From the category archives:

nonharming

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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Happy Mother’s Day

May 11, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling too comfortable with the idea of this day where I’m supposed to be suddenly special for being a mother.
I mean, it is special being a mom. As well as exhausting, rewarding, confusing, and frequently humiliating. But why am I more special than ever on [...]

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How Losing a Little Bit of What’s Central to You Can Be Kind of Centering

April 26, 2008

It hit me somewhere around the time I was half-heartedly kicking my right foot up toward a handstand in the middle of the room. Something had radically changed in my life.
Part of it was that I wasn’t trying very hard. I had resigned myself to never, ever having the courage to attempt a [...]

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Respecting Your Body (and, of course, your child’s) in a World That Doesn’t

April 24, 2008

Boy, you think you’re a careful, concerned parent doing everything anyone could to ensure that your child will never contract autism or cancer or any of the other scary diseases that seem to lurk everywhere in our toxic world, and along come abundant assurances that you could be doing so very much more. It’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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When Family Visits Cross Paths with Our Personal Journeys

April 8, 2008

Any moment now, my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and niece are going to arrive at my house.
I am, I report with pleasure and a little bit of pride, not in complete meltdown mode, despite just now sitting down to write when there’s really no time left to do so. While this was my priority when I [...]

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Judge the Man in the Red Yoga Shorts only if You Are Ready for Him to Judge You

April 5, 2008

The man in the red yoga shorts was in class again on Thursday. I wasn’t the only one looking.
None of us, I assure you, were staring with pleasure. He was wearing the traditional yoga shorts that no doubt were the inspiration for European bathing trunks, the kind regretfully worn only by old German [...]

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Shopping for Groceries without Jake, or Following the Path I Have Chosen

April 3, 2008

Wednesdays are my no-yoga-class days, when the 7 hours Jake is at school (and I’m not) stretch ahead of me like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s waiting to be eaten without interruption. I imagine productivity the likes of which have never before been seen in a middle-of-the-week frenzy to do all the things [...]

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Breaking from Break, Part I: Why We Are Allowed to Take a Break from Being Mothers

March 31, 2008

It began before I left to take my friend Sam to the airport at the end of his weekend visit. Panic. Anxiety. An unsteady feeling, as if the floor beneath me had disappeared, leaving me spinning my legs in an ethereal nothingness.
I thought about what was causing this feeling half an hour [...]

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Learning to Trust (Including Yourself)

March 28, 2008

My favorite yoga class begins in 10 minutes, and I will not be there.
I ensured this outcome by eating breakfast a few minutes ago because I knew I could not be trusted to resist throwing on my yoga clothes at the last minute and dashing out the door. [One should not eat ideally 3 [...]

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Taking Care of Yourself When You’re Sick Instead of Pretending You’re Not

March 27, 2008

Once again, Jake is sick and — despite my best efforts at denying it — so am I.
Just a cough and a scratchy throat. Plus this weird thing where I wake up with my eyes all puffy and glued shut. But enough for me to feel tired and defeated and like a complete [...]

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When I’m Sleepy I’m Even More Critical of Myself

March 26, 2008

It never really goes away, does it? How many times your brand new baby wakes you up every night and how you get him back to sleep morphs into whether, when, and how to sleep train. Once you’re over the guilt and/or exhaustion produced by your decision, a bout of teething sends you [...]

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Practicing Not Yoga with a Glass of Wine and 2 a.m. TiVo

March 23, 2008

There are days when you don’t have time for a yoga practice but can still practice yoga.
On these days I still eat in a way that nourishes my body (mostly — we went to Trader Joe’s in Charlotte last weekend and walked out with three packages of Droste dark chocolate pastilles that aren’t very good [...]

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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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