Archive for the 'trust' Category

Imagine How Pushy I’ll Be By the Time Jake’s in College

Published
by
Melissa
on January 20, 2010
in awareness, ayurveda, balance, breathing, change, chattering mind, expectations, letting instead of making, school, the bigger picture, toddler tantrums, trust, yoga class and you can't control everything
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4 Comments

I thought I had it under control.

A couple of years ago I had that breakdown over Jake’s fifteen-month evaluation at preschool — the kind where they determine whether said fifteen-month-old can say anything more than “Mama” and “Dada” and pick up a Cheerio with his fingers.  And that breakdown, I felt, brought me to a place where I could let go of needing to make sure everyone in the world knows that my child is a genius.  Let it go, I told myself, and everyone will figure out he’s in line to win a Nobel Prize one day without you pointing it out to them.

Since then, I’ve become firmly convinced that I’m not one of those mothers who pushes.  He’s in preschool, for goodness sakes, where mostly what he’s learning is that it’s not okay to hit your friend in the head with a bucket (especially when you are on the receiving end) and that “poopyhead” is a potty word that will make your friends crack up and will make adults frown and tell you not to say it before they crack up too.

Plus, I tell anyone who will listen that Jake won’t be starting kindergarten until he’s nearly six because I’d rather he be older than the other kids than younger.  Subtext:  Even if he is a genius, I recognize it will not hurt him to spend that extra year in preschool.  Or a good Montessori school where he’ll probably learn so much he’ll end up skipping first grade anyhow.

And so it was that I was truly pleasantly surprised when the head of Jake’s school told me that he would be moving up to the next class.

Until this weekend, when I found out he’s not moving up quite as quickly as he was supposed to.  And, behold, the pushy mom popped out of my relaxed mom facade like the creature in Alien who, it turns out, was only biding her time, incubating until she could erupt with maximum, frightening force.

Continue reading ‘Imagine How Pushy I’ll Be By the Time Jake’s in College’

Lily Goes Full-Time

Published
by
Melissa
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
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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’

I Can Cook! And Lots of Other Things You’d Never Know I Can Do

Published
by
Melissa
on December 1, 2009
in awareness, expectations, inner peace, intentions versus goals, letting instead of making, opening your heart, too much to do and trust
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4 Comments

By the end of our Thanksgiving meal, life as a mother, as someone who is (can it only be?) eight-and-a-half months postpartum, and as a still relative newcomer to my new home — it was all beginning to seem manageable, pleasurable even.

And then Ellen turned to Mike.  “You and I should have monthly Iron Chef-like competitions,” she said.

Ca-thunk.  That was the sound of my perennially left-out, insecure thirteen-year-old self dropping like an air conditioner out of a New York apartment window into my stomach.

It’s true that Mike’s turkey was a piece of edible art.  And Ellen is the only person I imagine has the culinary talent to turn green bean casserole into something approaching gourmet and without a hint of canned soup in sight.

But there was a time, not so long ago, when I considered myself a pretty awesome cook as well.  In fact, it was Thanksgiving just fifteen years ago (eegads, fifteen years — can I still say “just”?) when I tested the waters of my fantasy escape-the-law-firm job of opening a catering business by cooking a kick-ass meal in a tiny apartment with a kitchen that measured approximately one foot by three feet.

Granted, I’m not much of a foodie these days and pretend that it’s just that I really like the taste of unadorned food, not that I’m too lazy to cook a proper meal with seasoning and sauces and stuff.  Nonetheless, I’m more than a little bit sensitive about the cooking thing, for reasons I can’t begin to articulate.

All I know is that when Ellen summarily eliminated me from the Iron Chef competition it made me really sad to think that no one knows I can cook — and that maybe I no longer can.

Continue reading ‘I Can Cook! And Lots of Other Things You’d Never Know I Can Do’

The Co-Sleeper Is Gone … And Time Marches On

Published
by
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
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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.

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A Truly Scary Halloween, or How I Crossed Over

Published
by
Melissa
on November 10, 2009
in aging, being in the moment, change, letting go, motion, opening your heart, practice, social life and trust
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2 Comments

On Friday, Lily will be the same age Jake was when we moved to Asheville two years ago.

