Not long ago, I arrived to pick Jake up from school to find not one but two incident reports awaiting me.
"He got bitten," one of Jake's teachers said apologetically. "Twice."
From the deliberately pared-down details they provided—perpetrators' names and identifying characteristics are omitted from incident reports to protect those too young to deserve the wrath of their friends' mothers—I gathered a general idea of what had happened. Jake demonstrated, as he does quite a bit lately, his desire to possess a toy already in the possession of The Biter. And The Biter bit him.
So far, so good. Maybe it's a tad Lord of the Flies of me, but I kind of like knowing that when he tries to steal a toy from one of his friends he may get bitten. It's a valuable lesson, and one I can't teach him myself.
The second bite, however—occurring a mere half hour later—happened under far murkier circumstances. The way Jake's teacher described it, Jake was merely in the other child's space and got bitten for nothing more than his willingness to let first bite bygones be bygones.
My initial reaction was, naturally, to try to figure out who The Biter was.
One of the other kids had bitten Jake before. And his mother cheerfully admits he's a biter. So, of course, Mike and I spent the evening teaching Jake to say, "No, [name withheld to protect innocence]! Don't bite me!"
I asked him to demonstrate his new trick the next day at school.
A teacher looked at me sadly. "It wasn't [name withheld to protect innocence]," she said.
Oh, my. What happened to three years of law school when you're supposed to remember (because they never really spend time teaching it to you in any substance) that one is innocent until proven guilty?
My suspicions next fell on a friend of Jake's we've actually played with outside of school. Since I like his parents so much, I didn't feel animosity toward him for being The Biter, so much as amusement. Despite being three months younger and several inches shorter, he had easily pushed Jake over on the playground where we met for a date one day. And, more damningly, he had an incident report of his own taped to his cubby at school. Since perpetrators receive incident reports just like victims, I felt I was on to something.
Until his mother and I arrived at the same time to pick up our children from school. And I found out that her son, too, had been a victim of The Biter.
So I never did find out who The Biter was. I have my ideas, but Jake has managed to remain bite-free for some time, so I can let it go.
But with the passage of time, I've been left to ponder the more significant question the double-biting incident raises: Why would Jake have gone up to this child who had just brutally bitten him and allow himself to be bitten again?
Think about it. If it were you, wouldn't you spend the next hour or so fuming about what an [expletive deleted] that person who bit you was? Wouldn't you work furiously at justifying your own actions in trying to steal his toy? Wouldn't you steer clear of him, refusing any gestures of friendship, for at least the rest of the day?
So why did my child shrug it all off in the time it took him to stop crying and buddy up to The Biter a second time?
The answer, I think, lies somewhere in my own condition. Because I—despite having had so much trouble regaining my equilibrium after giving birth to Jake that I started this website—am pregnant with my second child. Twice bitten, indeed.
Baby Wisdom/Toddler Wisdom
Getting pregnant a second time—or a third or even fourth and I'm not going to count above four—offers us a unique opportunity to return to the mind of a toddler.
Pregnancy is hard. It's uncomfortable. Having an infant means having no sleep, no showers, no ability to control when and why we cry for hours at a time. It means hard choices about whether and when to go back to work, how equipped we are to go without child care, when to set up the 529 account. We start to count the number of diapers yet to be changed, the loads of laundry yet to be folded, the number of inches closer to the ground our breasts will sag when we are done breastfeeding.
Think about what your friends had to say to you when you were expecting your first child. Were they full of beautiful stories about holding their baby while sitting in dappled sunlight, spit-up free and miraculously restored to their pre-pregnancy shape? Of course not. We dwell on the difficulties. We get bitten and we forget that, above all, The Biter is our friend. Instead, we live in the significance of the wrong he has done us, the humiliation and pain and just plain unfairness.
And then we decide we want another. And all the humiliation, pain, unfairness melts away.
