A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson when I looked at my butt in a mirror at my sister-in-law’s house while four months pregnant.
You would, in fact, not be expecting too much to think after that shock I would be smart enough not to look at my butt in a changing room mirror at a Nordstrom in Charlotte when I am ten months postpartum. When I am forty-three years old. Or ever, for that matter.
Some explanation is required.
There are those (my husband) who will think me a little bit nutty for saying this, but windy days breed anxiety.
One might suggest that I am simply looking for something other than my mother to blame my anxiety on. And that may be the case. But I have it on good authority — my acupuncturist, no less — that I am on to something. Windy days make us feel ungrounded, scattered, and, yes, for someone prone to anxiety like me, anxious.
If I require more proof — which I don’t — I need look no further than yesterday morning, when the wind rattled the maple trees in our front yard and rained bits of debris on the tin roof while I held my puzzled, hungry baby in my arms sobbing, “It’s not your fault! It’s not your fault!”
Anxious. Crazy. Indeed
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)’
I was initially kind of excited when I sat down to breakfast this morning and discovered an article in the New York Times Style section about a yoga class I attended a few times.
It felt like a brush with celebrity, an acknowledgment of a past life maybe not steeped in but occasionally brushing up against glamour. “I know uber-teacher Vinnie Marino,” I pictured myself saying to someone who cared. “And that’s the waiting area at the Main Street YogaWorks,” I smiled knowingly as I scanned the accompanying photo for a familiar face.
There were no familiar faces. Perhaps because it’s been at least four years since I attended a class at the Main Street studio. And I’m pretty certain Heather Graham was not in it with me, even though the article reports that she is now a regular.
In fact, the more I read, the longer ago it all seemed. And the longer ago it all seemed, the sadder I felt. It’s not that I was ever a regular in that class or that I wasn’t a regular in a local class right up until the day before I gave birth. Rather, as I read the article’s description of the mad rush for a spot, the mats placed perilously close to each other, the intimidating poses, I knew that if I were to show up for the class now I would be kind of frightened.
Four years ago I wouldn’t have been frightened.
Four years ago I would have confidently spread out my mat. I would have had at least a bit of a grasp on any pose Vinnie threw my way and a healthy sense of confidence if it was one still beyond me. I wouldn’t have been the tiniest bit intimidated by the other practitioners. I would, in short, have belonged.
Continue reading ‘What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom’
What’s the most natural thing in the world? Breastfeeding? The naked human body? Worms and cockroaches and creepy crawlies? A little flatulence after a satisfying dinner of rice and beans?
Any one of them. Except for breastfeeding.
This declaration, I know, sounds a bit aggressive, wounded perhaps, certainly not in keeping with the spirit of someone who believes that everything can be cured by yoga. Everything, it turns out in my own personal experience, except breastfeeding.
Because no matter how many people might tell you otherwise, it is not the most natural thing in the world. At least for those of us whose children would end up wolf food were it not for utterly unnatural things like the medication I take to induce lactation. A medication whose dosage I am slowly reducing, slowly reducing my milk supply along with it.
I am also, not incidentally, watching my sanity level slowly reduce as well as I fruitlessly wish I just knew for sure when I should stop.
There are a few things that feel unshakably bad for me: Voluntarily being outside in the snow. Spending my work weeks in an office building (and, even worse, a suit). Wearing my pajamas all day. Watching television in the middle of a beautiful afternoon. And eating chocolate.*
* I understand that I have just alienated 90% of my audience, including a few of you I hold particularly dear, but please bear with me and my eccentricities and read on for even more horrifying evidence of my chocolate antipathy. Remembering, of course, that we vilify that which we love the most.
For the most part, my weeks of second-time new motherhood confirmed these truths by which I live. Except, most surprisingly — and, probably, most enticingly for those of us (that is all of us) who want another excuse to eat it — for the chocolate.
Continue reading ‘Everything Bad for Me Is Good Again (or at Least a Few Things)’
When I was pregnant with Jake I received a mysterious “congratulations, new mom!” package in the mail from a company whose name looked vaguely familiar to me. Nestled inside the box were two shiny blue and white cans of Similac formula.
I was appalled. Outraged. And yet too lazy to pack them up and send them back to the evil perpetrators of formula-fed babies.
Instead, I dumped them in the trash and wrote a satisfying letter to Similac declaring exactly what I had done with their offering and self-righteously berating them for encouraging pregnant women to formula feed. Though I don’t remember the details, I feel certain the letter contained plenty of unrealistic declarations about how my baby would be exclusively breastfed and lots of the semi-informed political stuff I picked up in law school from women who were, like me, a long way from having babies about how the formula manufacturers were dumping their product in developing nations so as to maintain their profit margins at the expense of the health of underprivileged infants.
A week ago, when my pediatrician handed me a can of Enfamil, I knew better.
Because, it turned out, Jake drank the equivalent of those two cans of Similac and many, many, many, MANY more. Yep, for all my high mindedness about breastfeeding, my son drank formula. Lots of it. And my twelve-day-old daughter has had a taste of it as well.
