Mike and I had one of those glorious Asheville Saturdays yesterday. We took Jake to Plow Day at Warren Wilson College, a small school just outside of town with—as the Plow Day moniker would suggest—a working farm.
Yes, one year of living here, and I consider Plow Day at Warren Wilson College the height of family-friendly entertainment. And I say that with an honest lack of snarkiness or sarcasm.
Clearing still-late-summer skies greeted us as we hiked past the chickens living as chickens ought to, with a spacious hen-house equipped with easy access to a grub-filled yard and a positively stunning rooster, resplendent in his glinting green tail feathers and magnificent wattle. "Cluck, cluck," Jake remarked. "Cog-a-oo-l-oo!"
We continued past haphazardly collapsed stacks of slumbering pigs, apparently not the early risers who had curiously monitored our approach when we visited them one August morning with our out-of-town friend Kali. ("Let's go visit pigs!" we must have said that Sunday morning. I'm sure she responded most enthusiastically.)
And then we saw them: teams of horses and mules of various equine ethnicities hitched to rustic-looking plows. I wondered if there have been any advances in horse-drawn plows in the past few decades, and, if so, whether there was a picturesque-ness requirement for the locals entering their teams in the College's plow day. As the farm is run entirely with natural methods and subsistence farming, it didn't seem unreasonable that they would ban an approach that might be more efficient but less quaint-American-pastoral than the one we were witnessing.
There didn't seem to be much organization to the plowing. Teams entered and exited the field, plowed where they wished, and appeared beholden to no bosses. A large dog loped across the path of some stolid plowers without any sign of awareness that she might think twice about her choices. An eight-week-old brindled Catahoula puppy gave me and Jake a snuffle before tugging at his leash in a failed bid to join the bigger dog out on the field.
Contrary to our experience last month, Jake was not distressed by the horses. Instead, he identified them eagerly and repeatedly—"Hoh-se! Hoh-se!"—as if merely naming them was as satisfying as examining them up close.
It all seemed so idyllic that I didn't think twice about allowing him to plop down in the middle of a field usually occupied by livestock to watch the bluegrass band performing atop the flatbed of an old pick-up truck or to make non-threatening attempts to climb the poles supporting one of the barbecue tents with a new three-year-old friend. Nor, to my eternal Bad Mother shame, did I consider the possibility that there could be anything the least bit dangerous about offering my toddler son cider pressed on an old-fashioned press with great enthusiasm by barefoot college students using unwashed apples gathered from the nearby orchard.
"I hope they don't let the pigs in the apple orchard," Mike said, with a tad too much restraint to truly catch my attention.
"It's a farm! They don't let the pigs in the apple orchard!" I replied with remarkable certainty for someone who knows not the first thing about farming, pigs, or—despite a few October visits to pick-your-own-applies orchards—picking apples. As if to prove my point, I sent a good swig of my own cup of cider to Jake's still-gestating sibling.
Maybe Mike was right. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that Jake ingested most of his cider by the questionable method of sticking a dirt- (and possibly horse manure-) covered hand into the cup and transferring the few drops that didn't slide down his arms and drip off the ends of his elbows into his mouth. But whatever did it, the results were not good.
At 5:45 that evening, Jake was in fine form, riding a stroller home from a romp in the park with me and babbling about his excitement to see Daddy back at home. At 6:00 Mike was asking me if he had seemed okay at the park. At 6:15, his temperature was beginning its climb to the 103-degree range where it hovered for the rest of the night.
All of which I am, as a mother, equipped to deal with. Liquids, infant Tylenol, cuddles, banishing Mike to the daybed in the office so I can sleep next to my sick boy are all standard modes of operation around here. I even maintained a remarkable state of calm when I awoke to my boy placing a puddle of vomit underneath his face and alarmingly close to mine.
It was a few minutes later when he began screaming inconsolably for his Daddy! that my confidence in my motherliness began to falter.
It's Always Mommy's Fault (If You're Mommy)
Jake's preference for his father obviously had a clear and well reasoned cause.
As he had, minutes before, vomited all over the bed and himself, I yelled to Mike for a towel. Mike, quite logically, brought me a damp towel with which to clean Jake up. I, however, was certain that what I needed was a dry towel in which to carry my feverish, shaking boy into the bathroom for cleaning.
Where I proceeded to lie him down on the hard wood floor and strip him of his sullied pajamas.
A reasonable way to clean up? Certainly. The way a child afflicted with E-Coli wishes to be treated? Probably not.
After performing the necessary cleaning (including a dry diaper, since he was going to need one anyhow) I carried my naked child into the bedroom, cradling him protectively against me as if I hadn't just minutes before dumped him onto the cold, hard floor of the bathroom. Is it any wonder that when he caught sight of his father he started screaming for a transfer?
