In my last post I stressed the importance of bringing along an Elmo DVD if you intend to take a toddler on a four-hour driving trip without another adult in the car who is willing to spend the entire journey twisted around dispensing handfuls of popcorn.
I would now like to point out that the Elmo DVD will do you very little good when your toddler starts freaking out because you are on an airplane.
The trip had begun swimmingly. Mike dropped me and Jake off at the Asheville airport and watched with, I'm sure, great relief, as swarms of TSA employees helped us make our way through security.
One woman tried to fold up the folding stroller that I was using for the very first time, rendering me of minimal help in offering instructions. Another employee pointed out that I needed to remove Jake's shoes as well as my own; I had, in fact, removed one of them before being distracted by the task of folding up the folding stroller. Another TSA guy took my forgotten laptop out of the bag in which I had left it. Sippy cups of apple juice, plastic baggie with bottle of hand sanitizer, two sets of shoes, folding stroller, and toddler I could remember to place in the appropriate places. Laptop, apparently, fell through the cracks.
Once Jake and I had reassembled ourselves, we made our way to the gate. Where we found that someone intimately involved with the design of the Asheville airport has traveled with a toddler before.
Plopped in the midst of a colorful throw rug was a giant abacus, acting simultaneously as welcoming beacon to small children and warning signal to any adult who might find the sight of a small child preparing to get on a plane with her more than a little bit disturbing.
Jake and I alternated between manipulating the giant abacus beads and looking out the windows to spot airplanes.
"Ay-uh-plane!" Jake would cry. "Sky!" He'd point to the sky while I practically squealed with pleasure over his obvious genius-level IQ. "Whoosh!"
"Are we going in an airplane?" I asked. "Are we going in the sky?"
Maybe I should have taken a clue from the fact that Jake didn't answer these questions.
Instead, I busied myself with the task of early boarding, gate checking the folding stroller (which I was getting pretty handy with at this point), and staggering up the steps of the tiny prop plane loaded down with a diaper bag, a computer bag/toddler entertainment center, and, of course, the toddler, who could not be trusted to employ his own walking skills on an airplane tarmac, no matter how small and unbusy the airport.
Once inside, I found our seats and breathed a big sigh of relief for my decision to buy Jake his own ticket, three and a half months shy of his second birthday, when I will be forced to do so. Last time I flew with him, seven months ago, he was already too big to find a comfortable position for napping in my lap, a particularly distressing discovery when in the midst of a crowded six-hour flight to Los Angeles. But even with a mere two hour-and-a-half flights to get to Louisville, I knew a nap would be well worth the $140 it would cost me to purchase that additional seat.
So I set him in his seat next to the window and started stowing our bags.
Jake looked around, wide-eyed, assessing the situation.
Once he had fully considered the circumstances, he expressed his opinion. "No ay-uh-plane!" he yelled. "NO! NO AY-UH-PLANE!"
Elmo could not save me now.
Moving as You Move: The Traveling Toddler Version
There is one big thing toddlers and airplane travel have in common: you must be flexible if you want to survive them.
Panicking at this point would have been as useful as my tearful attempt in the summer of 1991 to bribe a ticket counter employee at the Nairobi airport with a twenty dollar bill when I was informed that, contrary to the assurances of the ticket I held in my hand, I did not have a seat on the Air Kenya flight from Nairobi to New York. That is, any such panicked actions would have been completely ignored by the party causing the panic.
Instead, I whipped out Jake's trusty Dr. Seuss's ABC's book. "Big A, little a. What begins with a?" I chirped brightly.
Jake was, for the very first time, only moderately interested in what begins with A.
I flipped to the inside cover, splashed with a colorful display of letters, and began singing the alphabet song.
Jake smiled.
"A," I sang.
"Ay, bee, szee!" he crowed.
"D," I belted out, as the other passengers began shuffling past. I smiled in a cross between apology and promise that I would have no reason to apologize. "E, F --"
"Gjhee!"
Within no more than three rounds of the alphabet, I had secured Jake in his special, FAA-approved harness and had even remembered to buckle my own seatbelt. The aches that almost immediately began shooting through my back from twisting in my seat and leaning over him reading books so as not to disturb the other passengers seemed a small price to pay for making him forget that we were: a) on an airplane; b) in the sky; and c) immobilized, at least for active toddler purposes.
