Sense Of Self | YogaMamaMe.com

Archive for the 'sense of self' Category

Lily Goes Full-Time

Published

on January 4, 2010

in Mommy time, being connected to everything, being in the moment, breathing, centering, change, daycare, following your heart, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture, too much to do, trust, vacation, work and yoga class

.
4 Comments

Today is Lily’s first day of full-time daycare.

Just writing it is making me cry again. (As is wandering past my bedroom and the empty bed on which she is not napping and knowing that I will not have that unspeakably joyful moment of my day when she first wakes up from her nap and grins at me and I lie next to her pulling her still-sleepy body against me and kiss every part of it I can find.)

It is, I know, time.

I have been spending months injecting little veins of longing to return to the things I have put on hold in my life into the warmth of our mornings together, like the marbles of fat that add richness to those pieces of red meat I have eschewed for the majority of my life. Maybe that’s why it’s not taking — because I don’t eat red meat the bits of fat that are my longing just aren’t sticking in my gullet. Instead, they hover out there as a concept that I don’t feel right now. Time for my own life? Pshaw. Who needs it?

And yet I soldier on in a direction I know in my core is right even if my surface emotions — the ones that made me start wailing when I put away a carton of formula this morning in a house empty of her — can’t bring themselves to agree.

I dress her before breakfast. I pack up lunches for both her and Jake. I unload on Jake’s teacher in a babble of still-postpartum hormones how I am freaking out about her starting full time. (”You have to do it,” she says kindly.) Even when Jake begins to scream and grab onto my leg, even as I walk stoically down the hall away from him abandoning my older child as I prepare to abandon my younger one, I stay on plan.

I drop Lily off with a smile spread across her pudgy cheeks. When it is time for me to leave, she looks at me for a moment as if she is going to cry, then turns around and gives a shriek of pleasure to the line of doll people her teacher has set up for her and never looks back. I have to turn off the radio on the drive home because my mind is feeling cluttered and unhinged. “Just make it home,” I tell myself. “Write about this. Start that legal project you’ve been putting off. Go to a yoga class.”

Now I’m home and I’m writing. And — I can see the humor in this, like a mediocre romantic comedy — I am still running from my desk to grab a box of tissues, the muscles in my jaw pulling the corners of my mouth into a clown frown as I cry in a hyena-like warble and whine to no one in particular, “I miss my baby!”

Continue reading ‘Lily Goes Full-Time’

The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On

Published

Melissa

on November 30, 2009

in balance, bed time, change, daycare, discomfort verus pain, inner peace, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, motion, sense of self, the bigger picture, trust and you can't control everything

.
3 Comments

Next to my side of the bed there is a large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards. On the other side of that large, clean(ish) patch of floorboards there is room to open the drawers on the left side of my dresser. In between there is space for my discarded shoes and socks to breathe without having to tussle with Mike’s.

What is not on my side of the bed any longer is the co-sleeper.

For those unfamiliar with this piece of modern baby-raising apparatus, the co-sleeper is a not particularly attractive crib-like thing that attaches to the side of the bed. The idea is to more or less sleep with your baby while theoretically eliminating the risk of inadvertently crushing her. (Couldn’t one still throw a sleep-heavy, errant arm on top of the innocent sleeping child? I wonder. Best, I suppose, not to contemplate the possibility, as I’m not a limbs-flinging sort of sleeper anyhow.)

Given my love of the middle road, the co-sleeper is the perfect invention, a detente in the polarized sleeping-with-baby debate, a way to hush Lily back to sleep in the middle of the night without ever having to leave the cocoon of my down duvet wrapped around me in the hours since kicking Mike out of bed for snoring.

Just as Lily has grown up with the scent and sound of me sleeping a foot away, I have come to love the feel of her within arm’s reach. I have become certain that there is nothing better upon awakening than propping up on an elbow to watch my angel sleep. Except, perhaps, that moment when her eyes pop open and she greets me with a big, sunny morning grin.

Only now the co-sleeper is gone, the victim of increasing baby mass and the fact that I have been dying to get to those dresser drawers for eight months now and just can’t wait any longer.

And in that once longed-for space is a big empty hole. Sort of like the one in my heart.

Continue reading ‘The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On’

Are We There Yet? (Part Two: Preschool Version)

Published

Melissa

on August 18, 2009

in Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, change, daycare, following your heart, grace, gratitude, letting go, partners, practice, sense of self, social life, stuck at home with a child, surrender and vacation

.
0 Comments

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)’

Busy with Baby: Me, Myself, and My Baby Who Demands All of Both

Published

Melissa

on May 28, 2009

in Mommy time, awareness, being in the moment, practice, sense of self, stuck at home with a child, too much to do and trust

.
0 Comments

We have reached that precious stage of infancy where Lily is alive to everything around her, singing out the sounds of conversation to us, staying awake longer between naps, and not looking quite so ridiculous in teeny tiny little dresses. This can mean only one thing:

Just when I have the most to write about I have the least time to write about it.

