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’
I’m still ashamed, even though I now recognize it was a December Mom thing.
There’s simply no excuse for being — I can still recall the out-of-body experience of watching myself do this — the mom screaming across a crowded coffee shop at her child. “Jake! Jake! JAKE! DO YOU WANT A BAGEL?” As if no one sits hunched over a laptop trying to experience a little peace and a nice cup of coffee between her and her child.
Yep, that was me.
On that early December Saturday afternoon, I became someone I never thought I’d be. The mother all us peaceful coffee drinkers hate. The woman oblivious to the fact that others do indeed occupy the somewhat inappropriate space to which she has spirited her children.
The one who is finally shamed by the sweet older man passing her as she gathers compostable forks and napkins and cups of water simply saying, “Quite a handful, isn’t it?”
On Sunday I climbed the curved ladder to the top of the play structure for the very first time.
Jake beat me to this milestone by several months and four decades. But that didn’t cheapen the fun of climbing, rung by rung, up and then, a little at a time, over until I crouched horizontally over the ground gazing at the mulch beneath me in giddy, defying gravity (sorry, stuck in my head from last week’s episode of Glee) motion.
It was yet another 75-degree November Sunday, surely the last of the year, and I had cheerily left Lily at home napping with Dad while Jake and I headed to the park for what I felt certain would be another morning of Mommy socializing.
Surprisingly, it seemed that all of our friends had something better to do with this glorious day than hang out with us for some impromptu playground partying.
For a while, I followed Jake around, dutifully pushing him in the swing as I scanned the faces of the other adults in attendance for some spark of familiarity. We headed for the play structure, and I settled myself on a nearby bench while Jake headed down the slide by himself.
This was, I thought smugly, far preferable to the days when I was obligated to accompany Jake on the play structure, him being too young to, oh, slide by himself without possibly flipping over the side or failing to stop at the bottom, instead landing in a heap of mulch and tears and possibly a few stitches. How lucky I was, I thought, that my child was old enough to entertain himself. I performed a few quick mental calculations to determine whether Lily would magically be old enough come spring for me to escape the awkward Mommy-on-the-play-structure phase entirely.
Except that my continued hopeful gaze at the faces of strangers — like a puppy at the pound hoping some nice person would take me home and love me — reminded me that I was, frankly, bored. I mean, it was nice and warm and sunny and all. But I was mostly checking my cell phone every few minutes to see if it was late enough to call friends on the west coast to distract me from what I was treating as a chore.
A chore. Hanging out with my beautiful son on a beautiful sunny day. This was, I began to fathom, not desirable behavior.
That’s when I headed for the curved ladder, casting aside habitual vestiges of self-consciousness, fear of falling, and adult-acquired reservation.
It was time to play with my not-quite-three-year-old.
Continue reading ‘Jake and I Go to the Dentist (and Have Fun)’
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.
As you may or may not know, Labor Day is a celebration of workers — a “yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country,” according to the Department of Labor.
What I want to know is who figured giving people a day off from work was a break from their labor. More particularly, I would like to invite anyone who thinks Labor Day is a nifty holiday to spend it with me. Especially Mike’s bosses, who deemed that he had to actually go to work on Labor Day, thereby increasing my parental labor exponentially.
Yes, yes, yes, I know that my children’s caregivers deserve a day off from their work. I’d deserve a day off too, if I actually had the kind of work where I had to wait for a day off to not work.
Nor do I mean to undermine the ideological underpinnings of the holiday, even though a good 80% of the country — including some recent Presidents — would if they knew it was created by the nineteenth century labor movement, which owed more than a little bit to socialism.
All I’m saying is that sometimes, when you have young children, a day off from work ends up being far more work than a day on. Toss in an Apple Festival and the last day the JCC pool is open for the summer, and you have just the right elements to reduce a mother to a puddle of tears.
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)’
I thought — mistakenly, as it turned out — that it was pretty momentous to be witnessing Lily’s first props-assisted rollover yesterday.
We were about midway through our hour-long drop-off at daycare. I was pretending not to notice the time I was supposed to be using for myself slipping away as I clung to my girl. After all, I couldn’t be expected to just put her down while the infant caregiver was busy feeding one of Lily’s classmates. And when Veronica set up a play mat to allow me to do just that, well, in my experience Lily doesn’t like play mats, so I was really doing everyone a favor by hanging out to rescue her when she complained about being stuck like a helpless little turtle on her back, unable to look away from the looming forms of stuffed horses and pigs with black and white checks on their bellies hanging overhead.
This particular play mat, however, had one thing our rejected-by-both-babies one at home does not: a small, crescent-shaped pillow sewn into it. Designed, I knew, even though Jake was never much of a tummy time guy, for helping infants appreciate tummy time by giving them a little lift. Imagine, if you will, lying sprawled face down in a sea of whimsical shapes you neither recognize nor find particularly attractive while trying to lift a head that feels as if it is saddled with a thick, granite helmet. You get a lift or two for a second or two and then crash nose-first back into the whimsy.
Now consider the benefits of a little crescent pillow that supports your chest and creates a gentle slope of your spine, allowing far easier head support. Not that it doesn’t crash to the ground frequently, but at least you have time to appreciate the view before it does.
Quickly surmising that Lily was horrified by the animals Veronica helpfully hunted down and I obediently attached to the overhead arches of the play mat — something about her crying at the sight of them — I decided we should try out that pillow thing. In the past week Lily’s been giving the lying on her tummy and lifting her chest and head routine a try, so I figured she’d be happy for a little prop to help her along.
She expressed a moment of initial surprise as Veronica and I arranged her.
“What do you think?” I chirped in a voice meant to suggest she should think this was just the best darned thing in the world.
She responded by rolling onto her back.
This was not the first time Lily has tried to roll over. She’s tried more than a few times. But has always been stymied by the bottom arm getting in the way, a common baby complaint.
This time, however, the pillow provided just enough clearance for her arm to magically move right through and — ta da! — she was on her back, crashed into one of the arches of the play mat and not particularly happy about it.
Still, it was an auspicious moment to recount to Mike half an hour later when I had rocked her to sleep so I could finally put her down and leave.
My big, euphoric bubble deflated more than a little bit, however, when I arrived to pick her up. Lily, I was informed, had rolled over on flat ground that afternoon, a far more monumental achievement than doing so with props. And, of course, she achieved this milestone when I wasn’t around to witness it.
Continue reading ‘Full of Firsts — And Not a Parent in Sight’
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.
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)’