I even covered the six or so miles between our gates at the Detroit airport with aplomb, despite the miscalculation of using the stroller to carry bags and my very, very, very sore left arm to carry my son. All well worth it the moment he fell asleep in his seat on the plane from Detroit to Louisville.
In fact, I wished the flight were longer, knowing, as I did, that it would be my only quiet time to sit and read a magazine over the next several days. Which is, to my thinking, what airplanes and hotel rooms are really supposed to be about.
Still, we landed in Louisville unscathed, with my father there to greet us and wrassle our suitcase and car seat. I was meeting him and my mother to clean out the apartment of my grandfather, who passed away at the end of June, just shy of his 95th birthday. Not exactly the sort of fun-filled vacation on which most people plan to take their toddlers, but an important thing to do nonetheless.
In fact, Jake was a welcome bright spot for the others at the apartment wading through 25 years of empty shopping bags; notes from every meeting of the local UJA from 1971 to 1998; and the itineraries, 30-year-old travel guides, and outdated maps for every trip my grandfather ever took. And there were many.
The thing about traveling with a toddler, though, is that—no matter how well behaved he might be, no matter how flexible and calm you might be—it is exhausting. Ran-two-marathons-back-to-back exhausting.
I questioned my judgment in agreeing to go out to dinner with my parents that night when Jake started melting down during my salad. I became certain of my mistake when I returned to the table after a good, rousing round of dancing to the piped-in Lerner and Lowe songs in the restaurant foyer only to find the entrees had not yet even been served. I began to mutter thanks to the gods who watch over people traveling alone with toddlers when all the tables around us emptied out and I could allow Jake to walk along the bench past the empty tables eyeing the aquariums perched above them as I tried to coax him to eat some of the fruit and cheese plate I had ordered on his behalf. And I was downright ready to carry him across the eight lanes of traffic that separated us from our hotel as my father savored the last few swallows of his wine well after he had paid the check and Jake had begun putting his head in my lap and frenziedly sucking his thumb as if by doing so he could transport himself to a nice, comfy bed.
You'd think another dinner out would have been easier the following night, when Mike arrived in a rented minivan he drove from Asheville. And it should have been, since I figured my day of making sure Jake didn't follow through with his otherwise impressive plan to plug an old lamp into an un-baby-proofed electrical outlet surely earned me the right to let Mike do the bulk of the restaurant toddler-chasing. Who cares if he had just driven for five-hours straight? Surely he missed his boy.
"I don't want to stay out until ten o'clock again," is what he had to say that night at eleven o'clock, after finally getting an overly wound-up Jake to fall asleep.
The next night we made it back to the hotel at ten thirty—though the park-like outdoor seating at this restaurant and our encounter with the owners' 15-month-old bulldog puppy nearly made up for the late hour.
And so, the next day, as we squeezed into a Nissan Quest loaded down with antique furniture and thirty years' worth of vacation slides and drove home to Asheville through the gusts of wind sent up from Texas by Hurricane Ike, I was mighty, mighty thankful to be putting in that Elmo DVD at last.
And so, I suspect, was Jake.
Moving as You Move: The Yoga Version
Stress appears in many, many more forms than a toddler who is suddenly certain he does not want to be on the airplane you have just boarded. Though perhaps not with such jolting, fight-or-flight intensity.
And, of course, the more stressful the situation, the less likely we are to appreciate the lesson to be learned from it.
For example, back in the Nairobi airport in 1991, I found it very difficult to see that I was learning a valuable lesson in flexibility as my flight home to the U.S. took off without me on it. I had already changed all my Kenyan money back into U.S. dollars, which the locals are not allowed to use. I had watched my boyfriend reluctantly board his own British Airways flight home, wracked, no doubt, with his own guilt and stress. It was midnight in Nairobi, and I had no place to stay and no way to get there.
Of course, as would anyone, I figured it out. I found my way to a hotel—and was I to blame if the only place that would take me and my credit card was the Intercontinental? (I'd used up all my travelers' checks and ATM's were not yet ubiquitous.)
I called my father, who arranged a new ticket home for me and informed me that my mother did not want to speak to me because it was, in her opinion, my fault that I was stuck in Kenya. (I could, after all, have chosen to do human rights work in the far more sensible locations of Australia or, better yet, Arkansas, both options offered to me along with South Africa.)
