First published on November 12, 2008.
I do not deal well with exhaustion.
I feel demoralized, lazy, like I am squandering opportunities, watching the economy sweep the can-I-get-published? bus off the road and into the deep muck of a future in which Mike and I are—we know—crazy to imagine raising our children on freelancing and, even worse, journalism.
Mostly, though, exhaustion makes me crazy. Lying in bed in the middle of the night sobbing about my life gone wrong crazy.
Here's the formula for a good dose of Losing Your Mind: start with a pregnancy that somehow doesn't seem like an adequate excuse to, you know, feel tired sometimes. Add a toddler who, for reasons unknown, has suddenly shifted from champion sleep habits (for a 22-month-old) to a rash of 2 a.m. screams for parental affection. And, for good measure, toss in the fact that you never quite managed to get your act together to have storm windows installed last winter and are well on track for another several months wandering through the upstairs wrapped in a down duvet and avoiding blasts of arctic wind coming from the baby's room.
That last bit requires some explanation. But, first, the background.
When Jake began yelling for me in the middle of Sunday night—Night One of our latest round of sleep struggles—I approached him with my usual strict and unsympathetic words.
Phrases like, "It's the middle of the night!" "Mommy's tired!" and "Tell me what's wrong!" produced little but a more stubborn gripping of the side rail on his crib and that heartbreaking attempt to glom onto me when I felt my job was to refuse such glomming lest it be seen as a reward for unacceptable behavior. My background in parenting, you must understand, stems from dog training, where such simple one-to-one ratios are generally accurate and effective.
Instead, I spent the next hour or two in my bed with a pillow wedged between me and my flailing and unhappy boy, waiting for him to fall asleep so I could plop him back in his crib and pray for him to sleep until 9. My prayers, incidentally, went unanswered.
Night Two, I pitted my own obstinance against his. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong," I said sternly to his addled, sleepy face. "Use your words."
He refused to speak, probably because he didn't have many words in his half-asleep state.
Stubbornly, I refused to hold him. I sat on the floor in my tank top and underwear, certain I could wait him out.
"Does something hurt?" I asked periodically, more to keep myself awake than out of any sense that I would receive a meaningful answer. "Did something scare you?"
How, I still wonder, do I expect a 22-month-old to understand the concept of "nightmare"? I imagine him trying, with his impressive yet still limited vocabulary, to explain to me what exactly is wrong when it has vanished into the darkness of his familiar room. Can I blame him for giving up and instead seeking a warm, safe hug?
Yes, if it's 2:00 in the morning and my son has won the battle of the wills, I certainly can.
After 20 minutes or so, I picked up him up by his armpits, holding him away from me as if he were one of the stinky diapers that had, these past few days, been causing a nasty rash that just might have been the culprit for this episode, and dumped him none too gently on the bed.
Not surprisingly, he wailed.
"Go To Sleep," I commanded, turning my back on him.
Sadly, he tried. There is a certain distressing irony in the fact that my son's strong desire to follow instructions is far more upsetting to me than if he were to ignore me and continue to try to scale the pillow barrier to burrow against me. Frankly, I'd rather lose the fight and have my son sleeping in my bed until he's 16 years old than have to listen again to the whimper and frantic thumb-sucking that accompany the near-silence when I hiss at him to Go To Sleep.
And this sorrow, perhaps—this desire to fix the problem so I can sleep through the night and no longer feel exhausted and not take my exhaustion out on a not-yet-two-year-old who is probably awakening because of dreams of his mother abandoning him and is met upon his screams of sadness with further, real-life abandonment—is what led me down a deep, dark, crazy, I-want-my-old-single-life-when-my-biggest-responsibility-was-my-dog-back tunnel of depression.
You know just what I'm talking about, don't you?
But It Made Sense at the Time ...
The craziness really started with the storm windows. (I told you I'd get to them.)
A year and a half ago, when Mike and I first started talking about relocating from the oh-so-warm (well, not really) winters of Southern California to the mild-but-still-winter winters of Asheville, I asked for two things. An indoor garage. And good windows on our home.
Guess how many I got?
To his credit, Mike is quick to warm up the car for me in the mornings, and I recall scraping the windshield myself only once or twice last winter. More distressing was our failure to act on storm windows. Instead, I spent the dark months of winter starting at brown gobs of sealer, like the entrails of my lost sunny days smushed into the many, many window frame cavities through which the mountain wind came whistling.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I once again called the people who had kindly provided us with a storm-window estimate last year then waited futilely for us to act upon it. They came to the house, measured, promptly sent us another estimate. Even followed up a week later, wondering if we'd, um, made a decision. This weekend, I assured them, we'd decide.
Now it was Monday night, the estimate was still sitting in my gmail in-box, and I was searching for reasons Jake's sleep—and, consequently, mine—might be so disturbed. How convenient to have a cold night and the failure to make storm window decisions over the weekend at which to direct my sleepless anger.
