A Little Grey's Anatomy, A Little Kindness

First published May 30, 2008

I know how this sounds, but I'm going to say it anyway. Yesterday I paid more attention to Grey's Anatomy than to my child. Just a little bit more. And just for a little while. And only because I really, really needed to.

It had, you see, been a rough week. Jake's allergies were keeping us all up, the breathing treatments the doctor prescribed were freaking us all out, and I'm not sure Jake was yet over the previous day's chest x-ray taken because, yes, his coughing was that bad. I could barely remember the last time I'd practiced yoga, written a post, or done anything that could roughly be called something for myself. In my sleep-deprived, not-even-allowed-to-like-spring-and-all-the-pollen-now, self-centered ("It's not fair!") state, I found myself reduced to shuffling through the house bursting into tears every time it dawned on me anew that I have no friends who live in the same time zone as I do. And a mean migraine was refusing to do more than recede slightly from time to time as I downed Advil and wished fervently for someone to show up at my door bearing Imitrex.

We had, moreover, just returned from spending an hour and a half at Jake's school, during which time I tried mightily to convince him he'd like to stay, to play, to just let go of Mommy for more than a cautious and tearful minute or two at a time. I had yet to confront his refusal to so much as take a nap later in the day (who knew that a select few of us actually get hyperactive when fed a teaspoon of Children's Benadryl?), nor was I aware that I would be spending a barely coherent hour going over the last details of the YogaMamaMe website on the phone with the designer well after I should by all rights have been lying in bed with a good book and a bottle of Ace Pear Cider.

There was simply nothing left to do. I had zero energy, zero ability to read Jake a book in anything but a dejected mumble, zero desire to do anything but cry. And so, in a burst of warm-chocolate-chip-cookie-like comfort, I watched the remaining hour of the TiVo'd Grey's Anatomy season finale at 11:30 in the morning while Jake did me an enormous favor and entertained himself in the living room.

Any you know what? It made me feel a whole lot better.

The Truly Rough, Is It Worth It? Moments

I hate sounding like I don't enjoy spending time with my son, because I do. I just enjoy having, you know, a life. And the frustrating thing about motherhood, I'm discovering, is that you are forced to choose between the two more frequently than you had ever imagined when you decided to become a mother.

I was more than prepared, by the time of Jake's birth, to cede much of my professional life to motherhood. Frankly, I'd tried the corporate world (suit jackets make me itch), the academic world (all that enthusiasm -- from students and colleagues -- about things that really don't matter made me restless), and even, on occasion, the whole-day-teaching-yoga world (nice, but really, really hard). With my part-time, at-home consulting gig and my writing projects, I figured I was set. Stay home with Jake until I was ready for a part-time sitter (five months), switch to full-time daycare (eleven months), and I would have a full workday like every other normal person plus the joy of ending it a tad early to spend evenings with my beautiful boy.

It sure is great when it works out that way.

On our slow, defeated stroller-push home from school yesterday, Jake and I stopped for a short chat with the mom and daughter we had met in Jake's pre-daycare days, when I sat in our front yard hopefully striking up a conversation with every passerby who'd take the bait. This woman, I knew, has stayed home with her seventeen-month-old for seventeen long months.

"I don't know how you do it," I confessed in that confessional tone one sometimes adopts when all sense of purpose and clarity has evaporated into the ether that exists outside the bubble of the world of caring for a seventeen-month-old.

She looked a little bit surprised -- at the suggestion or at the fact that a near-stranger would say it, or perhaps it was a sign that I am not in fact voicing the things we all feel but feel like we shouldn't say. "Yeah," she conceded after a moment, "it is a lot of work."

Which, maybe, I now realize, was exactly my point. It is a lot of work. And work -- the stuff we understood was "work" before our children introduced us to a very different aspect of that word -- is a lot of work. Put the two together and you might sometimes get that week of smooth sanity that makes it seem possible. But the mothering kind of work just doesn't fit neatly into the waking hours of the weekdays. And the other kind of work doesn't lend itself to being tucked into the hours when your precious one is asleep and you would like nothing more than to be snoring right next to him.

So I am left with this recurring madness, the choice to put off the things that define me for the motherhood that I resist comprising the entire definition. Maybe it should be enough. Maybe for five or ten or fifteen years it just as to be. But, honestly, I'm not built that way.

