Booster Seats and Boosting Yourself

First published May 25, 2008

Thursday's life lesson took place in the unlikely location of a Babies R Us in a strip mall off the exit just past the Asheville Mall, second-rate real estate where the stores squat sadly as if aware they have been banished.



I entered already full of the anxiety large, glowing box stores induce in me, determined to make it to the booster seats and back to my car before I passed out from breathing the oft-recirculated air. The salespeople lacked not in the cheer and charm department, but came up woefully short in terms of knowledge of the store -- sending me on more than one jittery revolution of its perimeter before I found the booster seats for eating at the table rather than the booster seats for riding in the car. You could just see them waiting for the call about their application to work at The Children's Place or Gymboree or some other children's store ensconced in the more desirable environs of the Mall.

Once I had zeroed in on my target, I found myself in a Mama quandary -- which one to buy?

If I were Mike, I would have better spent my time at home on my computer reading Consumer Reports and hunting down the safest, most environmentally friendly, and of course the most cost-effective booster seat to be had. But I'm not Mike. I'm a frazzled mother with a to-do list far longer than the amount of time I have while Jake is at school who suddenly decided she could not tolerate a single day longer of serving as a human booster seat for her child who refuses to eat in his high chair.

Now I was confronted with the choices. The Cooshie Booster was mighty attractive, a simple foam seat that boasted the approval of an upscale parents' magazine. But its intended age group started at three, over a year and a half past Jake's age. At more than thirty-five dollars, or the prospect of having to return to a store I dislike on principle for a return, the risk that Jake would topple off of it to fall to the ground amongst the detritus of dried pasta bits and cracker crumbs overlooked by the dogs seemed too high.

And yet the booster seats recommended for his age group seemed so plastic and baby-ish. I probably shouldn't admit to fretting about his aversion to the straps that adorned the molded plastic Fisher Price booster because it really isn't up to Jake whether he wants to be strapped in or not. Except it sort of is because we elect to "watch him closely" rather than fight over using safety straps. At any rate, I realized, after careful examination of the picture on the box, the straps secured the child to the seat, but the photo cleverly obscured the disturbing fact that they did not seem to secure the seat to the dining room chair upon which it sits. One thought of Jake falling to the floor with a yellow plastic seat secured to his butt, and I tossed it back on the shelf.

In the end, I went with the ages 3+ Cooshie. And he loves it. He has not fallen out of it once, although he has an alarming habit of twisting around to see if the dogs are in the room so he can tell them "No!" and just this morning I caught him standing up on it.

Still, ignoring what the label said about when my child would be ready for the Cooshie seat has been a lesson well learned. Not just to trust my Mama instincts about my child, but to break away from the set expectations we -- and others -- create for our lives. Jake, in other words, is far wiser than I because he doesn't care when the box says his Cooshie is for three-year-olds.


It's All too Much to Expect

I started thinking about that booster seat a few days later, when I found myself hitting the preset button on the car radio for a ghastly "light" music station. Ghastly, yes, but the fact that it pushed a new nostalgia button every two and a half minutes far outweighed the sickening feeling that I am now so old and un-hip as to not only listen to a soft rock station, but to set a button for it on my radio.

Actually, radio in Asheville is pretty sparse. So it's not like I displaced a perfectly respectable indie-rock station or even the distant second NPR broadcast that sometimes snakes its way over the mountains, instead reserving a spot for sappy love songs that all end on either a soaring diva-note vibrato or a soft whisper of regret. Why not, I reasoned, make it easy to return here when I once again -- as I predictably will -- have one of those days when I'm wallowing in weepiness and need to torture myself with candy-colored memories of my junior high school days?

Yes, I have taken to telling myself that those carefree days of my youth -- when I sported rubber bands anchored to various wire implements cemented onto my teeth, tried desperately and tearfully to achieve the Farrah Fawcett feather in my limp, fine hair, and generally hadn't a clue about how to feel good about myself -- were happier than my current state of ragged YogaMama-ness. I did, after all, have my life ahead of me, cringe-worthy as that concept was back then. I had all the time in the world to indulge myself in whatever I wanted to do -- at least once my algebra homework was done. But the point is I didn't know what I wanted to do. Other than have hair that looked like Farrah Fawcett's.

Regardless of how awkward and decidedly unglamorous my junior-high life was, as I sat in my car singing passionately to "Waiting for a Girl Like You" I was willing to go back to 1981 and do it all differently. Well, maybe not all. But the part where I fail to publish a novel or become a great actress or, you know, do all those things I'll never get to do now that I have a child who won't be able to so much as make a tuna fish sandwich for himself until I'm fifty.

