Sometimes there are good reasons you don't have time to, say, write a YogaMamaMe post for two weeks. And I don't mean "good" in the "eat your spinach, it's good for you" sense of good. I mean good, like good for my soul, happy, fun.
I mean, to get to the point, Coon Dog Day.
Not just specifically Coon Dog Day, which didn't happen until Saturday of the long July 4th weekend. I mean as well the uncharacteristic for us rush of parties and activities—a Thursday night party, Friday picnic, Friday night block party, Sunday ball game, and, yes, Saturday Coon Dog Day. It was a full, fun weekend, thrillingly free of any of those moments where you wonder how to entertain a toddler while sneaking just a few minutes reading the New York Times for, you know, sanity's sake.
Jake got to grow up in big ways, like splashing in the wading pools with the four-year-olds at the block party and noting with fascination—not in a consistent way, but still, he's only 18 months old—the baseballs flying by our outfield seats. And Mike and I got to have fun, thoughtless, busy, not working fun.
But I did not write. I did not break the two-weeks-and-counting silence in the nascent YogaMamaMe world.
Because I was too busy enjoying myself.
Which, naturally, has me a bit confused about my priorities.
The Important Things
We all know it, duh, not just because we have a family that has changed our lives for the better, but because we hear it so much it's become one of those things that is true through no real effort on our parts. "Family is the most important thing."
Did I first hear it uttered on Happy Days? Back in the days when The Brady Bunch was on Friday nights just before The Partridge Family and not a million times a day on cable? Or was it more insidiously buried in picture books read to me in the part of my life when the words were just sounds but their import soaked into my baby brain like developing solution slowly revealing the picture on the blank page?
Wherever it came from, it's not like I discovered it, figured it out, gave it the proper amount of thought to conclude that, yes, nothing is more important than family. It was fed to me, a self-evident truth on whose foundation is built, depending on whom you talk to, true happiness, modern society, or America and apple pie.
Which means that it takes some work to give the concept its proper due. The importance of family hangs out on the periphery, like my 39-year-old Snoopy content to sit in a corner of Jake's crib while he expresses far more interest in bright, exciting new toys like the mini John Deere Gator he received as a hand-me-down gift from neighbors. There, patient, constant, but not really acknowledged.
And so, as I sat on the ground with Jake in my lap watching coon dogs throw themselves at a taxidermied raccoon in a cage hung high on a pole (the winner—I'm not making this up—was the one who barked the most times without a break) what I was thinking was that the dogs were a hoot, the day was fun, and my website, well, maybe I'd get to it in the evening.
And when I didn't even pretend to write anything that evening, I thought maybe I'd write something during Jake's nap before the ball game on Sunday. I honestly can't tell you what I did instead—answer emails maybe?—but writing wasn't it. So I finally arrived at Monday hopped up with guilt and anxiety over not having written anything in two weeks.
Never mind that the time I spent with my family was important. Or that I truly, desperately, need to establish some friendships in this home that has been mine for nearly a year now. Or that the time was every bit as vital to me as work time.
No. Far too easy instead to go down the road that we construct as soon as we have that first conversation with ourselves about going back to work after the baby. You know. The one laden with issues about whether a good mother leaves her child to work, whether she should even want to, and whether, when she puts it off, she has lost her sense of self and her purpose in the world. Beyond Being a Mother! Of course! Because that's all any of us really needs, right? Because that's all a good mother needs.
Except that, for most of us, we need so very much more.
Hence, my inability to see my long break for what it was—a part of my life as important as working. Because they're both so fraught right no— work and motherhood. They hardly ever coexist, so it seems like one is always taking from the other. Somehow if we need work to feel fulfilled, we must not be good mothers. But if we spend time with our children, we have slacked off on work and need to make that all-important time up.
Or is it just me?
Trusting in the One Path
When I take a step back, I can see that all I'm really doing is doubting myself. Doubting whether I am devoting enough time to my work, whether it is even the right thing to devote myself to. And, conversely, doubting whether I deserve to spend time doing nothing but playing with my child, when I'm lucky enough to have the time. Doubt, doubt, doubt. So easy, so seductive, so frequently experienced I hardly realize I'm doing it.
