How Did We Get Here? - Issue No. 11
YOGA, SCONES, AND THE DAYS OF YORE
Before I owned a house, had kids and felt resistance to wearing pants that button, when I still had time to dry my hair and drink coffee that was fresh and hot, I had a Saturday morning tradition of walking to my favorite bakery, getting two scones (one savory, one sweet) and then going to yoga in the attic of my gym. My teacher was this ethereal creature who somehow would share such abstract concepts as the connectedness of my pelvic floor to mother earth in a way that, for whatever reason, worked while I was holding a downward dog. Then, I would go back to my row-home, which I shared with three boys as if we were auditioning for a sitcom, and ruin my workout by eating both scones. It was wonderful and simple. Somewhere in there, I decided that perhaps I too should learn how to be a yoga teacher who shares transcendental tidbits while cueing people to connect their bodies to their breath. I began a 200-hour yoga teacher training during my last spring in Philadelphia, and while much of it felt a little amorphous in terms of concept clarity, I loved how aware I became of my breath and my body. I thought of that this morning, when my daughter pointed out that unbeknownst to me our dog was humping my leg, which we’ve coded as “dancing.” If he does this for too long, we’ve found through some unfortunate previous encounters, his penis gets stuck out and then we have to assist him in retracting it. If that last sentence felt a bit jarring compared to my previous recounts of my peaceful yoga journey, then I have successfully captured the “how did we get here” feeling of parenthood.
I still practice yoga, though some postures that once came easily now are out of reach, and often a child is on top of me in my child’s pose. I try to continue to check in with my body and to model as much deep breathing and centeredness as I can muster. But, it turns out that even with a supportive spouse, a mother who consistently gives a generous amount of her time and energy to assisting me in taking care of our children, with school, sickness, big feelings, travel, fragmented sleep, and having only discovered the fountain of endless laundry and not energy, my yoga mat has been rolled up for three weeks, my daily desk calendar hasn’t been peeled since August 15th, and Charmingly Chaotic, which I had pledged to be a monthly publication, ultimately and discouragingly has been on a lengthy hiatus. “Flow gracefully and with intention as if you’re moving through water” my yoga teacher used to say. While there are certainly moments of this, more often I feel like my dog (the same aforementioned humping one) each time he stupidly jumps into a lake. Despite my rudimentary understanding of physics, in which he looks to me like he should be quite buoyant, he barely stays afloat, paddling frantically and with very little rhythm or direction, a toothy open smile on his face because perhaps he’s enjoying the chaos even though it’s causing him to have some trouble taking deep breaths.
The weekends in which I focused on pranayamic breathing, dharma talks, and sequencing yoga classes feels distant now. There are moments when it’s less flow and more fumble, when I’m utterly unaware that my dog is humping my leg. But, I hope the breathing, the bodily awareness, and love for scones continues onto my children, even in the craziest of times.
DINNER PARTY OUTCAST
In my early-twenties, dinner parties felt like a novelty, like a lavender latte or truffle cheese. They were a Pinterest bridge into adulting. By the time I got into the swing of them, had my arsenal of amusing stories, had fine-tuned how to be inquisitive without being intrusive, had navigated how to avoid being the oversharer without coming off as aloof, I had reached my thirties and decided to start having kids. As if that wasn’t enough, the world was confronted by a pandemic, and there we remained for long enough that anything other than sweatpants began to feel like an unnatural compromise we had succumbed to for far too long. Now I’m resurfacing, sifting through facets of my former-self, and realizing that, while still enjoyable, dinner parties now feel similar to trying to walk normally after sitting on a plane for too long.
Thanks to some Facebook algorithm, a Saturday Night Live skit from a year ago popped up in my feed this week. Here’s the highlight reel: the skit is about four moms who venture out to a club to relive their youth. Kim Kardashian attempts to rap and, ultimately, the women fall asleep, need ice buckets for their sore feet, find the music to be too loud and fast, and have diarrhea from eating and drinking whatever they want. At 9:01pm, they decide to go home after obsessing about the traffic. It’s not SNL’s best work. Might you crack a smile? Sure. But, most of the jokes feel like low-hanging fruit written by a group of men who were trying to incompetently put themselves in the high-heeled shoes of some moms. To me, what’s much funnier is the rapid code-shifting involved in going from applying vaseline to a butthole to discussing the tannins in a glass of wine at a dinner party.
