Jake and I spent the last week with his aunt and uncle and his three teenage cousins. Jake thinks teenagers are wonderful, especially 14-year-old Cousin Jeff who is as happy to throw a ball with him as to hold his hand, even if he draws the line at receiving a big mmmm-wah! kiss on the lips.
I enjoyed the teenagers as well. "Wow," I marveled. "Is it possible that one day I, too, will be able to hand the kids the keys to the minivan and send them to the movies while I have a nice dinner in a pub with my in-laws?" It is the stuff that the mother of a toddler's fantasies are made of.
Not so much, it turns out, the fantasies of the mother of teenagers. My sister-in-law, not without reason, on more than one occasion expressed sadness at how plainly her kids can can express their desire to not have her around.
It's easy enough for me to note the less-than-ideal circumstances of a family vacation during which the family is actually together all the time. Or to recall for myself the anxiety that accompanies those last few weeks before going away to college that my oldest niece is surely experiencing. And, from the perch of mothering an exhausting but relatively straightforward toddler, I can tell myself risk-free that when Jake becomes a teenager and wants his independence I'll just give it to him. If he's not nice to me, I tell myself, I'll elect not to be with him and so will my credit card.
The thing is, I'm smart enough to know that, as great a concept as my child's growing independence may seem right now when he has very little of it, should I still be writing YogaMamaMe posts fourteen years from now they will be largely occupied with the sadness of my child gaining his independence and no longer wanting me around.
Why Teenagers Are Fun When They're Not Yours
Just to be clear, my nieces and nephew are really great people. They are engaging and remarkably good natured about spending a week visiting their aunts and uncles and cousins when they could be hanging out with their friends doing whatever teenagers do or don't do when they hang out together during summer vacation. They do what their parents ask them to do—get Jake's tee-shirt left in St. Louis a month ago out of the car, give up the computer so their dad can check his work email, and, yes, even use their parents' credit cards responsibly. Hell, they even picked up their dad and Mike from the bar where they were hanging out drinking too many beers to drive late last night.
I am happy and almost relieved to have them be teenagers. I am not someone who ever claimed to be "good with kids." I don't love all kids; I love the ones who are nice. When I became part of this family I hadn't really spent much time with people a couple decades younger than myself. About the best I could offer was some mighty savvy Christmas-gift purchasing for my then-eleven-and-thirteen-year-old nieces, a job Mike was more than happy to delegate to me.
So we spent Christmases and summer visits chatting about books and school before they went out sledding or played ball with Mike and I remained inside with their parents. Until, slowly, they became teenagers. And I could talk to them because I have the ability to hint to them that I get it: Teenagers don't like to hang out with their parents.
I get it because I myself don't have teenagers whom I have spent years and years nurturing only to have them turn around and criticize my every statement and therefore don't think a teenager's desire for independence is a particularly hurtful concept.
I am, in fact, inordinately proud that yesterday, when we were finishing up lunch at 12 Bones and deciding to split up for the afternoon, sending parents to the Arboretum and kids downtown for yet more shopping, they invited me to go with them.
Wow. I was a teenager again. I was the cool young aunt (the one who doesn't want to be called "Aunt" because she is too old for that) even though I am only a year younger than their mother. For a moment, I forgot my own child sleeping in the stroller next to me and instead saw myself traipsing through downtown trying on and fitting into and even buying clothes that a teenager could wear.
In one happy-aunt moment I stepped far back from the small steps I have been taking toward accepting the fact that I am not, believe it or not, a teenager any longer. Or in my twenties. Or even—and this one is a hard, hard thing to grasp—in my thirties. It is, I am just beginning to realize, time to stop checking out what my nieces are wearing and doing with their hair for ideas about how to jazz up my own appearance.
And so, instead, I heard and accepted the invitation of their parents to join them at the Arboretum. And I realized that my sleeping boy, once he was awake, would surely enjoy running along wooded trails more than hanging out in a clothes store commenting on whether that dress is the right size or too bunchy at the hips.
The choice, of course, was not only the right one, but most enjoyable. As soon as we left the restaurant, our progress was halted by the passing of a train across the very street we needed to cross. Pinned in the back seat between the Jake's enormous car seat and the side door, my sister-in-law excitedly counted cars with him and he just as excitedly commented on the train with her. She was, I realized, at least as much fun as Cousin Jeff, despite being nothing like a teenage boy.
Adults, I was reminded once we arrived at the Arboretum, are also much more patient about things like diaper-changing stops. They encourage you to take the stroller even though Jake is unlikely to deign to sit in it, and they even push it for you. They take him out of your arms as you struggle to hike up a hill with him and guide him to bits of moss to stroke with great seriousness and chubby fingers.
Watching Jake's aunt point out lizards and explore the bottom of ferns, for the first time in my life I wanted to take a biology class, and I wanted to take it from her. (She is, indeed, a high school biology teacher. At her daughters' school. This, all involved will acknowledge, further complicates the teen-parent dynamic.)
