"Mommy, go work."
Jake said these words gently, with a firm hand on my knee as if to steady me for the blow of his very first (but, oh, I know, definitely not his last) leave-me-alone-already.
We were in his new classroom, on his first day at the "big kids" preschool across the street from his former pre-preschool. I had been in the room with him for something over an hour, slowly but surely coaxing him away from my lap, suggesting he interact with the other kids, gently edging my way toward the door. Proving, in other words, what a great mom I am to anyone who might be watching. Which was, approximately, no one.
Except Jake. Who, after a while, felt he had to coax me out of his hair with a gentle "Mommy, go work," that assured me he was, indeed, okay without me.
I was thrilled.
I mean this in a pure, completely thrilled, not the least bit traumatized by my son's step toward adulthood way. After all, I had been far more nervous about his transition to the new school than he was. He had already visited several times and knew there was a gym with basketball hoops, which is about all he really needs in life. I, on the other hand, had been struggling with a random comment from a parent I recently met whose son had been through the same class; the teacher, he told me, "is tough."
Tough on the kids or tough the parents? I wondered nervously.
I had no worries about Jake. He doesn't bite or push and apparently follows his teachers' directions consistently even if he sometimes has something better to do than following his parents'. In other words, he had nothing to fear from a take-no-nonsense teacher.
No, I was worried about me. In particular, I spent most of the long drive home from our holidays in St. Louis imagining scenarios in which his new teacher would chew me out for unconscious infractions of the many, many rules a North Carolina preschool apparently must follow to receive state accreditation. Was I, in fact, worthy of sending my child to preschool?
My hour with Jake in his new class assured me that I was. His teacher, in fact, was quite kind, and not nearly as tough as some of the ones who had trained me at the pre-preschool.
And so, finally, I found myself able to return my attention to Jake's well being. And felt nothing but pleasure when he told me his being was more than just well, thanks very much, and he preferred I leave him to do what two-year-olds do in school.
I should have known it was too easy to last.
High Winds and Anxious Days
Jake greeted the following day with enthusiastic requests that we return to his school.
I, on the other hand, greeted it with a disturbing sense of displacement, a lost-in-the-woods feeling that my life lay somewhere back before the holidays and that a week of too little work and too much sugar had blown away the pitiful trail of breadcrumbs leading back to it. Finally, I understood why Hansel and Gretel didn't stand a chance against the giant gingerbread house.
I walked Jake through the parking lot at school—a new, Big Boy activity for us, this walking through a parking lot—against gusts of wind seeming to push me away from a nice, normal, drop-my-boy-off-at-school-and-get-to-work schedule. Every time the wind blew, Jake made the angry crying noises I would have it I weren't forty years older than he and pretty sure someone would see me doing it.
We arrived to find his classroom empty of all but the two teachers. Which should have struck me as a great opportunity for some two-on-one babysitting for Jake. But instead freaked me out on Jake's behalf. Who wants to be alone with a couple of adults instead of ignoring them with one's friends?
Jake seemed at first to agree, clinging to me with suspicious looks at his very kind teachers. He was pretty tired today, I explained to them, as if saying so would distract them from the fact that I had removed my coat and settled myself into a tiny chair from which a seven-months-pregnant woman might never get up.
He had, you see, been at his sitter's the previous night while Mike and I celebrated Mike's birthday. We had arrived at 9:30 to find him reclining on the couch holding court like the funny guy at the party around whom everyone naturally gathers for a little free stand-up performance. So hyped was Jake by his evening that he spent the next hour and a half trying out his routine on me while I struggled not to laugh and to sound like I meant it when I told him he really had to go to sleep already. Which I did.
As a result, I told his teachers, Jake had gone to sleep at 11 and awakened at 7. Not unreasonable hours if you are an adult funny guy at the party. Less so if you are two years old, just recovering from an illness, and haven't had an adequate amount of sleep in the week-and-a-half since the holidays started. In other words, I would just sit with him for a while and make sure he was okay.
