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’
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!”
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)’
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’
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?’
A couple of weeks ago, Mike handed me a book that had come free to his workplace.
“I doubt it’ll be very good,” he said, “but it’s a memoir about going to Columbia Law School. I thought you might be interested.”
Maybe it’s the buddha-like peace that has descended on me as I prepare to give birth. (Hardly an accurate description of my demeanor, but apparently the impression I give off in yoga class, where, I am told, women vie to practice next to me for my “beautiful energy.” Frankly, I think this has more to do with the public-ness of a pregnant belly than anything I am or am not doing, and it makes me feel a little crowded. So I guess buddha-like peace does not account for my reaction.) Or maybe it’s the passage of time, both since I graduated from Columbia and since I taught law school. Or maybe it’s just where I am in my life at this moment.
Whatever the reason, I did not take the book and throw it back at him.
In fact, I read it. Not with great enjoyment, certainly not with fond nostalgia, if anything with more than a touch of jealousy that a division of Simon & Schuster would publish something with nothing new to say, said in an occasionally amusing but mostly unoriginal way. (I realize one could say the same thing of my YogaMamaMe essays, should they ever be published, and this is no doubt a large part of what contributes to the jealousy.)
What I did find as I read was an ability to read more. And to smile when I recognized certain professors. And to sometimes nod without feeling a clenching sensation around my heart and a desire to run in the general direction of “west” so as to put a bit more distance between myself and that part of my life.
Because, I am realizing with a certain amount of awe, I no longer feel the need for that distance. I seem to have picked up perspective somewhere along the line instead.
Continue reading ‘A Brief Return to a Past Life, or How (Really) Did I Get Here?’
I finished my taxes yesterday as Jake napped on the couch and the last hour of Waitress unwound on TiVo.
I say this not to brag but to point out that I am now ready to give birth.
I have repeated it many times over the past several weeks: “No, I’m not ready. I haven’t done my taxes yet.” (To put into context what might appear to be a distressing obsession with finishing my taxes nearly two months ahead of time, contemplate my due date of March 8 and count forward from there to April 15. Then think about doing taxes while you have a five-week-old in the house.)
I have said this half-jokingly, but with a deadly half-seriousness. Really, how can there be a woman who’s ever given birth who still has the lack of tact to ask a near stranger who apparently can be insulted at will by dint of her prominent belly, “Boy, you must be ready to have that baby!”
I don’t pretend to know what it is about a pregnancy that makes your personal life public — “Is it a boy or a girl?” ask people who will never, ever see this baby, whatever its sex; “Are you ready?” as if they will personally run down to Charlotte to do a Trader Joe’s run for me if I say I’m not; and, the new evolution from the strangers touching your belly without asking to the query whether it, um, would bother me if someone I’ve never met before does so. Like it’s so much less personally invasive if they ask first.
Since, as I say, I don’t begin to know why people do these things to a very pregnant woman who would really, really feel much happier if someone just occasionally said, “You look great!” instead of “You look HUGE!” this is not the subject I mean to tackle here. Just a much-needed tangent.
Rather, the fact that I really did not feel ready to give birth until finishing my taxes — and several work projects — seems to me to open up a realm of inquiry interestingly at odds with my failure thus far to pack a bag for the hospital or wash the infant clothes that have been put away for the past two years.
On the one hand, I figure this lack of preparation makes me an experienced mother and, therefore, someone who understands how little control I have. No planning months in advance for a baby that will come when it comes no matter how many miles I walk or Evening Primrose supplements I down, no desire to complain about the discomforts that naturally accompany having a baby head smushed in your pelvis for several weeks straight, no need to control when this child will make its appearance.
On the other hand, I have to admit that refusing to have a baby until my taxes are done smacks of a certain amount of falsely pretending to be in control. As if the baby will graciously wait so I don’t have to apply for an extension from the IRS between rounds of breastfeeding.
Continue reading ‘My Taxes Are Done, So I Guess I’m Ready to Have a Baby Now’
I can’t remember the last time I went to Target on a Saturday.
As of today, I know why.
It was supposed to be my break, part of the divide-and-conquer strategy Mike and I launched on this Saturday morning of oh-so-cranky toddler.
And, indeed, somehow, I needed a break, despite having spent all of an hour or so with Jake. All of it, mind you, “getting ready” to go to the park. This involved:
1) Three peaceful minutes of saving Daddy from his breakdown as Jake raised my hopes by agreeably taking my hand and walking upstairs to “put on clothes for the park.” As he rarely agreeably puts on clothes these days for any reason whatsoever, even the park, I believed my calm and motherliness had finally prevailed over what I still fervently wish to believe is the myth of the Terrible Two’s.
2) One medium-length crying fit as I objected to Jake’s preference for playing with the obnoxious-in-the-way-only-people-who-don’t-have-to-live-with-the-gift can be (a little driving console with steering wheel, radio, and turn signals that all make different and equally grating noises) over listening to me. Not only am I particularly up in arms about his recent penchant for steadfastedly ignoring me when I talk to him, but my frustration is compounded by the fact that I am usually striving to give him the choices that are supposed to mollify and mature a young child. Really, how much good is it letting him choose his outfit when this scenario consists of me kneeling on the floor with a selection of three shirts draped over my arm like a maitre d’ at a restaurant serving up a selection of Old Navy toddler tops while he hunches over his race car console drowning out my pleas for him to make a choice with the VRR-VRR-VRROOOOOMM of a toy whose battery just won’t die already?
