I experienced a whole new way of thinking at the end of yoga class yesterday.
I’d spent the past several days mulling over how I wanted to approach writing about continuing toddler-inspired sleep interruptions; guilty, crying morning-afters; plummeting four-season temperatures; and that frustrating in-between period where the choice between too-big maternity clothes and too-small normal person clothes reawakens all my body image issues, only now in a surround-sound, super-sized version.
The possibilities for enlightening lessons were plentiful. If nothing else, I reasoned, my struggles with winter, approaching-two-years-old, and pregnancy would be fodder for many a YogaMamaMe essay. I could offer endless pearls of wisdom about surrender and letting go of the myth of control and listening to your heart instead of your head.
And then, as Baby Lamar and I settled into savasana for our final relaxation, my teacher invited us to not only let it go, but to let it in.
This was a stunning concept to me, the last thing I wanted to do. I had made my way to class huddled deep in my beloved new winter coat, the faux-fur-lined hood pulled low over my eyes as if to mimic the direction in which my spirits plummet when cold weather approaches. In the last couple of years before I retreated from St. Louis to southern California — largely inspired by a Christmas day landing at LAX when I emerged from a frigid and snowy St. Louis morning into perfect 80-degree weather — I greeted with cries of despair the slightest bite in the autumn air, the brilliance of the changing leaves, and even the chance to wear a scarf casually draped around my neck (a style I love to curl into but one which makes you feel a bit silly when walking the streets of L.A. in flip flops). I dreaded those nights when I would wander through my house wrapped in a duvet avoiding the kitchen despite gnawing hunger pains because it was the coldest room in the house — and that was saying a lot. I cringed at how easily I would be reduced from a strong, independent woman who could steam the wallpaper off her own walls to a helpless little girlie who felt no shame in asking a visiting guy friend to take her trash cans to the curb on his way out on a particularly wintry afternoon.
The road from more recent California winter afternoons so mild I recall walking seven miles in a skirt and bare legs the December day I went into labor with Jake to persuading me I could survive The Rest of My Life back in winter was not an easily negotiated one. Mike promised me an air tight home where we gave no consideration to utility bills or the environment once the thermometer dipped below 50 degrees. He reminded me of how during our St. Louis courtship he gladly shoveled my walkway, scraped my windshield, and started my car for me in the mornings, and promised such chivalry was not dead. I considered the fact that our current car even has seat warmers, blessed, best-invention-ever, aptly named seat warmers. He regaled me with images of Jake going sledding, building a snow man, having snowball fights — all the things of which my warm childhood had deprived me.
Perhaps this was the clincher: the memory of when I was 26 years old and living in D.C. when snow shut the whole city down for the better part of a week. I was walking by a group of people lined up to sled down a perfect hill near my apartment. They carried flattened cardboard boxes, cafeteria trays, cheap plastic sleds I could easily have purchased nearby and which someone no doubt would have loaned me had I asked. But I didn’t ask. I was afraid to. Because, tempting as those whoops of childlike joy were, unexpected as this sense of urban community was, I hadn’t the slightest idea of how to sled and was convinced I would crack my head open running into a tree because no one would think to show me how to steer.
So, upon Mike’s suggestion, and after careful consultation of charts on weatherchannel.com, I proclaimed Asheville mild enough for me to winter there. At least until Mike and I become rich and famous and can spend whole winters in our second home near Santa Barbara.
There is, however, as we often forget until it’s too late, a big difference between imagining what 18-degree winter nights in a poorly insulated house feel like and actually feeling what they feel like.