Continue reading ‘Feeding My Child without Starving My Soul’
I guess I’ve been thinking more lately about how to feed my children healthily (without instilling in them my own seriously warped food issues) because everyone has. You know, that peanutbutter thing.
Then, on Friday, I read an op ed piece in the New York Times entitled The Maggots in Your Mushrooms. Suddenly, it all became clear.
I am, it turns out, far more grossed out by unrefrigerated processed cheese goo than by the specter of spider eggs in my cereal (as long as they haven’t hatched yet) or a little e. coli coating my organic spinach (as long as it didn’t come from the rear end of a plant worker but rather from a rodent crossing the spinach patch unhindered by pesticides). (And, yes, I wash even my pre-washed spinach, so it’s not that I’m happy to actually eat e. coli — see Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy? for my recounting of what happened when Jake did, in fact, do just that.)
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household where if there was a little (or a lot of) mold on the cheese, you just cut off the moldy parts and gave them to the dogs before putting the rest on a plate with some crackers for human consumption. Where my sister and I spent many a morning holding a questionable carton of milk under the other’s nose and saying, “Does this smell all right to you?” and then agreeably pouring it on our cereal if the other sensed nothing too dangerously off-putting. To this day, I’ve got to wonder what surprises my refrigerator would hold if we didn’t have a compost bin and a policy of feeding our hounds any leftovers more than four days old as both a health measure and, honestly, because it ends up saving us money on dog food.
But really, I think it has to do with yoga, of course, and with the kind of life I would like my children to find as they navigate their way through a world that still offers more unavoidable toxins than choices.
Jake has been wearing his beloved pink polka dot boots pretty much non-stop for over a week now.
We have engaged in successful negotiations about removing them for bed time and bath time (for which he even removed his swim diaper the other night, suggesting he is finally over the traumatic poop-in-the-tub incident). But otherwise, on they go — over his footie pajamas, to the alpaca farm where we bought our Christmas tree, pretty much with anything or to anywhere that allows a boy to proudly display his most prized possession.
He picked them out on a family trip to the new REI situated in a nearby suburban complex of shiny box stores still smelling of plastic and glue, condominiums for the type who grow faint-hearted at the prospect of walking more than a block to get a cup of coffee, and the first stadium-seating movie theater in town. (Asheville has lots to offer, just not, regrettably the ArcLight.)
Much as I shuddered as we came upon the brightly lit buildings and manicured intersections of the Biltmore Woods development, I must say I also felt a hush of calm fall over me, not unlike those times during my 1990 backpacking foray through Europe when I’d walk into a McDonalds just to use the bathroom and feel at home. I was even moved to suggest to Mike that we schedule a date night there.
“We could have dinner at P.F. Changs and then see a movie,” Mike said, half-jokingly but mostly agreeably.
Sometimes, it seems, we crave the comforts of consumerism.
Even, apparently, when we are not yet two years old.
After some time spent traipsing along the aisles and charming the very patient employees, Jake stumbled upon the boots. There they were, displayed on a wall of children’s shoes, along with some heavy duty hiking boots and, notably, the “boys” equivalent of the boots he chose.
I pointed out the navy-and-green option just to make certain he was aware of all the possibilities.
“No,” he said, hugging the pink polka dot version to his chest.
“These would match your football shirts better,” I said hopefully. Which, honestly, was my main concern. Gender roles bother me not in the least, but a well coordinated outfit is of great importance. And, yes, Jake prefers to wear a shirt with a football or baseball on it every day. I did not teach him to do so.
Mike came upon us as Jake responded by trying to put the sample pink polka dot boot on his foot.
“He won’t try the other ones on,” I said apologetically. Again, not my gender issue. But Mike’s — you know — a guy, and I wasn’t sure he’d be quite so amused by Jake’s flaunting of convention.
“You like these, buddy?” Mike asked, as Jake made it perfectly clear that it was a ridiculous question. “Should we try them on?” Then, a tad sheepishly because he really isn’t all that caught up in gender conventions either, he added, “Should we try the others too, just to see if you like them better?”
We flagged down a salesperson, a young guy, outdoorsy in the suburban-outdoorsy way of REI employees. And we practically tripped over each other to explain that Jake just preferred the pink boots. It was as if we needed to prove to this 22-year-old stranger than we knew those boots were meant for girls, it’s just that our child didn’t.
I didn’t get the sense the salesperson cared too much one way or another. He certainly didn’t make any untoward faces as he helped Jake try on various sizes in the pink, and he handled the entire transaction with the same professionalism I’m sure he would have shown had Jake chosen a more manly option.
So why, I ask myself, did I recount the story of Jake refusing to try on the navy-and-green boots to his teachers at school the next day? Why does Mike still add this detail when people comment on Jake’s boots? Why am I still recounting the story today?
It is, I think, more complicated than a gender thing. Rather, it seems to be an identity thing. Or, rather, it’s about Jake’s innocent display of how we do, to varying degrees, for better or worse, define ourselves by the things we own.
Continue reading ‘Can a Sense of Self Come with Pink Polka Dot Boots?’
