How about that Michael Phelps, huh? Single-minded determination, laser-like focus, conquering his body's limitations. The ultimate competitor.
I'd like to see him take care of a toddler while suffering from a good bout of stomach flu.
I'd heard the horror stories before: Entire family succumbs to a nasty virus that has them battling each other for the bathroom, pits parent against parent in the fight over who has to drag her or his aching body out of bed to change the kids' vomit-covered sheets, reduces the parents to shivering skeletons sleeping in puddles of sweat while their fully recovered and now ravenous child chirps, "Pasta? Pasta?" How does anyone survive?
Honestly, I didn't have it that bad. In fact, I had the good fortune to get hit on a Sunday, when I could lie moaning in bed and Mike could, with only a tiny bit of reluctance, take Jake to a work party. (His only complaint upon returning was that he was so busy chasing Jake around that he never got to eat any of the food.)
I did, however, have the bad fortune of getting hit on the Sunday before the Monday and Tuesday when Jake's school was closed for summer break.
In other words, like an Olympic athlete, I found myself pushing my body beyond what is probably healthy (standing dizzily in the heat of a toddler playground while Jake ran an endless loop on the slide).
I kept going by tapping into that voice in my head telling me I could work through the pain—or, perhaps, Jake's pain. After I made my way to a shady bench to rest I refused to leave it when Jake fell and starting crying, instead calling out, "Did you fall, Mister?" and prompting a woman at the next bench to stand up and bellow, "Is that anyone's child?" She seemed only slightly embarrassed when I assured her that—my heartless response to him falling down notwithstanding—he was, in fact, mine.
I made it through the school-less-stomach-flu day, in other words, with the utter commitment of an Olympic athlete going for the gold. Okay, maybe I had no choice, but neither do a whole bunch of the Chinese athletes, and it doesn't make them any less committed.
There is one big difference between me and the Olympic athletes, though. (Two, if you count, oh, what great physical shape they're in.) A gold medal, however awesome and life-changing it might be, surely can't compare to the feeling of sitting with my neighbors at the end of the day watching 20-month-old Jake walk, grinning, single-file along the fence in front of our house between the four-year-olds who live on either side of us.
In that single moment bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, my toddler grew into a little boy and my heart grew with him.
Taking a Moment to Be Amazed By What You Can Do
Part of the fun of watching the Olympics is being able to sit on the couch marveling at what the human body can do. Not my human body, of course. But, still.
The thing is, as truly awesome as those athletes are, they distract us from how pretty awesome we can be too. Sure, there's something very American about celebrating the ability to do what very few others can (swim 50 meters in 24.07 seconds, say. Go, Dana!) But that perspective leads us to discount all the really amazing things we do as mothers because other mothers do them too.
But, really, even if I know I'm hardly the first, I am amazed at how relatively smoothly I made it through my day of child-care-while-ill. By all rights, I could have flopped on the couch, turned on the t.v., and pretended not to notice when Jake got bored pushing pencils down the ramp of his parking garage or staring saucer-eyed at Elmo. And yet, for my child's sake, I couldn't.
Okay, not just for my child. For myself as well. Part of what motivated me to push myself so hard was the prospect of—gasp—a social engagement. The purpose of our park outing was to meet up with one of Jake's school friends with a cool mom I've wanted to get to know, and I just didn't want to miss out.
We've been in Asheville for a year now and my few faltering attempts at meeting other moms—"That's how you have a social life," my seasoned mom-friends explain—have petered out in a self-pitying whimper to Mike that, "I don't have any friends here." Finally, the stars were aligned, and I was going after that medal even with the pulled hamstring.
In fact, my days of illness rained social opportunities—from the concert at our neighbors' Saturday night, when I was so tired I almost couldn't make it across the street, through our Monday at the park, and into a lovely hike with a neighbor on Tuesday pushing our twin jogging strollers over the trails as our boys slept. Sure, Jake's nap while I hiked for two hours fueled by nothing but days of clear chicken broth and ginger ale didn't bode well for the rest of my day. But I was, at this point, Superwoman, able to leap minor illnesses in a single—if not exactly a bound, since I didn't have that much energy, at least a game little hop.
And later that day, despite the utter exhaustion, came my reward: watching Jake with his four-year-old friends—because they are, rather suddenly, his friends—and having one of the neighbor's say, "He's a peer now."
The Moments You GIve Yourself a Break Are Awesome Too
As proud as I am of how tough I can be (and let's not even go into the psychoanalysis that should accompany the idea that it is glorious to push yourself even when it's not very good for you), I am also distinctly proud of all the little ways I gave myself a break. Of my uncharacteristic (but I'm learning) ability to honor my body's limitations.
I did, for example, not force myself to take care of Jake on Sunday. I handed him off at 8 to Mike with a plea to "watch him for a little bit because my stomach really hurts" and promptly got into bed and slept until noon. I let Mike bring me the Sunday Times to read in bed and run out to buy six-packs of real ginger ale and organic sports drink. I even waved weakly and without a smidgen of guilt as Mike took Jake off to the work party, even though this is a new job for Mike and he undoubtedly had been looking forward to actually meeting new colleagues who will now, alas, recognize him again only if he is accompanied by Jake.
