A Community of Moms Trying to Keep From Losing Their Mindfulness
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson when I looked at my butt in a mirror at my sister-in-law’s house while four months pregnant.
You would, in fact, not be expecting too much to think after that shock I would be smart enough not to look at my butt in a changing room mirror at a Nordstrom in Charlotte when I am ten months postpartum. When I am forty-three years old. Or ever, for that matter.
Some explanation is required.
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!”
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?”
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’
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’
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)’
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’
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.
Nursing my daughter in the back seat of the Honda as we left town for the weekend — me kneeling over her with a hand braced against the window as if to wave (or perhaps hold out a big STOP!) at passersby — probably should have been a good clue that I would be facing some unique challenges on our travels.
You’d think I would have chosen this moment to consider the other adjustments my children would demand of me while we visited my sister-in-law’s house in West Virginia. You’d think I would have pondered how a seven-month-old might respond to a new setting, new faces, and the absence of the hound dogs with whom she is so fascinated. (No worries on the last front, as Pete and George made their houndness roundly accessible to her.)
I am sorry to report, however, that the only thought running through my mind as I leaned over Lily’s car seat while we idled at a traffic light was how glad I was that no one was waiting at the bus shelter at which my position required me to stare as if looking forward to a chat with whoever was sitting there ogling me.
Continue reading ‘New Places, New Faces, New Records for Lack of Sleep’
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