And, many, many tears, a thirty-six hour migraine, and a bewildered sense of aimlessness later, I'm ready to say that I deserve to have something in my life that's all me.

Backing Off

"Backing off" is not, you may have guessed, an official tenet of yoga. But it is one aspect of ahimsa, which is one of the central ones. Ahimsa means nonharming -- being kind, friendly, thoughtful, considerate. And, yes, it applies to how you treat yourself every bit as much as how you treat others.

When I practice ahimsa during an asana practice, I'm readily aware that it means not pushing my body beyond where it can go, avoiding injury, being kind to myself when I fall over in a balancing pose or yet again lack the courage to try a handstand without a wall. It also means -- and I frequently have to remind myself of this part -- backing off when I'm not feeling my best, opting for a less intense variation of the pose even when I know I'm capable of something deeper. We don't always have to go our deepest, be our strongest, have perfect focus and discipline.

So if I can do it on the mat, why not off? Why not understand that, while I might be capable of pulling off a coherent post after Jake has gone to bed at the end of a very, very, very long day, it would be kinder to myself to skip it. Maybe I can unload the dishwasher, get the laundry done, and spend an hour on the phone with the web designer on the same day I am on full-time baby duty. But maybe I'll be a whole lot happier if I don't even try.

The bigger, harder step is allowing myself to take a break from trying so hard to be me. After all, I'm the only one who seems disappointed when I spend the day in old, too-big army pants, a baseball cap pulled over greasy hair, and an alarming lack of deodorant. True, my mind struggles to stay engaged, my heart cries out for a glass of Pino Grigio with a girlfriend, and my midsection suggests that it would not wobble so dishearteningly if I managed to go to yoga class more often. But maybe these are all products of a mind that wants to distract me from the deceptively easy truth:

Things do change. We do develop as human beings, even if we're putting an awful lot of energy into helping another much smaller human being develop as well. We don't run out of time for fulfilling our dreams, age out of the chance to be exceptional, or spend the last half of our lives winding down.

It's never easy to have your rhythm rudely interrupted, to find your many plans for a day suddenly sucked away like dog hair through the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. But rather than letting my marbles remain shaken up by the experience of this week, rather than bemoaning the greater disruption yet to come as we head off to St. Louis for a week of vacation, maybe I should focus on the kindness-to-self part. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to see backing off a little bit -- doing a little bit less than my overachieving, fabulous, strong, independent self is capable of -- as something I deserve, not something I'm forced to do because, sniff, sniff, my life has ceased to matter.

In the end, maybe, just maybe, those times I stop believing in myself and my Self and my future -- the times when I berate myself for feeling just a tiny bit trapped by motherhood -- are nothing more than my own failure to be kind to myself. And forgiving myself such a failing is a first step toward the kindness that I deserve.

Give Yourself a Hug: Supta Kapotasana (Reclining Pigeon)

My first thought in choosing to offer supta kapotasana here was simply that it involves giving yourself a hug. I wanted an asana that allows you to wrap your arms around yourself, protect your heart, and just feel good.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized supta kapotasana can do me a world of good right now for a bunch of other reasons. For one thing, it's a hip opener. If you're anything like me, the second you succumb to tears, you find your way to old griefs. Something as simple as a mean bank teller might set me off, but by the time I'm back in the safety of my car, I can turn her scorn into a psychodrama of my two best friends in eighth grade who used to gang up on me on a daily basis, reducing whatever self-esteem a thirteen-year-old might be able to get her hands on to an ugly duckling puddle on the floor certain she will never, ever be a swan. (I am, I confess, sometimes still waiting for that transformation.) Hip openers, in short, are one satisfying way to let go of the old hurts and to move on.

Supta kapotasana also has the potential to allow you some restorative work. Reclining allows you to let gravity do much of the work. You can literally back off and surrender to something much, much bigger. Gravity, it occurs to me, is so big that even a skeptic would have to admit that it's a force bigger than us, an energy that exerts an undeniable influence on our actions.

Finally, supta kapotasana offers the possibility of a lovely back massage. Even if you don't feel quite up to doing a little of the massage yourself, the earth is more than happy to do it for you. Because -- one more time -- you deserve it.