So, too, much as I pushed myself on our Monday morning trek to the park, I followed it up by an afternoon with nearly two hours of television—thus breaking the made-to-be-broken rule of "no more than one hour of television in any given day and then only if it's Sesame Street." I plopped Jake in an early bath and read Entertainment Weekly while he drove cars down the sides of the tub until Mike got home from work and I could hand the boy off and abandon him for bed. I even—and this is just how tired I was—let Mike get up early with Jake on Tuesday, despite having had no time to himself in a solid 48 hours and a full day at the office looming ahead.
The point here isn't how much I took advantage of Mike. And I know it doesn't sound like I did anything particularly notable for myself. But you understand me if you have—willingly or not—succumbed to the Olympic style of motherhood wherein your child always, always, always comes first, even if "first" means taking him to the park when you can barely stand up straight instead of playing with him on the living room floor where he will be perfectly happy since he has no idea that he could have gone to the park instead.
In other words, for many of us—and, I'll bet, many of the "us" are mothers—it's not easy to take it easy.
Did I get the balance right? Who knows? I doubt it. But the point lies in the practice. I pushed some, I relented some. And in doing so, I practiced more than a few moments of ahimsa.
Ahimsa means "non-harming." We generally think of it as applying to other people and animals. For example, I hate to watch or read anything having to do with torture—I was barely able last night to make it through the letters at the end of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise recounting her last days in occupied France and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz, where she died. I can't stand anything that mentions the suffering of an animal, much less inflict it myself. I don't even like to kill bugs, unless you count (as I don't) the mosquitoes regularly landing on my ankles or my child's face. See, we all have limits to our practices.
So we don't harm others—we don't physically harm them, we don't verbally harm them. Or rather, we strive not to, since we're human and therefore very likely to flip a bird at the idiot who cuts us off coming out of the CVS parking lot before realizing that the idiot is a tiny, white-haired old woman who looks so shocked at the gesture that I quickly apologize to my deceased grandmother as a surrogate.
We understand—even if we can't always find our way to the practice—that learning not to harm others makes us better people, that kindness and compassion are roads to opening our hearts to others and the more we open our hearts to others the more they will open their hearts to us. World peace results, or something like that.
But what we focus on less often is the piece of ahimsa that applies to ourselves. Another part of the road to peace and happiness is to not harm yourself. Sounds so simple, and yet.
How often do I berate myself for losing the car keys, running late because I had to check email, taking a wrong turn because I'm busy thinking about the subject of my next post?
Or, to use a fresher example, I take my child to the park when I'm sick instead of taking it easy by watching hours and hours of Sesame Street.
An asana practice is, hands down (or up, depending on the pose), the best way to experience true ahimsa. You want to pretzel yourself into that twisted arm balance the teacher is demonstrating, or even the approximation of it the 20-year-old babe on the next mat is performing. But as you work toward it, something pops or strains or otherwise tells you if you go any further you will hurt yourself. So, generally, you don't. Hurt yourself, that is.
It's not always that easy or clear of course. You're in a pose that's familiar, feeling good, and maybe you push just a little beyond your edge and, yep, you do hurt yourself. When athletes do it, it's grit, determination, playing through the pain. When most of us do it, it just hurts.
So you learn, in an asana practice, how to strike a balance between challenging yourself and practicing ahimsa. You begin to discover how to expand and strengthen while respecting your body's limitations. And you experience the joy of slowly noticing those limitations slipping away, stepping back, leading you deeper into your practice.
It's the same way with life, just not as obvious. Sometimes, rousing yourself on a Friday night and going out for ice cream downtown turns into a lovely celebration of summer evenings and youthful energy and joy in going on a date with your partner or with your own beautiful self. Sometimes, though, it leaves you so tired you wake up two days later with the stomach flu.
You're never going to get it right every time, and that's not the point. The point is to constantly seek a balance. If you're not challenging yourself enough, then you learn to pick it up, to be kind to yourself by moving and socializing and getting out into the world. And if—mothers, I"m talking to you—you haven't given yourself a break in so long you don't rightly understand the concept, then it's time to practice ahimsa, the fine art of living your life and caring for your child while simultaneously—here's the crazy part—taking care of yourself as well.
Like I said, not as easy as it sounds. But worth trying, don't you think?
Vrksasana (Tree Pose)—Finding the Balance Between Pushing and Ahimsa
Probably for me more than for your average person, balance poses represent the perfect fulcrum of pushing and forgiving. I am not, to put it mildly, built for balance. So I lose my balance and fall over and get frustrated with myself. My muscles begin to burn and I fall over and get frustrated with myself. I try to move more deeply into the pose and fall over and get frustrated with myself. You get the picture.
Vrksasana is one of the most basic balance poses. Which doesn't mean it's easy by any means, rather that it is a lovely place from which to observe what balance requires.
You become a tree, swaying much as the beautiful maple in front of my window is swaying now in the tropical breeze that has blessed my morning. You feel the shift to one side and—without judgment, in the spirit of ahimsa—you let yourself move back to center. You go too far in the other direction and lose your balance. Forget those angry, frustrated thoughts. Because, really, what difference is it going to make in your life if you are able to practice tree pose perfectly? Instead, being kind to yourself (um, ahimsa) you calmly find the pose again.
This is what life really is. Swaying, falling, finding those perfect moments when the energy flows and you are stable and steady and a beautiful, flowering tree.
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