I figured it was a momentary matter, that my punishment for less-than-motherlike behavior was stripping the bed while Mike put Jake in clean jammies. It was only when I found them cuddling in the limited confines of the day bed that I suggested rather petulantly that they move to the comfort of our bed, all the while eyeing with great hostility the iron frame and backache-inducing mattress on which I would have to sleep.
Still, I held out hope. I bustled about retrieving infant Tylenol and locating back-up bottles of children's Motrin. I carried the thermometer into the light of the hallway for a reading. I even, at Mike's partly kind, partly self-interested urging, curled up next to Jake as Mike retreated for the relative comfort of the day bed. Sure, it might have a mattress best suited for a limber fifty-pound child. The office might be graced with gauzy window treatments that make it a lovely, yoga-like place for me to write but render it an impossible space for a good night's sleep if you are bothered, as I am, by the streetlight shining directly in the window. But, to Mike, the fact that it is free of a restless, kicking toddler makes it as comfy as The Four Seasons.
About thirty seconds after I slid into bed next to him, Jake ceased his shivering for just long enough to babble, "Mommy. Mommy. Mommy."
"Mommy's right here," I murmured reassuringly.
"Mommy bye-bye," he clarified. "Daddy. Daddy."
"You want Daddy?" I wasn't trying to be difficult, really. Just responsive.
"Daddy," Jake mumbled into the mattress.
"Bye-bye Mommy?" I said, still hoping to hear that I had it wrong.
"Bye-bye Mommy," Jake muttered with unmistakable finality.
"He wants his Daddy!" I bellowed into the hallway. I didn't mean to sound angry. But how is a mother supposed to feel anything but hurt as her sick child burrows against his father, continuing to mutter, "Bye-bye Mommy. Bye-bye Mommy"? Especially when she has just the other day fielded an email from a friend with a son the same age commenting on how Mommy-centered her child is?
I tried not to take it personally, I really did. I told myself how lucky I am to have a partner who is so warm and loving himself that Jake seeks his nurturance as much as mine. I reminded myself that, for Jake, night-time is traditionally Daddy time, while he cries with just as much anguish as he had when I was in bed with him if he has to spend morning time without Mommy. I sternly admonished myself that Jake was not rejecting me. He was sick and tired and feeling like crap and it happened that his father was what made him feel a little bit better. Didn't he have that right?
Still, I couldn't help settling into the day bed with a little bit of self-pity seeping out of the corners of my eyes.
I had, to put it bluntly, messed up. I had placed a feverish, sick boy on a cold, hard bathroom floor. And in doing so, I had placed my own revulsion at the vomit covering him above his need to be held. What kind of mother does that?
Only a mother who deserved to be banished—along with the fetus who, obviously, had no choice and would undoubtedly, six months hence, choose to join the tangle of bodies in the bedroom as well, leaving his mother well out of the mix. So, stranded in the office, I curled up into a little ball and slept the sleep of someone who feels alone and wronged and wrong.
Not Taking It Personally
Mike tried his best to make it up to me today. In the morning, he told me about his sleepless night of being kicked by a restless Jake. I responded by burying any satisfaction in the relatively peaceful rest I had under a deep blanket of guilt for managing to sleep until nine o'clock.
At nap time Mike promised me Jake was asking for Mommy to take him upstairs to lie down. Jake assured me that—if ever he had made such a demand—he was firmly retracting it.
Perhaps most importantly, Mike wisely refrained from contradicting me when I lamented to him that every twenty-one-month-old needs his mother when he's sick. Instead, Mike told me about a friend of ours who confided that her three-year-old wants nothing to do with her, turning instead to her father for all her emotional and physical needs. Cruelly, this made me feel much, much better.
The thing is, nothing is personal with toddlers. They are bundles of pure need, whether that need is the joyful one of acquiring new words every minute or the less satisfying need to be with Daddy instead of Mommy. It's a need, not a judgment.
The judgment, of course, all came from me. Because I couldn't bend my child's needs to my own sense of what a mother should be to her son, I judged myself a failure. It simply isn't true that every other child in Jake's position would seek his mother for comfort, especially one with a father as wonderful and loving as Mike. It is equally ridiculous to suggest that a good mother would have chosen smearing herself with vomit over putting her child down for a brief couple of minutes on the bathroom floor—a method that did, after all, have the advantage of avoiding several extra minutes of non-holding while I stripped my own now-sullied clothing.
Bottom line: you have to trust your Mama instinct consistently, not just when you get the reassurance you crave. In other words, I did everything right for Jake, and his fever-addled, "Mommy bye-bye," didn't change that fact. Nor did my own rush to condemn myself.