It would be far too easy to say, "Family is the most important thing." Because that just leads back to the circles of doubt: "What if it's not so important I can make it the only thing? What if sometimes work is important too? What does that say about me?"
What it says is that I'm not trusting my path.
We're all on a path, whether we walk it consciously or not. We make choices, those choices create consequences and energy, karma and responsibilities. Stop suddenly and try to will yourself somewhere else, and you just end up panicked, tangled, wondering how on earth you got to this point and how you will ever find your way back.
So the thing is, this path, it doesn't exist in the way that path to the potting shed in our yard exists. It's not something you walk upon, a space you can double back on. It's something you live. A directionless direction. The sum of your choices, whether you make them from your heart or your head. It's where you are.
Leave aside for the moment whether it's time for your heart to lead you on a different path (if, say, you're working so many hours each week that you know in your heart you will regret the time missed with your child or, perhaps, you find yourself going through the stay-at-home-mom motions while your heart whispers that it might be time to get that certification in massage therapy you've long secretly coveted). Whatever you're going to do about it, wherever you might one day end up, you're here now.
I, for example, am right here, at 2:28 on a Friday afternoon, my legs folded up beneath me in the tomato red swivel chair pulled up to my desk, my fingers hitting the keys on my computer while I occasionally glance out the windows at the pale sunshine beyond the maple tree.
Do I miss Jake? Sure, if I think about it. If I were at school picking him up, would I be fretting about when I will have time to write another post and whether I will make the launch I have planned for next Tuesday? Without a doubt. Because the second I go one of these places in my head, I forget where I am in my body. And if my mind and my body are in two different places, what on earth is my soul supposed to do?
It's not that the two places I could be are mutually exclusive or cancel each other out in any way. It's that my mind makes them seem so by suggesting I could be doing something else. And when I feel like I can't do both if I can't do them at the same time, I lose my trust.
My path has taken me to a place where I work at home. If I start to wonder whether I should be working regular hours, in a place where I have to wear closed-toe shoes and breathe recirculated air, I lose sight of the fact that I am right where I need to be. And if, when I'm with my child, I start to think I should be justifying my work-at-home life by, oh, doing more work at home, I forget that I have chosen to be a mother as well. That, in fact, I can do both. As long as I don't expect myself to do both in the same moment.
Maybe it's that when we think of a path we think of it leading in one direction, and we think it will require all our energy and attention to make sure that direction is the "right" one. We spend more time trying to figure out how to head in the right direction than enjoying where we are at the moment. If you're too busy worrying about the work you should be doing while you're playing with your kids or thinking guiltily about your kids when you're doing work you would otherwise enjoy, then you're failing to respect both choices. You're missing out on the good and the joy in both.
So I've busted my butt just a little bit to write three posts this week in an attempt to make up for a break I don't actually have to make up for. But hopefully I've done it with a respect for my choice to spend the weekend with my family. Because, after all, family is the most important thing.
But my work can be pretty darn important too.
Garudasana (Eagle Pose) -- For When You Insist on Tying Yourself in Knots
A warning here for the unwary—garudasana can be quite frustrating. It requires you to balance—frustrating enough—while simultaneously tying both your arms and your legs in knots. Not unlike, oh, worrying about not getting work done while playing with your child and then feeling guilty for not truly appreciating playing with your child but really wishing you could just do something solely for yourself occasionally and then hoping no one heard you thinking such a shockingly not-a-good-mother thought.
So here's the thing. Practice garudasana was an eye toward just watching how you can tie yourself up in knots. Enjoy the feeling, sink into it. Find a sense of balance that can exist even while you're falling into an oh-so-human pattern. And then let it all go and see how free it makes you feel.
It's a reminder that sometimes the choice to tie ourselves up in knots can remind us of how good it feels when we resist the impulse.
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