I would, for example, like to write about the frustration and guilt engendered when the desire for sleep overwhelms the biological imperative to tend to an infant’s needs in the middle of the night; the conflict between hunkering down to endless rounds of goo goo goo with an infant and the desire that arises after about thirty seconds of it to be doing pretty much anything else; the uncertainty revolving around whether I will ever get everything necessary to my sense of self done in the five hours when Lily is finally at day care (a good hour of which will be consumed with her breast milk consumption); and, of course, the Terrible Mother-ness that revolves around sending one’s three-month-old to day care in the first place. (I have lost count of the number of times I have deleted “part-time” from sentences involving day care as I recognize that it is not technically relevant even though it feels absolutely necessary to state.)

However, as Lily demands eye contact during her waking hours and, consequently, as I will not be writing about these topics in any timely manner, I pledge instead to:

1) hold onto all these lovely lessons barreling at me and trust that if I lose any ideas before I have time to write about them properly it is probably to the benefit of my readers, since those ideas must not have been particularly compelling in the first place;

2) continue to use the most certain nap-time for my yoga practice because if I stop practicing yoga what will be the point of anything I manage to write here?;

3) practice patience and the belief that my life will some day return to me (see necessity of #2 above);

4) enjoy these last few weeks before Lily starts day care (see #3); and

5) know that even if I don’t write a thing between now and the day she starts, I will have plenty of fodder for YogaMamaMe-ing the second she does.

Et voila! She awakens.

What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom

Published

Melissa

on May 22, 2009

in aging, change, compassion, following your heart, grace, practice, respecting your body, sense of self, the bigger picture and yoga class

.
0 Comments

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’

Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

Published

Melissa

on May 1, 2009

in aging, being in the moment, change, chattering mind, following your heart, friendship, gratitude, motion, opening your heart, practice, sense of self, structure, the bigger picture and work

.
2 Comments

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?’

What I Learned in My First Mommy and Me Yoga Class

Published

Melissa

on April 15, 2009

in Mama instinct, Mommy time, compassion, expectations, forgiveness, grace, inner beauty, letting go, nonharming, opening your heart, sense of self, social life, the bigger picture and yoga class

.
3 Comments

I’ve had this day marked on my calendar for weeks. My first Mommy and Me yoga class.

It’s been just two days since Lily officially reached the Age Where I Can Take Her Into Public Places, and the prospect of the class was even more exciting to me than Monday’s foray into Target. Purchasing diapers and Z Bars I could live without for another month if I had to; the only thing keeping me from Mommy and Me yoga this past month were those pesky flu viruses still floating around Asheville on the chill winds finally chasing winter away.

What I was looking forward to wasn’t so much a practice for myself. I can manage those at home if need be — and did for all of six sun salutes and five rounds of navasana yesterday before Miss Lily intervened. What Mommy and Me yoga offered that I hadn’t before experienced was a practice for the two of us, a time to share something beyond our daily routine of eating, holding, taking the occasional walk, and greeting Jake’s boisterous evening arrival with joy (me) and cries of annoyance (Lily). And, of course, I was very much looking forward to the company of adults who speak in real sentences, even if most of them are devoted to talking about their babies.

What I found, however, was something different, a lesson I haven’t yet approached in quite the same way in all the YogaMamaMe time I’ve devoted to the relationship between me and my children and my Self. What I found — as, if I’m being honest, I so rarely find — was forgiveness.

Continue reading ‘What I Learned in My First Mommy and Me Yoga Class’

Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is

Published

Melissa

on April 14, 2009

in awareness, balance, centering, change, chattering mind, discomfort verus pain, following your heart, letting instead of making, motion, practice, sense of self, sleep, trust and yoga class

.
0 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, I was like the Cheshire Cat, grinning and purring contentedly about how smoothly the first four weeks of Lily’s life have slid by.

Yesterday evening, I was Alice herself, “shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep, and reaching half down the hall.” Unlike Alice, who was understandably crying because she had suddenly grown to about nine feet high, I was less understandably sobbing about what a terrible mother I am and how bleak the prospect of my being any better at it over the next many months appears.