When I arrived at the ticket office the next day to pick up the ticket my father had reserved and was informed that my father had not paid for my ticket, I wisely refrained from paying myself, since the same computer that said he hadn't paid had also assured me I had a seat on the previous night's flight; better to check again at the airport and pay there if necessary. And when the ticketing agent at the airport told me that I did indeed need to pay for my ticket but that I couldn't do it at the airport—thus forfeiting my seat to one of the anxious Pan Am employees trying to make it home before the airline folded a few days hence—I did what anyone would do. I found a manager and I cried.
So here's the point. 1) I was experiencing far greater stress than Jake—traveling or not—has ever caused me. 2) Much of the stress was due to the fact that I had a set plan in my mind for when and how I was supposed to get home. 3) And when that plan was changed due to circumstances beyond my control I fell apart.
We all know the types of laid-back souls who, in the same situation, would have shrugged, headed off to a lovely hotel room at the Intercontinental, and enjoyed a leisurely lunch by the pool while awaiting the next flight that a parent could surely arrange, since that's what parents are for. A slight shift in plans, to such a person, means nothing more than an opportunity for unexpected experiences.
As a high-strung law school student, however, I didn't see a new experience awaiting me, and I surely didn't want a lesson in flexibility. Hadn't I, after all, just finished a year of law school to learn how not to be flexible? I needed, I was absolutely certain, to be home in time for on-campus interviews. I needed to buy my books before classes started. I couldn't be home in five days or a week; I had to be home when I was planning on being home.
You see the difference.
But when you see the similarities, you understand where I'm going. Either way, I was going to make it home. In the long run, even if I had missed the on-campus interviews, it wouldn't have mattered, especially since I didn't get a job from any of them. ("Your resume screams public interest," one kinder-than-I-knew interviewer observed.) A day or two of missed classes would not, by the end of the semester, have been missed either.
In other words, it didn't really matter when or how I made it home. It just mattered to me because I had decided how it should be.
That's when life really knocks us off balance—when it doesn't happen the way we had planned. And that—among many, many other things—is what yoga teaches us to face gracefully.
In any given asana practice, we're not sure how our bodies are going to respond. Sometimes they are strong and flexible and amaze us with the things they can do. Sometimes they just don't seem to move in the way they usually do. Sometimes we spend most of our time wishing the teacher would release us to the floor already because we can't stand another second in uttita parshvakonasana.
And no matter what the situation, more than training our bodies, in yoga we train our minds. We train them to accept: to accept that the pose may not look the way we expected or that we are expected to hold it longer than we would like or that we just plain don't like it but we can do it anyhow. We learn to transcend discomfort—to know when to calmly approach the Air Kenya manager and explain to him the situation and when to collapse in tears. (In my case, only the latter resulted in him accompanying me to the ticketing counter where—contrary to their assertion that one could not, under any circumstances, purchase a ticket at the airport—he withdrew a manual credit card impresser from under the counter and, yes, let me pay for my ticket.)
The trick in yoga, of course, is to take your lessons off your mat. An asana practice, after all, is just a means of finding one's way into the deeper, spiritual teachings of yoga. So learning to transcend discomfort in a yoga pose is a way of learning how to transcend discomfort when you are stuck in Nairobi with no Kenyan money. Learning to surrender to the asana flow of your yoga teacher is a way of learning to surrender to the flow of energy in the Universe—a flow of energy that cares not a whit when your on-campus interviews are scheduled to begin.
For me, the lesson is easiest to learn on my yoga mat. But it is also more gratifying when I master it, say, in a small, prop plane with my toddler son, as I distract him from the fact that we are on an ay-uh-plane in the sky going whoosh by reading him Dr. Suess's ABC's.
Uttita Pashvakonasana (Extended Angle Pose)—Learning to Transcend Discomfort
It's not just me. Uttita Pashvokanasana is a mighty difficult pose to love. It demands strength and patience from your quadriceps. It requires a deep openness in your hips that few desk-sitters have. It challenges you to raise your arm over your ear while neither resting it on your head nor sinking your aching shoulder into your trembling chin. All of this just so you can open your heart with strength, grace, and beauty.
And yet, it is one of the best teachers of the asanas. It brooks no cheating; you learn not to move more deeply into the pose than your body can handle, lest you collapse in a tangle of aching limbs and constricted breathing. You learn to be patient, to follow your breath in order to transcend discomfort. You learn how good it feels when you find a way to be open and clear and strong so your heart can shine.
If only I had had space for a quick uttita parshvakonasana on that airplane.
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