Within no time, it was not a matter of just storm window estimates but benefits decisions, financial planning, and let's not forget the lovely Saturday afternoon lunch I envisioned us having while Jake slept. What was the point, I thought, of having a partner if I'm still just as overwhelmed by all the unscheduled life stuff as I was when I grumpily ducked out of work-in-progress presentations by my fellow law professors with a sniffy complaint that they didn't understand I was taking care of a house all by myself.
Consumed by a fondness borne of the circumstances far more than any realistic memories, I recalled a time when any mess in the house was my mess and therefore able to exist precisely because I didn't notice it. Unlike the empty coffee cups in the living room where Mike plays with Jake in the morning while I read the New York Times. Or the black men's socks snaking along the floor of our shared closet as if they have escaped from the laundry basket of their own volition. I pictured yet again slamming shut the open compost bin on the kitchen counter as the scent of old banana peels and coffee grounds come charging at me.
Freedom from the mess of living with others—and I here I began to understand I meant not so much the physical mess but the emotional mess of calibrating your days to the ones you love most of the time—began to seem like a lovely concept as I lay there, balanced between the edge of the bed and my muttering child. Maybe—the thought sneaked its way in—maybe I missed those days when Mike wasn't around to complicate my life with dirty coffee cups and a different opinion about where to put the chest of drawers we inherited from my grandfather and an uncanny ability to distract me from household chores with weekend excursions to the Farmers Market and nearby community festivals.
And maybe, I allowed, if I missed the days before I found Mike's love, I could also miss the time not so long ago when Jake wasn't around to center my days.
And maybe, I further allowed, if I could think such a horrible thought, he would be better off without me.
It's no secret when the tears came in. Tears from half-believing myself, even if I didn't really. Tears because I was convinced the baby due in March could fathom my thoughts and would be forever scarred by them. Tears because I could almost just imagine a Lifetime-movie version of my life in which I dramatically and rather unreasonably move away, leaving my husband alone to explain to our child why Mommy has disappeared. He's young; he'll forget me. In the meantime, I end up, for some reason, in a beach town that looks a lot like Wilmington, North Carolina, even though I've never been there and thus don't really know what it looks like, raising my baby alone and pretending it doesn't rend me in two every time I think about how Mike must be devastated over never getting to know his child.
Worked up now to proportions available only if one has had far too little sleep for far too many days and nights, I conclude that I am only half loved by those who love me. I am deeply desired and cherished and supported at times, I must admit. But that only makes it worse when suddenly I am rejected, pushed aside because—I acknowledge this, but it doesn't square with my fantasy life of constant happiness—people have their own lives, their own private concerns, and their limits.
I awoke amidst a pile of tissues with Jake wrapped over the pillow behind my head like a lost little laboratory monkey grasping his cloth-and-wire mother because she is all he has.
I'm happy to say that I aired one or two more legitimate concerns that arose over the night to Mike over breakfast and that he responded with love and level-headedness. And that I didn't fall apart again when Jake showed a marked preference for a hug from one of his teachers to giving me a kiss good-bye when I dropped him off at school.
We did, in fact, share many, many cuddles when I picked him up from school yesterday, and he even let me have the honored task of reading him books and lying next to him while he fell asleep last night.
And when he awakened with a terrifying cry at 2 a.m. again, I held him in my arms, asked him what was wrong, and didn't erect the pillow barrier between us when I brought him, with nary a complaint, into bed with me.
Honoring Yourself. And Reminding Yourself to Honor Yourself. Again. And again. And. Again.
Look, I know what's going on here. I knew it even as I grasped in the dark for the Kleenex box on Monday night.
I'm tired. I'm pregnant. I get sharp round ligament pains and memory lapses and cravings for food that is really, really bad for me and therefore, I am certain, poisoning my unborn child. Which does not stop me from eating it anyhow.
But, I tell myself, I wasn't this tired when I was pregnant with Jake. Sure, I didn't have a toddler awakening me in the middle of every night. And I generally got to sleep past 7:00 at least a few times a week. Now that I think about it, I probably got a good 9 or 10 hours every night. If you want to compare.
But I didn't have any round ligament pains. And I was far more comfortable in headstand at 23 weeks of my first pregnancy than I am now. I'm certain I didn't wear maternity clothes yet. Again, yes, it was summer, and low slung skirts and belly-baring tops sufficed where they would not on a cool autumn day in Asheville.
But I'm 42 now and I hear it all the time, how I'm supposed to be too old and too tired to have an easy pregnancy. Like every 22-year-old out there just sails through these nine months without a complaint.