I was, to be brutally clear, mourning the fact that I haven't done all the things I feel I should have done by now and feeling gypped because I don't think I ever will.

And then, just at the brink of driving off the side of the road in a swell of over overly dramatic whining fueled, no doubt, by channeling my inner fourteen-year-old, I thought about the appropriate-age-designation on Jake's Cooshie. And in a decidedly twisted version of lucidity, I understood that I was creating an age-chart of my own in which I've outgrown all the cool, fun games and am therefore destined to spend the rest of my life sitting stiffly on the couch sporting a pained little smile as everyone else gets to play with abandon.


Trust

We pay attention to things like the age labels on boxes because it makes us feel safe. It's the same reason, I imagine, that we allow parents, friends, pediatricians, the teachers at our children's preschool, and absolute strangers to give us unsolicited child rearing advice, even if we will ignore it after a long internal battle over whether we are, in fact, bad mothers for doing what we think is right instead of what the bossy woman in the grocery store assured us was. It's just plain scary to run on instinct alone.

Who can blame us? We live in a culture where it's assumed there are answers to everything. Look how far science has taken us, a true believer might point out. But has science really provided more answers? Or just left us with even greater questions -- about how much harm we are suffering from the pesticides used to grow greater crops, the fuel emissions billowing out of our global economy, the latent side effects of the immunizations that we are told will keep our children safer, at least in the short term?

If it's hard to resist the desire to have someone else explain to us how to take care of our own bodies, homes, lives, there's no way at all most of us have the strength to ignore the "experts" when it comes to our children. I purchased or received as gifts no fewer than four books on pregnancy and childbirth and five on babycare and early infant development. I read at least parts of them all and shelved, gave away, or threw away every single one of them. But not until I had cried and equivocated, see-sawed and capitulated over how to feed my child, diaper my child, help my child sleep, stimulate my child, and, well, just be a mother to him.

You get so used to charting your child's "progress" against a big, fat chart of averages that it becomes second nature, even though you tell yourself that it doesn't matter if he's using two-word sentences well ahead of his peers or walking far later than three-quarters of the kids his age. We all, I hope, come around to knowing that our children are perfect just as they are. But we are still expected to walk past the signpost that tells us what "perfect" is supposed to mean.

It's reassuring, tapping that signpost as you head on past it, glorying in your ability to not (really) care about it. Not unlike the pleasure I found as an undergraduate rubbing the nose of the Rockefeller statue in front of the library for good luck on my exams; I didn't for a minute think it would give me good luck, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

And so, I'm convinced, we start looking to the signposts in our own lives. After all, if there are certain things our children are expected to do by certain ages, why not us? Sure it was once easy for me to pooh-pooh the notion that I was "supposed" to be married by thirty (I wasn't) and to have a child by thirty-five (I didn't). But now I suddenly see all the things I should have done by now. And it suddenly bothers me that I haven't.

Is it motherhood or just advancing age? I can't separate the two, as they arrived together. But, really, I don't think it matters. Because if not motherhood, there would be a million other things pressing against me, reminding me that I have missed some important milestone, some measure of my worth, happiness, satisfaction.

The simple fact -- and I'm taking a long way to get here, perhaps because the simple things are frequently the ones that are so hidden we can't quite see what we're missing -- is that we far too rarely let go and trust.

I've written before about trust, and how yoga helps you to trust in something bigger, which, in turn, helps you let go of the need to control that only ends up tying you up in knots. But this aspect of it, I think, is something I haven't fully explored myself. This frightening step of letting go of any notions of how things should be and just letting life happen.

I'm talking about even more than trying not to control things. Control would be something like looking at the label on the Cooshie and setting up a plan for your child to achieve Cooshie status by age three. What I'm suggesting is refusing to even look at the label. Refusing, in other words, to use any external measurement by which to gauge your life's choices.

So, instead of thinking of all the things I want to accomplish in life, feeling bad for a few days that I haven't accomplished them yet, and then figuring out how to get them done NOW, I'm suggesting letting of them completely. That's not to say they won't happen, nor that you should just sort of stop and stagnate and wait for things to happen to you.

No, what I'm suggesting is that we are all, as mothers, in a unique position to parent ourselves in a way as kind as the way in which we parent our children. Because we wouldn't dream of telling them about the developmental expectations that are revealed to us as their caregivers, any more than we would berate our perfectly beautiful offspring for failing to meet some externally generated standard. No, indeed. If some anonymous testing center told me that my son is lagging behind in, say, social skills, I would pick apart the basis for the standards and the means by which my child was tested. Most of all, I would determine that my child is exactly where he needs to be and I dare anyone to tell me otherwise. (Unless, of course, he's exhibiting truly disturbing behavior like hurting small animals; but, other than pulling the dogs' tails in an exploratory sort of way, I know for a fact that Jake has none of the warning signs of a true psychopath in the making.)

