas to remind us of it.
Continue reading ‘Why Practicing Yoga Is as Simple as Sleeping with a Sick Child’
Jake slept in this Monday morning. I did too, for a while. Until Mike told me it was eight o’clock and suddenly my eyes were wide open like a Bush voter who finds out for the first time that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. One minute I was dozing blissfully, the next I was jolted awake with the unpleasant aftertaste of guilt in my mouth.
I probably could have used the extra sleep just as much as Jake. More, in fact, since he spent the night awakening only when his coughing really hurt his throat whereas I was in some state of mental alertness for every single cough and snort of his stuffed up little nose.
But I, naturally, could not sleep past eight o’clock, even if I have spent many an early morning praying that Jake would go back to sleep until, oh 8:30 or 9:00. Because it’s Monday morning. And, let’s face it, even if Jake had ever answered one of those morning prayers, there’s no way I could have indulged in the luxury of sleeping in with him. There is, after all, always something you could be doing while the baby’s asleep.
Even on a morning like this one when, to be honest, there wasn’t much I had to be doing. I could, I assured myself, find something, just as soon as I dragged my lazy bones out of bed.
Continue reading ‘Monday Mornings, Sleeping Late, and the Clash of the “Should Do’s”’
I know how this sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway. Yesterday I paid more attention to Grey’s Anatomy than to my child. Just a little bit more. And just for a little while. And only because I really, really needed to.
It had, you see, been a rough week. Jake’s allergies were keeping us all up, the breathing treatments the doctor prescribed were freaking us all out, and I’m not sure Jake was yet over the previous day’s chest x-ray taken because, yes, his coughing was that bad. I could barely remember the last time I’d practiced yoga, written a post, or done anything that could roughly be called something for myself. In my sleep-deprived, not-even-allowed-to-like-spring-and-all-the-pollen-now, self-centered (”It’s not fair!”) state, I found myself reduced to shuffling through the house bursting into tears every time it dawned on me anew that I have no friends who live in the same time zone as I do. And a mean migraine was refusing to do more than recede slightly from time to time as I downed Advil and wished fervently for someone to show up at my door bearing Imitrex.
We had, moreover, just returned from spending an hour and a half at Jake’s school, during which time I tried mightily to convince him he’d like to stay, to play, to just let go of Mommy for more than a cautious and tearful minute or two at a time. I had yet to confront his refusal to so much as take a nap later in the day (who knew that a select few of us actually get hyperactive when fed a teaspoon of Children’s Benadryl?), nor was I aware that I would be spending a barely coherent hour going over the last details of the YogaMamaMe website on the phone with the designer well after I should by all rights have been lying in bed with a good book and a bottle of Ace Pear Cider.
There was simply nothing left to do. I had zero energy, zero ability to read Jake a book in anything but a dejected mumble, zero desire to do anything but cry. And so, in a burst of warm-chocolate-chip-cookie-like comfort, I watched the remaining hour of the TiVo’d Grey’s Anatomy season finale at 11:30 in the morning while Jake did me an enormous favor and entertained himself in the living room.
Any you know what? It made me feel a whole lot better.
Continue reading ‘A Little Grey’s Anatomy, a Little Kindness’