It's a defensive game of table tennis—or maybe some more sophisticated sport, only I was never much a sports person, so this is the analogy that presents itself. Up rears the human feeling of inadequacy. I lob some hard-earned yoga wisdom at it: compassion, ahimsa, surrender. And then I fold another particularly pathetic layer of self-pity on top of the wisdom, as if to seal it deep within a cocoon of feeling lousy when, in truth, I actually feel pretty darned good.
It's that exhaustion, I tell you.
For some reason, the exhaustion is much harder for me to accept than a changing body shape and the wobbliness in my chaturangas. I think I should be able to fix it with a good attitude. Which helps, but only goes so far. And with a careful diet. Good reminder that part of yoga is honoring your body by feeding it kindly, but I could eat gobs of fresh veggies and lean, tasteless protein and I'd still be tired. I revel in the freedom of really, truly doing only what feels good and right in yoga class, but I'm still a little bit self-conscious about the fact that I honestly can do arm balances—you should have seen me a few years ago—it's just the belly kind of gets in my way right now.
And so I do what I always do. I watch the back and forth and I try to learn from it. I remind myself to honor my body, even as I berate myself for having to give myself such a reminder when I'm pregnant for goodness sakes. And then I gently remind myself to honor even the fact that I can feel inadequate about the physical limitations that are just a part of being pregnant. Because feeling kind of secretly crappy and cow-like—that's part of being pregnant too.
So is feeling like a truly worthy mother wouldn't give a hoot what her body is going to look like once her beautiful baby is born healthy and safe and perfect. Or feel even the slightest twinge of frustration that her personal dreams are going to have to take a backseat to parenting for an unforeseeable amount of time and, quite possibly, forever.
I have, of course, had plenty of training. It's called motherhood. It's also called being human. Because it doesn't take having kids to be way too hard on yourself and to invent reasons that you're not as good a person as you should be.
So here's the reminder: you are.
Honor Yourself Again
We hear it over and over again in yoga class: honor your body's limitations.
It's easy to think of this as a simple directive to avoid injury. But it's a central precept of yoga. It's part of surrender. Its part of honoring other living beings. You honor yourself as well. Starting with your physical limitations because those, well, there's no denying those.
And as you approach that pose that frustrates you again and again—as you find ways to modify and back off and find it not so much frustrating any more as kind of, actually, intriguing—you begin to master it. Or rather, to master your frustration. There's always further to go in the pose, and recognizing that fact is part of embracing it.
Embracing yoga. Embracing yourself and this life which will always, always, always have a challenge waiting for you around the corner. Whether it's a boy who used to sleep through the night suddenly deciding he needs a little break from his crib every night or a co-worker leaving and you having to take up the extra work because times are too tight to hire a replacement.
This is why I can say that even when I have a hard night and an equally hard day of recovery I am learning something. I may not be paying attention to the lesson—may, if I'm grumpy enough, angrily reject it altogether. But it's happening, and how I choose to weather the storm is something I can look back on with a little more insight into myself.
Now, for instance, I'm pleased at how I made the decision to surrender to Jake's midnight howlings rather than make us all tired and miserable trying to break him of them. Maybe things will be different four months from now when his sibling is depriving us of so much sleep that we just don't have any more to sacrifice. But I'll deal with those circumstances then. I'll surrender to what is when there is a what is to surrender to.
Meanwhile, the best I can do is honor my limitations—be they physical or emotional or circumstantial. And when I forget to honor them, I can honor that limitation as well.
Some Really Yummy Ways to Honor Your Limitations in Asana Practice
Rather than a new pose to somehow cope with coping, instead, I offer here a few variations to poses that you can turn to when you're more in the mood to do something immediately comforting for yourself than to push and stretch. Or when you're struggling to push and stretch and have no choice but to back off. Might as well have a nice reward for being limited.
In trikonasana (triangle pose):
Place your lower hand on your shin rather than the floor or a block. Then allow your buttocks to shift back toward the long edge of your mat rather than bringing your hips straight back toward your back leg. In other words, don't try to align your body in a straight line. Instead, make this pose about the lower back release. Allow your navel to float in toward your spine and up toward your heart and feel the space this provides for your lower back to stretch out more. Round your back if it feels good; experience your spine in a way that feels delicious.
In any of the Surya Namaskar (sun salute) variations:
Replace chaturanga with ashtanga namaskara: bring your knees, chest, and chin to the floor (instead of lowering in one straight plank-like push-up); keep your buttocks well in the air as you feel the best lower back release ever. Let your body slide to the floor and push up into a gentle bhujangasana (cobra pose) and lift through hands and knees before coming to adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog). Remain in adho mukha svanasana for as long as you'd like.
In pascimottansana (seated forward fold)—or any other forward fold on the floor:
Place a bolster between your legs and drape your body over the bolster. Let your lower back release and let your shoulder blades slide to the sides. Press your forehead into the bolster in a gesture of complete surrender.
You might just find that you love yourself so much when you offer your body these gifts that you make them a regular part of your practice.