Luckily, some of Jake's friends arrived and it took only an hour or so for him to finally ignore me and realize that rolling around on mats with someone your own age while laughing hysterically is much more appealing than grasping desperately at your mother's leg as she tries to walk toward the door.
"I think maybe on Friday you should plan on staying only a few minutes," Jake's teacher said to me. "It's better for him."
I knew this of course. I was even planning on doing just that. But having someone tell me to do what I was already planning on doing—someone whom I had recently been led to believe was going to whip me into shape as a mom—stung. Plus, the wind was still blowing me across the parking lot when I left, I found a message on my cell phone from the sitter informing me that I had somehow managed to pay her only $12 for the entire evening of watching Jake (I just grabbed the wrong wad of bills, I swear), and the piles of gifts sitting in our front hall waiting for me to put them away pretty much put me away.
I sent Mike a semi-hysterical email, blamed the winds for my high anxiety, and felt really, really grateful that I had a yoga class to go to.
I'm Not Kidding About Winds Causing Anxiety
In ayurvedic medicine—the Indian "Science of Life" that is sort of a parallel to Traditional Chinese Medicine—individuals are assessed by determining what combination of three doshas, or energy types, they are.
There are the kaphas, the types who revel in curling up on the couch with a good book and never once hear a far-off mother saying, "It's a beautiful day. Why don't you get outside and do something?" Not much of the kapha in me.
Then there's the pitta dosha. Pitta folks have tempers. They are quick, passionate, directed. I understand that most people have a temper, but I generally have a hard time finding mine, as if I've packed it at the top of the junk closet downstairs and forgot to label the box. By the time I haul it out the appropriate moment for expressing outrage has long passed and I am left to simmer and sulk until Mike asks me what's wrong and I burst into tears. He will confirm that this is true. And would also confirm that I am most definitely not a pitta if he believed in this stuff.
I am pure vata. Vata is air, cerebral and energetic, but soft and light and easily blown about. Anxiety accompanies the vata dosha. Especially when it's windy outside.
If you think about it, a windy day would affect any of the three doshas. It can send disturbing fingers of restlessness under the tucked away legs of the kapha engrossed in her book. It can quicken the already quick anger of a pitta. And it can, as it did for me, send a vata type into paroxysms of anxiety just because she mistakenly underpaid the sitter. Who is a very patient soul and totally accepted the pregnancy-brain excuse that is getting way, way old.
My point here is really just that something as simple as the weather can affect our mood, and, more distressingly, our ability to cope. Yes, we are all struggling in one way or another to find that place where we liked the rhythm of our pre-holidays life. But a little sunshine and some clear skies can make it a matter of nothing more than sitting down for a few hours and organizing. Toss in some gusty winds or heavy, dark rain clouds or icy pellets of hail and it can feel as if all the papers on the desk are being blown about like the scraps of garbage that swallow Robert DeNiro's character at the end of Brazil.
As I said, I felt lucky to have a yoga class in my day to smooth over all this anxiety. All it took was some steady breathing, some focused movement, and some really lovely upper back openers to make me feel as if maybe, just maybe, I could cope. Or at least deal with everything tomorrow.
In other words, I needed something to separate me from my surroundings, to remind me that sometimes it's windy, and sometimes I feel off-kilter, and sometimes, guess what, I'm not in control. Okay. So I'm not. Then I get on with my life.
Finally, What a Windy Day Has to Do with "Mommy, Go Work"
The contrast between how great I felt leaving Jake on Tuesday and how lousy I felt when I left him on Wednesday was also a good reminder about what's really going on with the need for control and anxiety over loss of control we all feel at times.
It's about change.
I remember proudly coming up with a way to explain it some time during my particularly anxiety-beset youth: "I love the idea of change, but I hate changing."
I suspect we all do.
