Driving with the Brakes On

First published June 12, 2008

I had a Very Bad Mother Moment walking Jake home from school yesterday.


We were strolling down a moderately trafficked street—the kind of residential road motorists use inappropriately as a through-way, inducing the residents to have cement traffic calmers installed, which end up acting only as a challenge to the faster drivers but at least slow them down to 30 mph or so. Jake was happily waving a bright yellow wooden ball he had discovered in the stroller bag and yelling, "Bahl! Bahl!" to any and all who would listen.

As we ambled along in front of some neat little houses, Jake took the opportunity to toss his bright yellow wooden ball down a rather steep driveway.

"BAHL!" he shouted in the sort of toddler tone that warns you there is far worse to come if you give up the ball for lost and continue your walk home.

Off I dashed, down the steep driveway, the ball infuriatingly gathering speed as it skipped along just beyond my reaching fingertips. Some neighbor dogs began barking at my intruding figure, and I glanced guiltily up at the owner shushing them. He did not seem to take me for a thief, so I kept after the ball as it took a final flying leap and landed in a patch of vines adorned with a number of dead leaves a strikingly similar color of yellow.

Victory finally attained, I trotted back up the driveway, yellow ball held aloft, to find that our lax attitude toward the stroller brake broken during a plane trip four months ago was finally coming back to bite me.

It's not that we don't know it's kind of dangerous to push your child around in a stroller in the Smoky Mountains without benefit of a brake. Nor that I failed to see the absurdity of propping it just so on the sidewalk in front of our house so it would neither roll down the hill unattended nor obediently back away when Jake flailed his body in objection to taking a ride. It's just that we're so busy and there's always something else that needs fixing.

Fixing the stroller brake jumped to the top of my to do list, however, the second I reached the top of the driveway to see Jake's stroller sitting in the middle of the street with two cars stopped in front of it.

Jake looked at me with an expression of some confusion as I scrambled after him in a state of mild shock.

"One of those days," I said lamely to the elderly woman in the first car.

Her open-mouthed stare of purest horror—the people they let have kids these days!—will likely stay with me forever.

It sure did induce a good flood of tears when I finally made it to the privacy of our living room. Just when I had been willing myself to the point of believing I do have what it takes to be a mother.

Wanting to Be a Good Mother so Badly You End Up Thinking You're a Bad Mother 

I know I can forgive myself because of the very fact that I can write about this episode with a sense of humor—and truly believe that others will laugh and feel better about the time they drove home from the pediatrician's office without strapping their child into the car seat. (Wait, that was me too.)

I'm human, I love my child, keep him safe, and, all evidence to the contrary, kept him safe yesterday as well.

"All's well that ends well," Mike said lamely when I called him to tell him why we absolutely had to get that stroller brake fixed already. (He did it last night.)

And he's right. Unless, of course, you are, like me, one of those people who loves to trot out old mistakes to beat yourself up with every so often.

Ironically, I truly had spent most of my day trying to wean myself from needless self-flagellation, to unstick myself from the what's-happened-to-my-life goo in which I lately find myself mired. That morning my acupuncturist had pronounced me stuck (no pun intended), and I couldn't have agreed more.

Maybe it was the acupuncture, maybe the arrival of summer and a sense of the freedom it brings, maybe there's just so long you can drag yourself around feeling teary and misused until you need to snap out of it already. But as I crossed the street from my car to the yoga studio earlier in the afternoon, I had a comforting revelation.

There is no such thing, I thought with the bell-like clarity that comes when you suddenly stop overlooking an obvious fact, as the mother who gets everything done.

I might feel overwhelmed by the constant barrage of things that need doing, the seeming impossibility of finding a moment to myself during the long days of mothering and being. But there is not a mother out there who actually gets it all done. The neat, open, clean, fresh home I imagine? Reserved for guests only, or maybe an indication of people who aren't home much. The refrigerator neatly stocked with fruit and vegetables all washed and stored in their proper, locatable containers? Only if the rest of the house is a mess. Bills paid, kids' rooms cleaned, grass cut? Never all at the same time.

This realization that I'm not falling short of an attainable goal provided a moment of relief. I was, once again, only human for feeling so impossibly behind. Except, of course, that in my heart of hearts I don't care that no one else can do it. I still think I can.

This is, I now see, the real problem driving my driving myself into the ground. Even if I logically understand there is no such thing as a perfect mother, I do not see that as an excuse not to become one myself.

I want to be that mythical mother who can raise a well adjusted child who recognizes his boundaries without ever once raising my voice or losing my patience. Impossible? Sure enough. Unattainable? You betcha. Something I feel bad for not doing anyhow? But of course.

Here's how it works. I love my son so deeply and, for reasons too psychotherapeutic to go into here, have a great need to let him know how much I love him frequently. I want to hold him nearly as much as he wants to be held. I am happiest when he is laughing, distraught when he cries, determined that he know what a valuable, beautiful human being he is.

But, of course, there are times I am simply too tired to hold him for half an hour straight while I struggle vainly to make something for dinner. So, too, I am usually pretty cranky when he wants to get into bed with me at 4 a.m., and generally refuse his tearful requests to sleep on my chest. I pry sharp objects out of his fingers, even when he protests they are the only thing in the world he wants. And, perhaps worst of all, I speak to him sternly and in no uncertain terms about the need to change a poopy diaper and how much I would prefer it if he would cooperate in the venture.

