Breaking from Break, Part I: Why We Are Allowed to Take a Break from Being Mothers

It began before I left to take my friend Sam to the airport at the end of his weekend visit. Panic. Anxiety. An unsteady feeling, as if the floor beneath me had disappeared, leaving me spinning my legs in an ethereal nothingness.

I thought about what was causing this feeling half an hour later as I pulled away from the curb at the airport and started crying.

Sam is a good friend -- so good that he served as an usher in our wedding. But he is not someone I see or speak with often. My life does not flow by checking in with his. In fact, he met Jake for the first time on this trip. While it is true that time does pass so quickly these days of motherhood I sometimes feel as if I already have one toe in the grave, when you go well over two years without seeing someone, you do not tend to fall apart when he departs after a three-day visit.

The anxiety, I think, had more to do with my visit to Asheville than his. For perhaps the first time since moving here six months ago, I was a little bit less of a mother in Asheville and a little bit more just me.

What I mean is, I gave myself a break.

Even before I had Jake, I was a person who felt comfortable with structure. But since his birth, structure has become a crucial way of life. It's good for him, I tell myself, and I do believe this is true, at least when "structure" means something flexible like "pattern." But it's also a way of knowing I can hang on until the end of the day, of ensuring that I have some quiet time to read a book, of avoiding crazed mornings because I know I will have prepared his lunch the night before even though all I want to do is get into bed with that book. As parents, we keep ourselves from going crazy by imposing a structure on the multiple lives for which we find ourselves responsible.

In imposing this structure, we also make ourselves a little bit crazier.

When Sam's visit was looming, I felt crowded, rushed. So much to do before he got here, so pulled between hostessing and mothering. My need for the structure was so great, I had trouble conceiving of a few days when it might melt and bend slightly.

And then it was Friday evening, Sam was here, and the sitter had arrived. We have used a sitter just once before, so the adventure of being Jake-less for a whole night is new to me indeed. Even newer -- in an I-once-used-to-do-this-regularly old way -- was finding myself, 20 minutes after the sitter arrived, sitting at an outdoor table enjoying a gimlet.

I will repeat this for anyone who knows me and knows I rarely drink anything, and then only half a glass of wine. I was drinking a gimlet. I was standing up from the table to head to dinner a little unsteady on my feet. I was a little bit loud and a little bit loose and uncomprehending of the headache that would creep up on me in the next hour or two.

My buzz was a perfect metaphor for a weekend where I didn't worry about structuring our sightseeing around Jake's nap time -- going so far as to wake him up when we arrived at the Nature Center. I let Mike take over the bulk of the baby duties without so much as checking in to make sure he knew that Jake likes his bread untoasted, screams if you try to help him maneuver spoon to mouth, and -- a recent discovery -- will go from sleepy to wide awake if you try to read him books at bedtime.

Some of you may recognize this behavior as Taking a Break. Many of you will not recognize it at all because you haven't tried it yourself. I never noticed how much I don't give myself breaks until I finally did.

I didn't realize just how much of a break this was -- and, believe me, it's not as if I abandoned Jake to the arms of his father and sundry sitters -- until it was time for Sam's visit to end. Because mine was ending too.


Finding the Balance in Your Life

I'd say it's a guilty pleasure to sneak out for a drink with an old friend and feel like a young, childless, attractive person again. Except that guilty pleasure would suggest a balance of guilt and pleasure. The guilt -- or anxiety or panic -- that arises when you have to return to mothering can easily outweigh the pleasure. If you let it.

Here's what I was really feeling as I left Sam -- and my childless, carefree self -- at the curb. I was feeling panicky at the thought of returning to my neglected work. I was wondering how I will avoid breaking down this evening when Jake and I play alone and I feel the bright, active, rested person I used to be slipping back into my past. I was dreading bedtime tonight, when Jake will remind me that for the past several nights we have been too busy relaxing with our guest to impose our usual bedtime ritual of dinner, bath, and to-bed by 7:30.

Superimposed on this normal end-of-vacation anxiety was a new cherry on the chocolate sundae that is motherhood. I felt terrible that I felt so terrible about returning to full-time mothering.

Here's the crux of the problem: We all need a break. We all deserve it. It is a struggle to believe that we do deserve it -- because who, after all, wants to take a break from being a mother except someone who doesn't properly appreciate being one in the first place?

Finally, we overcome the reluctance to take care of ourselves as well as we take care of our child, we give ourselves permission to get a little bit drunk, to be a little bit lax about our child's days, to let our partners stay home with him while we go out for sushi on Sunday night. And we don't want to go back.

That's a hard thought to have. It's not that I don't want to go back to having one-on-one time with my boy. Or that I don't want to get him back to a daily pattern that makes him feel safe and secure and happy. But all that beauty comes with a price tag. I am perennially tired; I have less time for myself; I have to be content to be a little less energetic, dynamic, pretty than I once was.

Recognizing the difference is akin to finding that one point of balance -- not tipping too far in one direction or the other, not thinking too much about it, not shifting energy once you find the truth. The truth that it is possible to love your child more than anything -- to be willing to make any sacrifice it takes to ensure his happiness and safety -- and, at the same time, to want a break from the work of mothering.