Primarily, I was crying because my girl wouldn’t stop crying. And I wasn’t trying to stop her, which merely led to more heart-rending screams on her part (and maybe on mine — no one else was around to witness them, so I can’t be entirely sure). Her screams led me to remember all the times I let Jake cry the same way when he was an infant. Which made me cry more instead of reassuring me that good mothers sometimes can’t deal with their babies’ crying and those babies turn out just fine anyhow.

Worst of all, I was feeling — how could any mother feel, much less admit, this? — resentful that Lily wanted to use my breast as a pacifier. (Perhaps, I discovered later, because the nail on my pinkie finger was just a sliver too long and likely slicing the top of the poor girl’s mouth when I offered her a finger pacifier as a substitute. Which thought makes me want to cry a little bit now.)

All this crying in front of my impressionable young infant made me — what else? — cry some more. Even though I knew, despite my state of utter unreasonableness, that she will not remember her mother crying hysterically in front of her. Didn’t matter. Surely I was damaging her delicate new psyche in permanent and insidious ways.

In short, in the space of a few hours, I went from thinking I had finally put all the pieces of my life into place to being quite certain I could not manage life or motherhood, especially the next two to four years of it.

And I realized that It Is Hard. Even when you find a place where it doesn’t feel like it.

Continue reading ‘Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is’

My Refuge

Published

Melissa

on April 6, 2009

in awareness, being in the moment, centering, change, gratitude, inner beauty, inner peace, letting go, motion, opening your heart, partners, practice, sense of self, stillness, structure, surrender and trust

.
2 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘My Refuge’

I Like Pink

Published

Melissa

on April 3, 2009

in Mama instinct, balance, being in the moment, breathing, centering, expectations, following your heart, grace, letting instead of making and sense of self

.
5 Comments

It occurs to me as I type in the title of this piece that I may generate hits from some fans of the singer Pink. Who seems like a perfectly nice person but isn’t the pink I’m talking about. On the other hand, I find it fortuitous to have the opportunity to declare “I like pink” to a few extra people, given how many have heard me viciously attack the color pink in the past.

Some context is necessary here.

Starting with my first pregnancy, I had a great fear of pink. Pink little girl outfits with ruffles and ribbons. Tiny pink bows that some mothers affix to bald baby heads in a frequently futile effort to make their androgynous babies look feminine. (”My sister put a pink bow on her daughter’s head,” a friend of mine once told me. “Strangers told her how cute her little boy was and asked why she put a pink bow on him.”) Shiny little Mary Janes with paired with pink socks, and sparkly pink princess clothes, and mounds of pink doll-like dresses that I was just certain strangers were waiting to buy for my child if only she turned out to be a girl.

Jake, of course, did not turn out to be a girl. But even before we found out he would be a boy, we warned our friends and family that the sex of our child would be strictly between me and Mike. Primarily because we thought it would be nice to have at least one aspect of the pregnancy a private matter between just the two of us. But, really, what a huge side benefit to know that if we did turn out to be having a girl she could remain free of others’ gender conventions for at least the time she spent in utero.

This time, not only did the rest of the world not know we were having a girl, but we didn’t either, having decided that we had already pondered all the big boy/girl decisions during my first pregnancy (to circumcise or not to circumcise? that is the question) and therefore didn’t need to know the baby’s sex ourselves. So no worries about the dreaded explosion of pink that I feared would bury both me and my girl baby in a sea of Strawberry Quick colored blankets and dresses.

This child, I thought proudly, would arrive in the world a clean slate, no expectations piled upon … um, her.

As soon as she was a “her,” the pink card showed up on her hospital bassinet. And I didn’t much care. Maybe I was already sliding down the slope to my first Lily purchase — the pink Old Navy tee-shirt with the ruffled sleeves and Lucy Toothy decal and the hot pink polka dot pants with the ruffled ankles.

They are far from the last pink items I have purchased. And even futher from the last ones I will ever buy.

Because, after opening gift upon gift of beautiful pink dresses with, yes, bows (but no ruffles), after oohing and ahhing like the most pink-addled of mothers, after thrilling at how girl-like my three-week-old looks in her pink clothes, it is time for me to admit it. I like pink.

Continue reading ‘I Like Pink’

YogaMamaMe.com

Archive for the 'sense of self' Category

Lily Goes Full-Time

The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On

Busy with Baby: Me, Myself, and My Baby Who Demands All of Both

What Happened to My Yoga Practice?: Lamentations of a Postpartum Mom

Is There Such a Thing as a Full Circle and What Does It Look Like?

Alice in Motherland, or Just How Hard It Is

My Refuge

I Like Pink

Subjects

Poses

Chronology

YogaMamaSubscribe

YogaMamaSearch

YogaMamaNews

YogaMamaPosts

YogaMamaLinks

YogaLinks