Not much good, if, like me, you end up threatening to and then taking the toy away, provoking the tears that it seems it is my job to provoke these days.
This crying episode, however, ended surprisingly well, as Jake actually heard and understood me saying that if only he’d make a choice I’d give him his toy back. Or maybe it was sheer coincidence. At any rate, he chose a lovely red shirt and I gave him back his toy. All was peaceful. Until –
3) Five minutes of me looking for a pair of tennis shoes to celebrate our 60 degree weather while he insisted on going through my shoe boxes and trying on a pair of heels so high I’m surprised I haven’t broken an ankle in them. He was unhappy when I wrested them away and put them back in a box, but was fortunately distracted by the much safer Ugg slippers my wonderful husband bought for my perennially cold feet at Christmas. Minimal tears were involved.
Perhaps Jake was just saving up for:
4) A good twenty minutes spent in the bathroom as I foolishly tried to change out a load of laundry and put shoes on him. There were three flaws in this plan.
The first was that these days Jake is fascinated with turning on the faucet and wasting as much water as he possibly can. While I fancy myself able to choose my battles, I had the now apparent misfortune of living through a massive California drought at the impressionable age of nine. This means that I am hardwired to freak out at the prospect of wasted water. To the point that my lawn in St. Louis was constantly brown, even as the neighbors explained to me that there’s this little river called the Mississippi from which their abundant water supply came. Of course, we had a small drought a year or two after I moved there, and my brown lawn enjoyed some company, proving my point but at the expense of positively fixing me in a state of water-mania for the rest of my days.
While I might perhaps have been making some headway with Jake on the whole water-conservation thing up until this morning, we then hit flaw number two — while I was putting on shoes in the bedroom, Jake had come across the fishy-face mask of his Nebulizer and was now discovering the great fun to be had placing it under the faucet and letting all the wasted water run through the tube attached to its “mouth.” (For those lucky souls unfamiliar with the Nebulizer, it is a very loud machine with which one administers breathing treatments to their child with viral pneumonia or, in this case, a more mild but threatening respiratory bug. Said child is much more likely to tolerate the Nebulizer mask placed over his mouth and nose if he has viral pneumonia and is too sick and weak to protest.) This Best Activity in the World made it that much more difficult to suggest to him that he turn off the water already. And, no, he was not amused by the substitute game I made up, whereby I turned off the faucet, he made his way off the step stool he uses to reach the sink so he could walk around to turn the water back on and by the time he made his way back up the steps to the sink I had turned off the water again.
Yes, I understand why he was frustrated. But I was too.
And so began more tears. Because, remember, that’s my job.
And we’re not even to the third flaw in my plan: thinking he would actually put on his shoes.
This was not an unreasonable assumption. On weekends Jake gets to wear his beloved pink polka dot boots, banished from the gym at school.
“Do you want to wear your boots?” I asked in that cheery, upbeat voice I can put on even when cheery and upbeat are the last two things I am feeling.
“Nooo!” Jake wailed. “Shoes!”
“Really?” I asked, untucking his pants from his socks. “Okay, shoes.”
I got one on. Then, “Noooo!”
“What do you want?” I asked. At this moment Mike came up the stairs.
“Daddddyyyy!” Jake howled. I did not like this answer. “Daddy isn’t going to hold you until you have your shoes on,” I said grimly as he squirmed in my lap. Anyone who has had a strong, howling two-year-old squirm in her lap will appreciate how much more joyous the sensation is when you are eight months pregnant and don’t have a whole lot of lap to accommodate such squirming.
And so we entered into a match of Who Is More Determined. I was fixated on getting that second shoe on Jake’s foot at all costs — it velcros closed I reasoned, it can’t be that hard! — and he was equally determined not to let me. You know who won.
“BOOTS!” he finally howled. “I want BOOOTS!”
“Then let me put your boots on!” I yelled, sounding — I cringe to admit it here — like my own mother. I was embarrassed to have even my husband hear me talking to my child like that. Even though there is a reason that all parents yell at their kids from time to time, and it isn’t that they’re bad parents.
The thing about me yelling is — whether I am yelling at my own parents or my husband or, in my past, roommates or boyfriends — it can end only one way.
I cry.
And I cry even more when my son is clinging to his father for dear life. The same father who had used the very same tone of voice with him a mere forty-five minutes earlier. Which only proved that I had blown it forever, provoked one too many tantrums, wasted all that good will built up over nine months of in-utero care and twenty-five months of hugs and outbursts of great love.
So I sat in the bathroom for a while, crying and wondering where, exactly I am supposed to draw the line. What battles am I supposed to pick when every single thing in Jake’s life seems to be a battle these days? How, in short, do I know when to say no?