How to Find Your Balance

As I said, the thing about balance is that it's gone the second you overthink it. You have to simply let it come to you and sit with it. This is not something I'm good at.

I was unable to literally balance in yoga class for my first full year of practice. When it finally started coming to me -- in short, simple, tree-pose increments -- I was living on an ashram studying for my teaching certification. Hours of daily chanting and meditation, immersion in a yogic lifestyle, a vacation from the pressing realities of life -- these all no doubt contributed to me finding my way to balancing on one foot. That and the fact that the yoga studio at the ashram was carpeted, giving my toes something to grip to.

Only as I gained strength and confidence has my balance become something I can do without thinking. And even now it is precarious. I must work to not think, to let gravity shake me without giving up, to trust my ability to find my center and balance before crashing to the floor. Perhaps more importantly, I have learned to fall out of balance gracefully, without disruption, so I can find it again.

The secret -- as much as I have discovered it -- is in caring more about the process of finding balance than about being balanced.

If you think about it, our ability to engage equally as mothers and individuals separate from our children is short-lived. The second you find that place of balance, you are bound to think of your child again. Or -- probably far less often -- that mythical place we long to return to before we had childrren where we were always beautiful and vivacious and like nothing so much as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, only with era-appropriate clothes that don't look quite so shockingly bad when we watch it again.

This weekend, by giving myself a break, I was actually achieving a rare moment of balance. I was with a friend who knew me before I was a mother, when I was in my thirties and even -- gasp -- late twenties and full of the energy that, frankly, dissipates with age as much as parenthood. At the same time, I was mothering my child, and no less for letting Mike put him to bed every night.

Once my reason for letting go got on a plane back to DC, I crashed to the ground.

Rediscovering my balance now will take something different. I don't think the answer for me is to let go of our daily rituals because -- as I said before -- I think they're good for Jake and at this point in my life I know they're necessary for me. I need to find a new way to balance when I have work to do and bills to pay and dreams to pursue in addition to a little boy to parent with my hardworking husband.

I have no idea how I'll find this new balance. I do know that once I find it, it will be fleeting and I will soon be back on the path to discovering a new way to balance who I am with a child. And knowing this, I feel the anxiety subside. Because I have found the grace to fall calmly, to seek balance patiently, to know that the point isn't to find it, but to live with the search, the place where the growing comes from.


A Balancing Challenge: Uttita Hasta Padangustasana

Standing balances are the place where calm happens for me -- because it has to. The more excited I get about finding my balance, the more conscious of the other students behind me watching me fall, the more likely I am to spend my time tapping the floor with the foot that is supposed to be floating somewhere near hip-level.

I find the standing balances the most calming because I am a person who tends toward motion. If you are someone who tends to be calmer being still, you may find better balance in an arm balance (like bakasana, crow pose, which I will discuss tomorrow) because arm balances are more heating.

For today, I offer uttita hasta padangustasana -- Extended Hand to Big Toe pose. Doesn't sound any easier in English, does it?

Uttita Hasta Padangustasana

I've read that this is considered one of the hardest poses in the astanga series. Which is sort of like saying Dulce de Leche is the most fattening of the Haagen Dazs flavors . This means you really do have to approach this pose as one about finding your balance, not finding the actual balance.

1) Stand in tadasana (mountain pose). Take a moment to find your balance with two feet on the floor. I like to place my hands in angeli mudra (prayer position) at my heart to find my center.

2) When you are ready, shift your weight to your left foot. Strengthen your leg, tuck your tailbone, and find your balance. When you have found it, start to draw your right knee toward your chest.

3) Each time you lose your balance, try to place your right foot on the floor gracefully and enjoy (ha!) the process of finding your balance and starting over.

4) When you can reach your right leg, either take hold of your right toe with the first two fingers and thumb of your right hand (this is called a yoga hold) or, if you have less flexible hamstrings or less experience with standing balance, place your right hand under your right thigh or calf as a support. You may also use a strap around the sole of your right foot and hold the ends in your right hand. The point is to find balance, so any tools you use that help with this purpose are right for you.

5) Slowly lengthen your right leg in front of you. Think of lengthening toward your body to keep your right hip from floating up and knocking you off balance. When you have reached the pose, stand still, counting 5 slow breaths.

6) If you would like to continue the challenge, you may open your leg out to the right. This requires thinking of your standing leg as rotating in (inner thigh toward the back of the room) and your floating (right) leg rotating out (inner thigh toward the ceiling). Advanced balancers may turn their head to look over the left shoulder. Hold this for 5 breaths. If you start to lose your balance, you may gracefully bend your right knee or return your right foot to the floor.

7) Return your right leg to the front. Draw your navel in strongly and let go of your toes. Place your hands on your hips and keep lifting your right leg up, pointing your toes, for 5 long, slow breaths.

8) Gracefully release to the ground. Repeat on the left side.

If you're like me, you will spend most of your time in uttita hasta padangustasana gracefully falling. Which is pretty much what I've been doing since leaving the airport. Because there's no way I can keep myself from losing my balance right now. But I can choose to do it with grace.