So I love it that my son is growing up, growing independent, ready to move to the big kids' preschool. But when a windy day disturbs my equilibrium and it feels like things are changing too quickly, it becomes a lot harder to watch my guy grow up. I suddenly long for him to cling to me because I know it will not be long before the feel of his head cradled against my neck and the locks of soft baby hair fanning against my chin will be nothing more than a memory. One that Jake may even in his adolescence vehemently deny as if to strip from me any claim to his all encompassing love.
Of course, any rational parent knows she can't hold onto the cuddly toddler forever. In fact, even an irrational parent reaches the point where she really, really looks forward to the day when her child will be able to, oh, entertain himself while she cooks dinner, get out of bed without rousing her, lead his own, independent life that leaves her to rediscover what that particular long-forgotten concept is all about.
It's change. It's healthy. And when we're healthy, we look forward to it.
But there's also a competing human instinct not to change—at least, not when we're not in control of it. So, yeah, when I'm planning on sitting with my child on his first day of school and I can have a hand in helping him adjust and decide he doesn't need me there, I feel good. Because I've fooled myself into thinking that I'm in control.
On the other hand, the following day, when I think he's ready for me to leave and he suddenly grabs a hold of me in tears because a child he doesn't know has taken his ball in the gym, I feel frustrated. I see the piles of bills on my desk, the heaps of toys in the front hallway, the old newspapers yet to be relegated to the recycling bin, and I feel as if I will never, ever get it all done. All it takes is a gust of wind and a message on my cell phone about paying the sitter twelve dollars to make me feel utterly unable to cope with all the things life is demanding of me. All I want, I moan, is a normal day where I sit down at my computer at 9:30 and I know just what I have to do and I do it.
Knowing all this, by the way—seeing what was really going on—didn't make it any easier for me to act like a calm human being. Mike's "everything's okay" voice mail message to me will attest to this fact.
But that's one of the things I love to come back to in yoga. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Simply acknowledging what it is you know even if you don't feel it. Like knowing that change is hard. But that denying change—denying the anxiety I feel on a windy day—isn't coping. It's denying.
Better to watch myself, feel my pumping heart, nod at the pinpricks of tears stinging the corners of my eyes and think, "Yep. I'm human."
Releasing the Tension and Feeling Human—Upper Back Openers
At the end of my calming Wednesday yoga class, the teacher invited us to see if there was one more pose our bodies craved at that moment, one final need before we could retreat into the serenity of savasana.
I was preparing for ustrasana (camel pose) before she even finished her sentence. In particular, I performed my ustrasana with a focus on my upper back—the space between my shoulder blades. This, I know, is where I hold most of my tension. So as I thought of lengthening my spine, I also thought in particular of lifting that spot where I felt the most tense. I sensed a release, a lightening, a spreading of my collar bones that came through my heart and floated into the air around me.
And with this release I was also able to accept what was around me—even a windy day and too much to do and my own crazy anxiety.
Another place to experience this release might be in setu bandha sarvangasana, or bridge pose, where you can similarly release the tension in your upper back.
Or, if you tend to hold tension in your lower back, try some forward folds. My favorite is janu sirsasana (head-to-knee) because you get some hip and hamstring release along with the lower back release, finding areas of tension you may not have even realized you had. Pascimottansana (seated forward fold) and balasana (child's pose) are also lovely ways to receive a lower back release. In any of these three, for best lower back release, think especially about letting your navel soften into toward your spine. Follow the feeling this generates as it creates more space between the vertebrae of your lumbar spine and your tail bone extends toward the back of your mat.
Or try anything else that helps you release tension, even if it's not a yoga pose. But whatever you choose, focus on your breath. Breathe in through your nose, directing the breath to the spot of greatest tension. Breathe out through your nose slowly and forcefully, taking that tension out of your body.
I sort of like that image—of my breath adding to the gusts of wind that now carry away my anxiety instead of inducing it.
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