What I look forward to is the day when I can defend myself with the same intense certainty with which I am prepared to defend my child. My intention -- the direction in which I would like my life practice to take me -- is toward a place where I can dismiss labels, expectations, and should have's as firmly as I dismiss the things that threaten to place my child in a box.

Maybe we're all already in boxes built around us when we were too young to know better. And maybe it's just a little bit too scary to step out of them right at this moment. But if we keep working on true trust -- on believing we can negotiate our lives without anyone, including ourselves, telling us how to do it -- we will, I feel certain, open ourselves up to the beauty of our own lives.


Urdhva Prasarita Eka Padasana (Standing Splits) -- A Lesson in Trust, Play, and the Fallibility of Expectations

My moment of learning trust in asana yoga came when I managed my first handstand. It's one of those poses where you just have to jump in. One moment you're rightside up, the next you're upside down. No two ways about it.

But it's hard to get to the point where you're willing to dive in like that. For me, it came with my decision to pretty much turn my life upside down -- quitting my job and moving to California to be a writer. Without such impetus, I've since found myself stalled at jumping into handstand with two legs, or trying it without a wall. The all-or-nothing aspect of the pose, in the end, proved too stringent to include here with a lesson in trust.

Instead, I offer urdhva prasarita eka padasana, which, by the way, is never called by its sanskrit name. Standing splits provides one with a more conscious means of turning upside down, reaching for the sky, and opening up. And, of course, like any asana, it gives us the strength to turn further, reach higher, and open more deeply.

And, hey, if you want to get into the scary part of trust, there are a few variations at the end of the pose that will allow you to do just that. Trust where you are, and practice in that mode. It's the first step toward trusting where you are in your own life as well.

Standing Splits Instructions

1) From adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) step your right foot forward about 6-12 inches from your hands. If you are new to this pose, place your foot at least 12 inches from your hands -- the tighter your hamstrings and the shakier your balance, the further away you want it.

2) Shift your weight toward your front, right foot, using your hands on the floor for balance. As you are ready, let your left foot float off the ground.

3) As your left leg starts to lift, feel the connection between the leg and your core; let your navel pull in toward your spine and up toward your heart and let the strength and heat you are generating be what propels your left leg up as if your toes could draw a line on the ceiling.

4) Pause before you lose the feeling of being solid and conscious of your left leg. Press your right foot more firmly into the floor and feel as if you can draw energy from the earth through the sole of your foot. Watch that energy move all the way up your standing leg and out the toes of your lifted leg.

5) Now start to engage your trust. Trust the energy you are drawing on. Trust the strength of your standing leg. Trust the heat you are generating in your core. Never mind what the pose is "supposed" to look like; it is your own expression of it that counts. With this thought, let your shoulders relax and your spine lengthen, and see how these actions of letting go tip you forward, so your head comes closer to the floor.

6) With this sense of trust energizing your pose, let your floating leg sing and let the toes float even further in the direction of the ceiling. Gaze at your fingers or, for more of a challenge, at the toes of your standing leg as you confidently radiate the energy of the pose -- toes reaching for the ceiling, torso reaching along the length of your strong standing leg, crown of your head releasing toward the floor in a gesture of surrender.

7) Concentrate on your breath now. Let each inhale through your nose bring you energy and confidence. Let each exhale release doubts. Stay here for 8-12 long, slow, beautiful breaths.

8) If you want a more challenging variation, you may move your hands closer to your standing foot, deepening the pose. To create an even greater challenge, you may hold your (right) standing ankle with your left hand. If you are feeling ready to truly trust -- and maybe even to fall -- press the standing foot even more firmly and surely into the ground, engage all the muscles of the standing leg, engage your core, and reach your right hand to the ankle as well, so you are balancing entirely on one foot with both hands grasping your ankle. Keep reaching your floating leg toward the ceiling. And if you're really flying today, you can reach both hands behind you, either interlacing your fingers and lifting your hands with your floating leg or placing your hands behind your back in reverse prayer position.

9) When you are ready to come out of the pose, slowly and consciously lower your floating leg so your left foot rests next to your right. Bow in an easy uttanasana (standing forward fold) and truly surrender. Trust is about acknowledging that you don't control everything, including a beautiful, strong pose.

10) Once you have a clear picture in your mind of trust, step back to adho mukha svanasana and repeat with your left leg as the standing leg.

Remember to have some fun. Because what's the point of a trusting, wise, peaceful life if it's not kind of fun as well? In fact, I'm going to invite Jake to practice this one with me. Because I know for a fact he'll remind me that having fun is what it's all about.