I took my dearest friend—Kali I'll call her and she knows why—to the airport this morning. And I started crying—again. Not just because "Carolina in My Mind" was playing on the radio. (That song makes me cry every time, dammit, and not because I live in North Carolina.)
I was, in fact, able to fill up most of the twenty-minute ride home with reasons why I was crying with such a depth of feeling: The enormity and joy and impossibility of having someone who's known you so well for over twenty years and still knows you so well now. The mingling of how it felt to be me in college with how much better it feels to be me now. The gratitude of having a friend who can honestly and truly and proudly confirm that, yes, I really have come that far. The distinct sadness that life's possibilities just don't seem as fresh at 41 as they did at 21. How hard, hard, hard it is to make the same sort of friends when you're older and realize how long it takes for such love to take root and busier and rather complacently settled into a family life and maybe, too, a little bit, more complicated than you once were and therefore harder to know.
I thought of all the things Kali has been through with me, carried me through, and how I never want to go through them again but am so very grateful to have been able to have her there with me. How so so so important it is to our souls to have friends and to have them close by and to spend time with them and appreciate them and depend on them and be there for them.
How much I just plain stinkin' love her and miss her.
But one thing I'm not crying about—because I won't let myself go down this road—is feeling like I'm all alone.
Being Alone Versus Being Lonely
In my experience, it frequently feels like you're all alone—very alone for a very lot of the time—when you have a young child who takes up so much of your time and love and attention and self. And it feels even more like you're all alone when you move to a new town with your young child who takes up so much of your time and love and attention and self.
I am getting better. I'm making plans and seeing people and taking the time to enjoy the rhythm of my life. But I still really miss having Kali around.
Some women are lucky enough to have good friends near them while they go through the closed-in time of new motherhood. Friends who have children at the same time (an increasingly distant possibility as you near and enter your forties, it's true, but far from impossible). Or new friends gained through breastfeeding groups or organized stroller walks or postnatal yoga classes.
When I had Jake, I was, at 40, at the distinct tail end of my friends having children. As for meeting new friends, I was lucky enough to gain one through breastfeeding clinic. But, for the most part, I'm not great at shaking up my routine at the best of moments. Now factor in how I mostly spent those seven months after Jake's birth literally tied (okay, surgical-taped) to an SNS, bound by a corset with holes over the nipples to a hospital-grade pump used so frequently I think my heart began to beat in tandem with its hypnotic sshing sound, and never far from the refrigerated formula and bottle warmer and all the other things that whisked away from me the freedom that I suppose problem-free breastfeeding affords.
Most women—even if they aren't lucky enough to have friends with babies also shut in and so desperate for companionship they don't care if they have fresh milk stains adorning the front of their tee-shirts or hair that hasn't been washed in so many days they have lost track of what a shower feels like—are lucky enough to not move 2,200 miles with an eight-month-old. (Although they might not be lucky enough to live someplace as lovely as that 2,200-mile move took me.)
So, really, I don't know if I'm lonelier than the average 41-year-old, work-at-home mother of a toddler. Could be that I'm making an awful lot of people feel pretty darn great about their own lives right now.
But I do think there's a certain loneliness that sets in when you have a child, no matter how many friends and family you might have close by. It's not unlike those new, breathless, hot relationships we ran through in our twenties, when we would unwittingly abandon our best friend the same way we grumbled about her abandoning us when she briefly dated that jerk she met on the treadmill at the gym. You feel like you've fallen into a big, deep vat of a kind of love you've never experienced, an underwater-like world where you don't think you'll ever return to the surface to breathe.
And then one day you find that you do need to sneak a breath, and you find the world on the surface quiet and empty and, yes, lonely because all the people you had gathered around you before you plunged into your reckless, all-encompassing pool of love have given up waiting for you and maybe even grumpily said a prayer or two for you to drown in your own foolish, selfish, exclusive love fest.