Just typing those words is sending me into a shower of I-don’t-know-whether-to-explode-with-joy-or-cry-uncontrollably emotions.  For months after Lily’s birth I had to consult Jake’s old baby pictures to remember  what he was like at her age.  Now, however, I have stumbled into a landscape littered with mile markers that make Lily’s every new trick — waving good-bye, handing me toys, figuring out how to remove the Robeez boots I dug out of the bottom of a pile of Jake’s old clothes — into a reminder of just how little Jake once was and how soon I will lose both of my children to time.

This makes me more than a little sad at how quickly indeed the time has passed.  And then even sadder because missing baby Jake makes me feel as if I am wishing away the remarkable boy Jake is right now.  Not to mention the potty-trained one.  Why on earth would I ever go back?

Mostly, though, putting eight-month-old Jake next to eight-month-old Lily collapses two points of my life, like a Wrinkle in Time tesseract.  And while it makes me a little bit seasick to contemplate how unstable I was in the first round of motherhood and how not exactly solid I am now, it also allows me to see how comfortable I am with the whole “I’m a mother” concept.

Which, honestly, is a good thing.

Until I take a step back and wonder how the single yoga gal going out drinking with her friends turned into the mom who thinks Sunday morning on the playground is a big, hot social hour.

Continue reading ‘A Truly Scary Halloween, or How I Crossed Over’

Not Everything Is Easier the Second Time Around

Published
by
Melissa
on September 15, 2009
in Mama instinct, bed time, being in the moment, change, chattering mind, compassion, inner peace, letting instead of making, sleep, structure, the bigger picture, trust and you can't control everything
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It is more than likely that I will spend pretty much the rest of my life debating whether Lily is such a patient, generous soul because I was in yoga practicing vasisthasana right up to the day before she was born or because, as the second child, she is doomed to my “been there, done that” approach to parenthood.

This is not, all joking aside, to say that I in any way fail to appreciate what a special human being she is.  Or that I love her any less than I love Jake.  Or, for that matter, that, when I’m being honest with myself, I give her any less attention than I gave Jake during his infancy.

It’s just that, now that I’m doing it for the second time, I’m a whole lot smarter about choosing what kind of attention I give her.

I mean, really, could six-month-old Jake truly not stand to be left alone to entertain himself for just a few minutes?  Probably, but I would have pulled my hair out before continuing to wash it had he screamed the way Lily has on occasion when I have taken a shower that did not fall during her nap time.  To my credit, I carefully open the shower door every few minutes to show her we are in the same room.  Though I’m pretty sure the message is lost the second I close the door again.

So, too, Mike asked me the other day how we knew Jake needed his bottles warmed.  Did I ever offer him the room temp bottle I so handily pull out of the diaper bag for Lily now that she is far too interested in new surroundings to nurse anywhere other than in a hermetically sealed room?  I am embarrassed for myself, but I have a strong suspicion that all those times we plopped a cold bottle in a cup of hot coffee at rest stops and counted ourselves clever for this less than adequate bottle warming solution may not have been strictly necessary.

The other night, however, I gained some much needed reassurance that I am not squelching the needs of my second born simply because I’m too lazy to expend all the needless energy I wasted on my first.

On this night, I found myself queasily reduced to a little sleep training.  And, I discovered, I was far more sympathetic to Lily’s cries than I ever was to Jake’s.

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Labor Day Indeed

Published
by
Melissa
on September 9, 2009
in bed time, being in the moment, expectations, grace, letting go, potty training, social life, stuck at home with a child, too much to do, trust, vacation and you can't control everything
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1 Comment

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.

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Our First Stitches

Published
by
Melissa
on June 25, 2009
in Mama instinct, being in the moment, centering, illness, karma, letting instead of making, school, surrender, trust and you can't control everything
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2 Comments

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.

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

Published
by
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
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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.

The Most Natural Thing in the World

Published
by
Melissa
on April 29, 2009
in expectations, feeding my child, intentions versus goals, letting go, opening your heart, practice, respecting your body, structure, surrender, trust, yoga class and you can't control everything
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0 Comments

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.

Continue reading ‘The Most Natural Thing in the World’

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