As I savored the ability to walk along unencumbered by a toddler and as his aunt thoroughly enjoyed the experience of exploring with him, I began to see that, no matter where our children are in their development, there is some piece of us that needs more. I love and adore Jake, and I love being with him. But it necessarily hampers my own independence, my ability to use the hours of the day when he is not at school to do something other than play with him, feed him, bathe, him, read books to him, or otherwise assure him that he is, indeed, the center of my universe.
At the same time, I understood, there will come a time when I have that independence and, because I will still love and adore him and consider him the center of my universe, my independence will make me very sad. It will not be so easy to dismiss his teenage grunts of sarcasm and/or disgust with a sage nod of the head as I turn to Mike and whisper, "He's asserting his independence." I will, I can see, want him to need me even when he doesn't.
And, truly, even if I am tired all the time, even if I haven't sat on the beach reading a book since my fortieth birthday, even if Mike and I long to one day have enough time together to watch a whole movie in one sitting on TiVo, I still want Jake to need me as much as he does.
It's the deal we make as parents, even when we don't know we're making it. We lose some of our identity, we flounder about trying to find it while holding onto the responsibilities of parenthood, we feel, yes, older and sort of tied down and scared to death at the notion that we might one day buy a minivan.
But hard as all that is, it's not nearly as important as being needed.
Your Heart Is Much Bigger than You
Much of the time, when I'm practicing yoga, my focus is on going inside. One of the final steps on the road to enlightenment is attaining a state of pratyahara, or withdrawal of the senses. I think—as I'm sure many practitioners do—about leaving the world behind and going into myself.
But that frame of reference is slightly off. The point isn't to go into myself, really, so much as to go into my heart. Hard to distinguish the two at first glance. My heart, right? Inside my body? Hurts when I hurt. Kind of vital to me continuing to be me.
But in yoga philosophy, the heart is in fact the seat of something much bigger. We believe that god—whatever that means to you and whatever it is you believe in that's bigger than all of this—resides in our hearts. In all our hearts. In everything. So by going inside—inside our hearts—we are actually connecting to something much, much bigger.
On a simple, leaving-children-aside-for-the-moment level, this means that yoga is about connecting to something bigger than myself. The more I can find my connection to a larger universe of energy, the more I realize that I don't control everything and the smaller my individual issues appear to be. I see myself as part of a large and beautiful dance in which the more I let go and move with the music the less struggle and the more joy I will find.
All fine, until my mind wanders to Jake's smile and my heart seizes up with selfish, passionate, laser-focused love. When I feel connected to Jake like this, it is hard to connect to everything else. Because I simply don't feel such fierceness and need when I think of anything else living in this world besides Jake.
And so, he becomes personal. I forget that he has the same connection to the Universe that I do. That the same bit of god that resides in my heart resides in his as well. And that, one day, when he is a teenager and seeking his independence through unkind remarks made on a family vacation, it is not about me but about him finding his own dance with the Universe.
It's a lovely and complicated and ultimately painful thing, as everything important in this world is: This very proof that I am connected to everything—this child who is made from me yet separate, tied to me in intangible ways yet bound one day to grow just as attached to other people and a different life—is also what challenges my ability to feel connected to everything.
Just as a yoga pose challenges us to go deeper, seek more, find something new in ourselves, so our children challenge us to let go just enough to acknowledge our connection to something bigger than our own small, happy, self-supporting family.
And, just like any other yoga practice, the more we practice finding that connection, the easier it gets. Until maybe, one day, those teenage years won't be quite as painful for the both of us.
The Challenge of Opening Your Heart—Ustrasana (Camel Pose)
Heart openers are both about opening your heart (well, duh) and about going inside it. The more we open our hearts to the world, the more we open them to ourselves. After all, if we're hiding things in there from the world, aren't we also hiding them from ourselves?
Like that time you told everyone you were just fine after a particularly disappointing break-up and ultimately convinced yourself you really were fine, only to crash suddenly and painfully one night when you overheard "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough" playing in the 24-hour Korean grocery and ended up buying two pints of Ben and Jerry's that you consumed miserably in your apartment staring at a video of some movie you didn't understand and ended up hating for failing to distract you from the heartbreak that had taken over your whole life. (You may at this point be fervently wishing for me that I had discovered yoga in law school, but weep not. I'm over it now.)
Ustrasana, or camel pose, is a deep heart opener, but also a mental challenge, no matter what your level. There is simply something scary about turning upside down (unless you are Jake, who yells, "up-ide down!" over and over again until whoever's duty it is to do the honors tires out and tries unsuccessfully to distract him with a book or, preferably, Cousin Jeff).
The only way to stave off the fear is to connect deeply within your body and, at the same time, to trust in something much bigger. It's as if our deepest muscles are working with some force outside ourselves to support our bodies as we lean back, open our hearts, and challenge ourselves to connect.
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