“Code-switching” happens when a person adjusts their speech, appearance, behavior, and expression in order to “optimize the comfort of others.” This can be problematic in many cases, which you can read more about here. I have found recently that the code-shifting involved in attempting to pretend like you aren’t entrenched in motherhood is equal parts jarring and funny. Recently, I went to a restaurant that is fancy enough to give you a coat-check-tag for your leftovers, so as to ensure that your used food doesn’t sit on the table and interfere with your eating experience. Prior to arriving, my daughter had a mammoth of a tantrum, which culminated in her vomiting a Hulk-size amount of fluorescent green pesto all over her room. After I cleaned her and everything else up (no easy task), as I was attempting to pull pajamas onto her distracted, limp body, she looked at me and nonchalantly said, “I hope that when we die, we die together.” As I was processing the heaviness of her wish and formulating my response, my son did a running-jump-hug into my arms and rubbed his snot all over what was to be my outfit for the evening. Then, I kissed everyone goodnight, went to dinner, and did my best attempt at discussing anything but them. We all do this in some way or another, put adversity and our divided selves aside, run our thoughts through a filter, attempt to just show up and sit at a table. We never know what it takes for somebody to get there, all that they have handled and worked through to just be present, and for that we all deserve to go a bit easier on each other and ourselves.
According to the existing research out there now, though it’s ever changing and there isn’t nearly enough of it: the increased activity in the amygdala stays forever; no matter how old your child is, they have permanently made an imprint on your brain and it doesn’t go away.
When researchers looked at the dad’s brain, they found that men absolutely get an oxytocin rush from interacting with their babies too, but there was about a quarter of the activity in the amygdala that they saw in the mother’s brain. Which, I would say is about right, my husband is probably about a quarter as worried as I am on average. However, researchers also looked at 48 male-identifiying gay couples who were living in partnered relationships, had a child through surrogacy, and had the baby from the first day of life. When the father is the primary caregiver, they have amygdala activation just like the mothers. So, this amygdala activation seems to have far less to do with childbirth and far more to do with whether or not you are the primary committed caregiving parent.
So, all of this to say, your parental worrying and anxiety is justified and backed by science.
NOT SWALLOWING PLASTIC BANANAS
My son recently had his first visit to the emergency room. At the risk of spoiling the punchline, his discharge papers read “No banana found. However, please dispose of all plastic fruit in the house to reduce choking hazards.” So, here is the story of the plastic banana that my son, in fact, did not swallow: A few days before the plastic banana incident, my son had choked on a plastic strawberry that had gotten wedged in his throat during a pretend picnic with his sister. I had to pull it out as his eyes got big and his face reddened. It was terrifying. At this point you might be wondering why I hadn’t disposed of the plastic fruit after the first choking incident, to which I would respond, that is a great point. It turns out that when you reflect back on an emergency, there are a lot of retrospective good ideas on how you’d do things differently. So, fast forward to the banana which was handed to him in a teacup full of water by his sister for a tea party that they were attending together with an array of stuffys. As if by way of pure magic, the banana was in the tea cup, and then with a sip, the banana was gone. It was not on the floor, it was not on the table, and so we assumed that it had been swallowed. In hindsight, perhaps we should have searched a bit further or consulted the two tiny tea party attendees to see if they had any insights. But instead, in a moment of panicked proactivity, I swooped up my non-choking son and declared that we were all going to the emergency room. My thought process was, if he’s not choking now he might at any second, and we needed to be at the hospital in case he did.