It's not just our children who make us feel rejected, personally assaulted by choices that, at bottom, have nothing to do with us. Sometimes our best friend makes plans with someone else before we call for a rare lunch date. Sometimes yoga classes fill up before we make it to the studio. Sometimes the perfect new friends we think we have found at a neighborhood party may honestly be too busy to get together, not, as we are convinced, bored or even repulsed by us.
In short, things happen in life without necessarily happening to us.
It's a natural mindset, of course. We see the world through our eyes only, and digest it with our brains. Of course it becomes personal.
But somewhere between the moment we take it in and the moment it becomes personal lies the truth.
For example, in yoga class, we strive to approach each pose without expectation. It's just a pose, after all, nothing that will affect us before or after. What matters, when you think about it, is our approach to the pose, not the pose itself. Perform it more deeply than your body can manage and you will hurt yourself. Come into it with respect for your body and a lack of ego, and you will experience the opening we seek in yoga—an opening both of body and of spirit.
It's when we allow ourselves to judge our pose that we start to lose its benefits. "Why can't I do it as deeply as I did yesterday?" "That person on the next mat is just showing off by doing a more advanced version than I can." "The person over there must be laughing at me for being such a weakling, even though she's cleverly looking the other way now."
Want in on a secret? They aren't. They don't care. Your body doesn't care what it did yesterday—only your mind does. The other people in class—they care about their own practices, not yours. And if they are busy caring about yours, they're losing the benefits of the practice; why should you follow suit?
Same thing with the person behind you in line when your credit card is rejected for being over the limit. Or the hit-and-run driver who has left your parked car with a big, gas-guzzling SUV scratch in the bumper. Or, yes, your toddler who comes running to you when you pick him up at the end of the day of school only to bypass your outstretched arms for the sippy cup of juice in the stroller.
It's not personal. What is personal is what you make of the things that happen to you. It is personal when you revel in the love of your child, your partner, your parents, your friends—wherever you are lucky enough to find it. It is personal when you open your heart to others and offer them some love and peace. It is personal when you hold your sick child with softness and care and make him feel better. And it is personal when you lie on the day bed in the office telling yourself that you must not be a good mother or your child wouldn't have preferred your partner over you.
Jake's choice? Personal to him only. It's up to me how I choose to take it. With joy that he has a father who can offer him such comfort? With a deep sense of satisfaction that I took care of my son in a crisis? With a welling up of love for my child and my partner and my life that transcends vomit and self-flagellation and all the ways in which I am so good at judging myself?
Those, I believe are the only choices worth having.
Sunday Afternoon Forgiving Yourself Yoga
I honsest-to-god just looked at the time and calculated whether I could make it to the 4:30 yoga class. Even though I was just about to write about non-asana yoga, the kind where you let go of the class and treat yourself to a little Sunday afternoon living.
Maybe I should go back to where I went a few hours ago, when Jake made it clear he wanted his father to put him down for his nap, not me.
I walked right past the self-pity of last night and onto the sun-filled back deck, the special Fall Television section of the Sunday New York Times in hand. I shivered with the pleasure I feel every time the sun burrows into my skin as I read about television shows I will and will not watch—all with the imprimatur of New York Times critics to assure me I am not festering in ignorance and sloth for enjoying my "stories," as Mike teasingly calls them. (It is, perhaps, for him, that I flaunt the New York Times.)
As I sat there, timeless, not pushing or judging or planning, I found the same bliss that I seek in asana practice or in meditation. I let go of everything but the moment and the sense of peace and well being that can arise in a pure moment of being.
It is here—in whatever quiet, unguarded, giving-yourself-a-break moment you can honestly choose for yourself—that I suggest you go next time you start taking life a bit too personally.
Post-Script or Gift from the Universe. Possibly Both.
As I was preparing to post this piece, a neighbor's outburst awakened Jake from his long, still-not-quite-well nap. I lay down next to him, my hand on his back with its small, perfect ribs, my face close enough to him to count every curled eyelash.
He reached out and let his warm, square palm rest on my arm. His eyes fluttered closed again and his fingers kneaded my wrist as if to assure himself that—yes—Mommy is here.
Every time his breathing seemed to have deepened, his body to have relaxed into sleep, I began to inch away from him and back to my computer—when his fingers would once again tighten and release, ensuring that his mother was lying there next to him.
We stayed this way for another twenty minutes as he sought his last bit of nap-time and I marveled in the tickling joy of my heart bubbling with love at my child who does, indeed, find great comfort in something as simple as having me next to him. The very best yoga in the world.
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