Can I describe the good parts of having Jake? Of course—in the most glowing generalities. It's not enough to talk about how he gives me a chubby-handed push when he wants to play, saying, "Come on" with a great sense of purpose. Doesn't sound so cute until I throw in a few details about how much I love him and how sweet he is and how he makes me laugh and . . .
Generalities.
Because, like a toddler, I am reduced to letting go of logic and the geometric proofs of constructing a strong argument. It's not about explaining why I am thrilled to be pregnant with another child. And no one expects me to explain. We all get it. It is an amazing and happy thing. Period.
This is thinking like a toddler, in pure, inexplicable feelings. Maybe we can put words to them, we adults who've been so trained to use words when they aren't really necessary. But the words only deaden the feeling, take us further and further from it.
Better to follow Jake's example. Get over that first bite and get back to the truth. In his case, that The Biter was his friend and he was willing to play with that friend despite the danger of suffering another bite. In my case, that I love Jake like nothing in this world and already love his soon-to-be sibling in the same way. In a way that comes so deeply from my heart that I don't care if I have a colicky, reflux, cranky crying machine because it will be my baby.
Okay, maybe I do care a little bit, because I'm an adult and I know it's a possibility. But, like my toddler son, I'll get over it and move on to the heart of the matter.
Listening to Your Heart
It's harder than one might expect to listen to your heart. There's that whole thing with the head jumping in and messing you up with a lot of external junk that doesn't truly affect how you feel. And there are the circumstances of our lives that seem to hold us back more than they really do.
But even if you clear all that away, find the time and the patience and the talent to sit quietly with your feelings, it's not easy to listen.
Because our hearts don't speak in words. And our minds do.
So you sit. A beautiful feeling rises up from your heart and shivers across your shoulders. And before you know it, your mind blurts out, "Joy!" And that single word brings on a compulsion to explain why you feel joy, what that joy is made of, where that joy is going.
Your mind desperately wants to have a dialogue with your heart.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with such a dialogue. It's a beautiful thing, a palliative to the anxiety and depression and confusion that result when our minds chatter on their own, with nothing to play off of, nothing to slow them down, just their own increasingly frenzied chatter. Much of what we strive for in yoga is a union of heart and mind, so that our hearts can lead our minds to a state of peace and acceptance and, yes, joy.
But even deeper than that is the ability to just feel. No labels, no meaning, no cause and effect. Just feeling.
Toddlers can do it. One minute Jake's heart cries out for that toy in The Biter's hands. The next minute, his heart cries with the sadness of being bitten by one's friend. (He's just beginning to move out of the moment enough to explain that the tears are caused by The Biter, not simply by unhappiness.) And half an hour later, he is moved by the joy of friendship to get in The Biter's space with nary a thought of the possible consequences.
It's much harder for us—as it will get harder and harder for Jake as he masters language and learns the joy of being able to communicate through language. We gain the ability to communicate with words and lose much of the power of communicating with our hearts.
Until we have a child or find a partner whom we love in a wordless way or have one of those moments with our parents where the years melt away and we are allowed to be purely their offspring again. We don't have to use words, we don't have to explain. We just let our hearts take over.
So for all the complications of parenthood, maybe it's worthwhile seeing the difficulties as beautiful lessons about returning to a state where we can listen to our hearts. For all the part of our nature that has been conditioned to reject The Biter, our children teach us that sometimes our love for The Biter is more important than the things he does to shake up our world.
Modifying Yoga for Pregnancy
In celebration of my own prenatal practice, I offer here some modifications to allow you to continue with your yoga during pregnancy. Prenatal classes are lovely as well—special spaces where you can share with other women whose shapes are changing and celebrate the beauty of what your body can do.
But some of us want to continue our practice as well, move into it in a pregnant state, but not lose all the benefits it brought us when we weren't pregnant.
So, for yourself, or for a friend, here are a few things to bear in mind as you move through a regular yoga practice with a changing body and a beautiful seed of new energy nestled within your own.
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