Not one of us would give up the giddy, unreal, so THIS is what life's about feeling of that love, be it remarkably stupid youthful lust or the primal, brooks-no-compromise love affair we have with our children. But the consequences—the loneliness, the consequent loss of ourselves or some small piece of ourselves we hope to one day find hanging out under the couch cushions, the constant exhaustion, the sense that we no longer move as quickly or sexily or freely as we did before—they're hard. Because life is hard. Because something can be painful even when it is so very worth it.
Maybe it becomes more worth it for the sacrifices. Maybe it's a way of tempting us forward in life, with the harshness that often accompanies change. Would I really go through it all again for another child? I think about having another being I love as much as Jake, and the answer is an emphatic yes. But when I focus on the hardness of the change wrought by those first, oh, eighteen months of Jake's life, the answer is a little more difficult to form.
Oh. Right. Jake is past nineteen months and I was just crying—I am crying—because it's still so hard. Which, I think, brings me to my point.
Being Up for the Challenge of Change
Kali and I talked a lot about change during this visit. Mostly changes she has to make in her life. Changes I've made and am making in mine. Changes that have already happened, all for the better in retrospect but brought into relief in all their ups and downs and struggle by someone who knew me through them all.
The Hindu deity named Kali represents the energy of change. She is purely female, in the most raw sense of feminine power. Turn to Kali for help and she will swallow everything that is hurting you. But she brings all that hurt into a deep, unsettling blackness, a powerful, endless space. And that power will emanate back into your life, bringing the change you sought with a good dollop of the very pain you sought to avoid.
In this, Kali brings us a more precious gift than help out of the quandary for which we sought her. She reminds us that there is no avoiding pain in life. The harder you try to make your life pain-free the more you're simply removing yourself from reality, from the connection to the Universe that brings so much good along with the pain.
It's not unlike falling in love with your new baby. Such a huge, irreversible, difficult, utterly life-altering change. No way would anyone's rational mind say, "Sure, I think I should tie myself down to a helpless being who will one day grow into a resentful teenager before abandoning me for a partner I can only hope I approve of, all the while draining me of time, money, and a romantic life with my own partner."
Ah, said my heart when my rational mind went on this rant after I met Mike and thought it might be nice, after 37 years, to finally have someone love me all the time, unconditionally, at my side when I woke up every morning. But don't you want to have children with this man?
And I—the person who had calmly realized just a few years before that I didn't need a child to make myself feel loved and that I would, in fact, be perfectly okay if I never did find that one person to share my life with because I pretty well loved myself and that can be enough—I morphed into someone blown away by what our hearts do. Not only did I want to have a child with this man, I wanted that child now.
Now didn't happen for a while, and now today is fraught with joy and tears and, yes, loneliness because my best friend is on a plane headed back to her home 2,200 miles and three time zones away. And she will become entangled in her work life again and I will sink back into the slower but beautiful (I remind myself) life I am living right now. And I'll cry and sometimes I'll feel tired when I'm playing with Jake and a little bit freaked out that his school is closed for three days in the coming week, even though I'm rightly embarrassed to say that I'm freaked out about having to take care of my own child by myself for three days when there are plenty of people who do it all the time.
But, see, that's my point. It is HARD. Any good change in life is just plain tough. Because our minds resist change even as our hearts urge us forward. We know in the end our hearts are right, but it can be awfully difficult to trust them when they can't speak to us in the logic of the mind. After all, trusting your heart means trusting yourself, and that's often really hard to do.
It's the whole reason I practice yoga—to remind myself of the wisdom of my heart and how it's so much smarter than me.
Supported Bridge to Malasana—Open and Observe
My first thought here was to introduce malasana, also sometimes called garland pose. It is a pose that leads you directly in toward your heart, lengthening your spine and letting go.
Then I went to a yoga class and we began with a supported bridge pose, or setu bandha sarvangasana, and it not only felt good, but was a safe and gentle way to open my heart.
So I offer here a short sequence of restorative poses: starting in supported bridge to open your heart and moving gently to malasana to see what you find there.
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