Continue reading ‘Knowing When to Say No (and Not Just to Target on a Saturday)’
I would just like to point out that it is impossible to post a coherent essay with Sesame Street on in the room.
There’s the mini-mariachi band playing with Big Bird to distract me. (Nothing like a bunch of eight-year-olds dressed up like mariachis to make you wonder what embarrassing choices your own child will make in the future.)
There are the guilt pangs hitting me like lightning bolts hurled by Zeus at the mother who can’t even keep the tv off past 10:30 on a snow day.
And there’s the boy snuggling against me more and more insistently as if to point out that I have compounded my lack of good-motherness by not even watching with him and commenting on what’s happening as I oh-so-conscientiously do on our carefully regulated Sesame Street nights. Might as well leave the room and let him sit two inches from the screen drooling slightly. We all know that’s exactly what I’m going to end up doing with his upcoming sibling anyhow.
Instead, I sit here thinking of what I would like to write about — the breastfeeding conversation I engaged in online yesterday, how Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food is making it even harder to feed my child guilt-free, and maybe something about trying to find the balance between having my own life for the next four and a half weeks pre-baby and resting up for what I know comes next … starting all over on the search for mindfulness in motherhood.
Eventually, however, I will close the computer, put my arm around my boy, and watch the snow not melting outside.
This, I believe, is what is called “surrender.”
Yoga, I have always thought, saved me from the law.
I became a lawyer, in the narrative I have set up of my life, because I was blind to my heart. It was the path my mind led me down, the safe, manageable world of knowledge and surface communication and clear organizing principles.
Sure, I told myself I went to law school to change the world. Certainly not because my parents were begging me to do it. But I also fully acknowledged, at the ripe old age of 24, that I would end up going to law school eventually, so why not do it while I was young?
I did, to my credit, fight the good fight. Much of my first year was spent in tears as I tussled over the meaning of justice with other students who were plainly in the game to make six figures a year. (We’re talking the pre-dot-com ’90’s, when you had to actually work your way up to a six-figure salary at a big law firm.) I sought refuge in the nascent Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, reasoning that an organization run on consensus must be a warm and welcoming haven, even if we were, as it turns out, publishing articles about law by people who practiced and taught law. I jumped at the chance to work in the Fair Housing Clinic during my third year and ended up feeling alienated and discouraged at the thought that once someone needs to consult a lawyer, there’s nothing much the lawyer can do to correct the harm she’s already suffered.
In other words, the law broke my heart over and over again.
But I didn’t know how to do anything else. When I tried to think of something, I came up blank. I had, after all, spent three years of my life and a great deal of my parents’ money getting a law degree. I couldn’t imagine any other job for which I was fit. I knew from a mercifully brief but unfortunate college experience that I am not the least bit suited to waiting tables, which surely meant I couldn’t take any chances on a creative-type lifestyle.
So I pursued the public interest dream. I graduated from law school jobless. I volunteered with some public interest organizations as I studied for the California Bar while living in my parents’ home. (”You should reach for the stars,” my mother would say, her eyes shining with passion, as we crossed paths in the kitchen. “Work for a law firm!” Plainly, her universe is a lot smaller than mine.) And I stumbled into a clerkship in DC, buying myself some time and some legal street cred.
Then the clerkship was over and I was back in the dispiriting search for public interest work. Even at the time, I knew my heart wasn’t in it. But I couldn’t see my way to anything else. And when time was running out on my gainful employment and one of my co-clerks told me the law firm in which he had spent a summer was looking for associates, I dumped my resume in the mail and tried to forget about it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not work every weekend for the 22 months I lasted at the firm; in fact, I think I worked a grand total of three of them. I billed exactly as many hours as were expected of me, took my vacation and holidays, and was lucky enough to work with some good partners on some good issues. But I walked around much as I had in law school, with a big lump of tears crouching in my throat just underneath my smile. Because I just did not know the person in the suit (even if it was tangerine orange with a skirt that fell a good six inches above my knee).
The only way I knew how to get out was to go to graduate school. Because I know how to go to school, and I know it is a safe place, predictable, patterned. I was in the American Studies program, but I was teaching a writing course at — you guessed it — the law school. Before long my little brain started sussing out my options. Law school teaching: better salary than college teaching, shorter tenure track, less onerous requirements, lighter teaching loads . . .
Next thing I knew, I was an associate professor at St. Louis University Law School. And, for a brief year or so, I was pretty sure I was happy.
Then I discovered yoga. I discovered my heart. I learned how to follow it instead of my head. I began to see why, even when things were good, even when I was surrounded by friends, I was still deeply unhappy. I quit my job to write. I met my husband. I started a life with him in which the occasional legal project is nothing more than a means of contributing to the mortgage, certainly not a part of who I am or how I would define myself. And, of course, I discovered the joy of being a mother that led me to YogaMamaMe.
Then, today, I read an article about a piece of legislation passed yesterday by Congress. It reversed a truly evil Supreme Court decision that had gutted the Americans with Disabilities Act and rendered hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities powerless to fight against discrimination. And as I read about it I started to cry.
Continue reading ‘Could Yoga Really Have Led Me to the Americans with Disabilities Act?’