There is nothing wrong with any of these things. They are even, I might venture, examples of good mothering, of gently setting boundaries, of protecting a child who does not have the capacity to effectively protect himself.

The thing is, they make me feel bad. And because they make me feel bad, they make me feel like a bad mother. And when being a good mother makes me feel like a bad mother I am, in the words of my acupuncturist, driving with the brakes on.

A Quiet Time Before the Day Starts Churning 

Caught up in the cycle of wanting to be a good mother so badly I considered myself a bad one, I had utterly lost my perspective. So many things needed to be done every day—for Jake, for myself, for the basics of living in a reasonably clean house with working electricity and running water—that I had lost the ability to prioritize. I felt, quite simply, overwhelmed.

When you're overwhelmed by life, even a little bit, it's pretty easy to be overwhelmed by motherhood. All the details of life, after all, take time away from your child. Sure, one can frequently drag a toddler to Target to buy blackout curtains for his bedroom, but how patient will he really be when it's time to put them up? And so, you end up overwhelmed by both—the need for blackout curtains hanging over you like a big, appropriately black cloud and the pressure to focus on being with your child even when your mind is skipping from blackout curtains to a dresser for storing all the outgrown baby clothes to how to entertain the raft of visitors we have planned for the foreseeable future.

All of us have a time of day when we are most capable of slowing down, when it feels most natural just to be. For me, it's morning. I love the smell of it, the hushed sound of it, and, most of all, the way my mind hasn't started rushing around yet. Oh, it will, if I let it, jump out of the gate like Da'Tara at the Belmont Stakes the second my eyes open. But if there is any time I have a hope of taking a breath and just not getting started, it's in the morning.

This morning, I ventured into the lovely, cedar-scented sun porch that lies off our guest room, infrequently used save for a corner where Mike has parked his computer. To my not-inconsiderable distress, it had somehow been transformed during the winter into a gigantic, cedar-scented utility closet.
Fighting back tears of bitterness and wanting to give up before I started, I stacked and sorted and cleared things enough to find a lovely spot on the floor. Taking in a deep breath of cedar and stillness, I sat down. I closed my eyes. And, with perhaps more ease than ever before in my life, I meditated.

And, you know, it worked. It felt so good that, far from counting the seconds, I felt disappointed that my stolen little fifteen minutes at the start of the day would ever have to draw to an end.

I know what you're thinking. Fifteen minutes? Where am I going to get fifteen minutes? To DO NOTHING?

But, see, as impossible as that may seem, there are probably other ways your body and mind are telling you it's just what you need. The longing to stay awake long enough in bed to read a whole chapter of a book, absorbed and unworried about the things you could be doing instead since, at 10:45 p.m. with a child likely to awaken with the sun, there is nothing else you could be doing. The disproportionate disappointment that attends not having time to watch the season finale of Lost for nearly two weeks after its broadcast even if you don't inadvertently discover some of the juicy details ahead of time. The many, many times during the day when it all seems like too much and you just. want. to. stop.

There is a reason meditation is at the core of yoga, the ultimate reason for the asanas and the pranayama for which it somehow seems easier to find time. It is, quite simply, crucial that we get a break from our minds sometimes.

Great as they are and all, our minds are also what convince us, for example, that we are bad mothers when we are doing what good mothers do even if their children don't like it. It's not that thinking is bad—duh, it's necessary—but that too much of it can tie you up in knots.

The only way to unravel them, to gain a healthy sense of perspective, is to stop thinking. For just fifteen minutes. Or, rather, for a few seconds at a time interspersed with gently reminding yourself to stop thinking, for a total of fifteen minutes or so.

Look at it this way. If fifteen minutes to just sit and be quiet really does help you gain a healthy perspective on things, aren't you really saving time in the long run?

You will, it is likely, miraculously discover that not everything has to be done at once and, even better, what it is that really has to be done and what can wait for another day. Slowing down really is more efficient, even if our Blackberry-obsessed society tells us otherwise.

So just give yourself an invitation. Be ready, at some point during the day, to stop when you think it would feel good. Find a spot that makes you say, "Ah," and sit there. With your eyes closed. Breathing. Sinking into the now, where you not only know you are a good mother, but you feel like it.

I know I can't wait to get up fifteen minutes early tomorrow so I can sit in the sun porch smelling cedar and morning mountain air and not thinking.

Some Help Along the Way—Baddha Konasana (Bound Angle) 

One of the things that helped me slow down yesterday was a yoga class where the teacher gave us space to really feel the asanas, where there was space to move and space to be still even as we were moving.

How lovely, I thought, not to catapult through the challenges, but to enjoy them. And, most importantly for my state yesterday, to reconnect with yoga as a way to slow down and breathe.

One of the loveliest moments of the class came when the teacher offered us baddha konasana as a way to calm the nerves. Although it is a pretty intense hip opener, baddha konasana also allows you to bow to your heart. It is, in fact, one of the safest ways emotionally to open your hips—site of past hurts and emotions. You are releasing them even as you turn in to your heart, both protecting it and receiving from it. Done with a bolster on which to rest your forehead, it also helps quiet the mind as the third eye chakra (the spot just between and a little above your eyebrows) is pressed into the bolster.

If just sitting doesn't appeal or your body is asking for something more—relief from sitting at a desk all day, for example—try spending the first few minutes of your centering time in baddha konasana. Then see how it feels to sit, open, a little freer, a lot closer to your sense of the beautiful person you are.