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’
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
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)’
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.
Here is how not to get ready for your baby girl’s first day of daycare:
First, while it might seem like a good idea at the time, I do not recommend spending the previous week visiting your mother-in-law in St. Louis, having a lovely time, receiving lots of help with child care, and generally forgetting why you so desperately wanted to leave your baby somewhere you are not for a few hours every day in the first place.
If you insist on having that lovely vacation talking to adults and taking showers whenever you’d like (if, say, like me, you are facing a week when your son’s school is closed and you do not feel the least bit equipped to care for a two-and-a-half-year-old in addition to a three-month-old all by yourself to the point where you are kind of even looking forward to an airplane ride with the two of them if it will free you from this prospect), try very hard not to have the airline lose your bags on the way home. I seriously doubt the vintage-1983 car seat United loaned us was the cause of Jake’s sudden awakening to howls of apparent pain on the long ride back from the Greenville airport, but the situation was far from an ideal end to our trip. Furthermore, I suffered a general sense of discombobulation on my one-day buffer between travel and the start of school and, worse, didn’t get a chance to wash the darling dress in which I had planned to have Lily begin her new adventure, having rather stupidly packed it.
Try, too, to approach your last day before school starts on more than five hours of sleep or, if that is simply not a possibility in your infant-caring days, consider not dragging yourself cheerfully to the swimming pool to thoroughly exhaust yourself, your three-month-old daugher, and your two-and-a-half-year-old son. Especially do not follow this frivolity with shopping for groceries on your last few molecules of adrenaline while your husband whips up a beautiful meal for a visiting friend with whom you sit on the deck enjoying the evening air until past nine o’clock only to face the prospect of cleaning up and making your son’s lunch in a sleep-deprived stupor that greatly disappoints the friend who was quite reasonably hoping for a little conversation as he loads the dishwasher.
Most importantly, however, you should never, ever, ever wait until ten o’clock the night before your daughter’s first day of daycare to discover that you own only a single bottle suitable for her dining enjoyment while at school. Because that means you will spend the morning before she starts in a bit of a panic trying to fit her nap in before a mad rush to Target to buy more bottles, which must be sterilized at home while she waits patiently in her car seat (on the kitchen floor, not in the car; no need to call Child Services) so you can rush unceremoniously into her new school out of breath and utterly disorganized.
Of course, I could have done everything right, taken all my own advice, had her diaper cream purchased and labeled twenty-four hours in advance, and none of it would have mattered. Because nothing else in the world matters when you leave your darling, tiny infant sleeping in a strange crib and walk across the street without her to your car, your heart singing in pain as something that feels like a serrated paring knife neatly severs it into big, raw, hurting pieces.
Continue reading ‘First Day of School (Infant Remix)’
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.
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.
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’
Jake’s little sister arrived on Friday, proving that Friday the 13th isn’t so very unlucky after all. Unless, that is, you find it the least bit unlucky to have only 3 hours of labor to produce a nine-and-a-half-pound baby. I prefer to use the word “intense.”
A good word, as well, to describe the feeling of bringing a newborn home to meet the two-year-old Big Brother you love so much you sometimes feel the air literally being squeezed from your lungs when you think about it.
The intensity, to be perfectly clear, is all my own. Jake has taken it all in stride.
He arrived home with his sitter on Saturday evening to give Mike and me both big hugs. “Baby Lily,” he said sagely when he saw her sleeping in her moses basket. “That’s my sister.”
Did I mention that I love his sitter?
He was thrilled with the toy guitar Lily gave him, and mugged greatly for us in Elvis-ian poses, showing not the least bit of interest in competing with or pouting about his sister, or even remotely suggesting we do something a two-year-old might do like throw her in the trash. Instead, that day and every day since, he prefers to pet her head — in what Mike has termed the “giving of the benediction” — and — somewhat more alarmingly — to offer her gentle head butts, which are the height of playful affection for him.
In short, Jake is doing really well with the transition.
I’m the one who’s struggling.
Continue reading ‘It’s a Girl! and Thoughts on the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable’
It is, perhaps, the most remarkable change that motherhood has wrought: I looked forward to the Purim Carnival for weeks before it was upon us.
This is remarkable because — although this was my first Purim Carnival — it was certainly not my first opportunity to attend one.
Purim — for those who have not had and/or rejected the opportunities to participate that I have — is a Jewish celebration of spring. I’m not sure exactly what the story behind it is, although I’ve picked up at Jake’s school that it has something to do with heroes. My impression is that, as Christmas is designed to perk up those cold winter months, Purim is a chance to celebrate the onset of the warm ones. Mostly by getting dressed up in hero costumes and having carnivals in synagogue parking lots.
My only previous brush with a Purim celebration occurred my sophomore year in high school. My friend Brenda and I scored some cool 60’s dresses my mother had buried in a closet (since disappeared, to my periodic chagrin) and headed out to a party for the teenagers of a congregation to which Brenda may or may not have belonged. I certainly didn’t, and I know for a fact that she is the only one of the two of us who would have heard about and expressed interest in a party at a synagogue, even one at which boys might be met. While nominally Jewish myself, my entire exposure to what this meant consisted of: 1) attending a number of Bat Mitzvah’s at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Tarzana during eighth grade; 2) having my parents tell me a whole lot how important it is to marry Jewish (that one plainly never sunk in); and 3) during the fall of my sophomore year of high school informing my mother that I would be taking Yom Kippur off from school to attend services with my friends and having her respond, “Take the day off if you want, but don’t waste your time in services!”
So, as little as I recall of that spring’s Purim party, I can say with assurance that Brenda set the whole thing up. And that it was enough to push me over the edge and away from any synagogue-sponsored activity for, well, ever, since this last carnival was sponsored by the local Jewish Community Center (not a synagogue), where Jake attends preschool. Because it’s the best program in town, not because I felt the need to enroll my child in Jewish daycare.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The reason that spring of ‘82 Purim party so turned me off to the joys of Purim remains rooted in memory, even if all the other details of the evening have faded. Brenda and I arrived just in time for a stand-up routine by some kid consisting entirely of racist jokes. I was so horrified that, to this day, I have steadfastedly ignored Purim. Plus, I generally don’t have any idea when it is, being only nominally Jewish and all.
And yet, a few weeks ago, when the announcements went up at Jake’s school, I was thrilled. Not only because I knew without a doubt that there would be no racist fourteen-year-old comedians at the JCC’s Purim Carnival. But because I truly was looking forward to taking Jake to the celebration.
Continue reading ‘My First Purim Carnival! (and Jake’s too)’