The next four hours were a metallic-smelling blur of panic while we watched Hairspray on repeat in a waiting room full of very sick kids. The whole time, my sunshine boy was downright joyful while I sat there in dread playing out countless scenarios of plastic-banana-removals in my head. He was put in a little blue robe with his diapered butt hanging out the back, and the nurses pointed and smiled at his white-blonde curly hair bouncing down the hall on the way to the x-ray machines. The tech told me that, off-the-record, he thought he had located the banana, though I will never know what banana-shaped-object he identified on the insides of my son. Because, eventually, before a radiologist could analyze the x-rays, another doctor came in and told us how improbable it was that this banana could fit down my son’s trachea, seeing as she felt confident that it couldn’t fit down hers. However, she also explained that if he had in fact swallowed the banana, it was a very big deal. With that in mind, my dad and step-mom then returned to the scene of the non-crime to search for a wayward banana, which they thankfully found on the other side of the playroom far from the abandoned tea party. So, some unnecessary x-rays, an embarrassing set of instructions on our discharge paperwork, one found plastic banana, another affirmation that hindsight is 20/20, and an outrageously expensive hospital bill later, everyone is fine. And, even though it was nothing, it was the scariest of nothing days. Because feeling powerless to your kids potential pain isn’t nothing, it is visceral and very real.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
In September, we took our kids to Portugal. Traveling has always been an integral part of my husband and my identities, and when we decided to have kids, we agreed that if we just continued to travel, that doing so would be knit into the fiber of our being as a family. But before we had kids, we also didn’t understand the sacredness of schedules and routines, that despite our very best efforts and no matter the number of Instagram foodie-moms I follow, my kids are still relatively picky eaters. We didn’t consider how hard it is to soak in a vacation when you’re exhausted from your one-year-old demanding that 3am is close enough to morning, or how it doesn’t matter how much you want to go sightseeing if your daughter has a tantrum in the center-square. My husband and I spent one evening in Lisbon drinking wine at a bay window of our AirBnB, watching a street party across from us, like we were observing an exhibit of inebriated 30-somethings unencumbered by responsibility. However, despite all of these things, travel still feels so good and necessary (albeit, I know, also very privileged). Because, it turns out, kids, or at least our kids, are incredibly resilient and can adjust quickly to the adventures we throw at them. My son’s favorite activities were sprinting down the sidewalk of narrow streets and playing with a tiny red tractor, and my daughter’s favorites were riding the Metro and swimming in a pool, and looking back, I realize now that all of these experiences could have happened without ever having left Atlanta. But, even if we traded happy hours for playgrounds and had to read a “lift the flap” book about airports 127 times in order to eat at a restaurant, we did it and we’ll do it again. We continued to be the people who travel with our kids, and even if they won’t remember a moment of it, traveling as a family somehow bridges the gap between exhausting and rejuvenating.
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Recently, my son, who I would describe overall as a very agreeable little fellow, has made the steadfast determination that he will not lay in his bed for anyone else but my husband. This is problematic behavior on a few levels, but mostly because my husband is rarely around for nap-time, and occasionally not around for bedtime. When I stand up to leave after tucking him in, he screams out for me with heartbreaking desperation, as if he is anticipating these being our very final moments together forever. No matter how many times I forfeit my hardline and let him lay on me on the rocking chair or hold him in my arms with his head on my chest like I did when he was a baby, even if I sit next to his bedside and comb my fingers through his hair until he drifts to sleep, as soon as I stand up, even when his eyelids are fluttering and I’m certain I haven’t made any of the floors creak, like a lingering moro reflex, he grabs for me and screams “Mommy.” Then he’ll shuffle behind me in his sleep sack, and when I, full of guilt, close the door in his face, he lays down on the floor and cries out for me with his little fingers reaching out from underneath. It is heartbreaking. And, if you’re wondering how long he can keep it up, the answer is forever. But then, as I’ve observed on the monitor too many times, my husband will enter my son’s room, and will say as if it’s a novel idea, “buddy, aren’t you tired? It’s time to go to bed.” And, as if this is the first time that this suggestion has been offered, my son with very little consideration, will agree and with a newfound hop to his step, will walk willingly to his bed and fall asleep almost immediately. I do not know what act of sorcery my husband is carrying out in my son’s room, and I know my husband has felt this way during about 1000 only-Mama-will-do-moments, but this daddy-dependency at bedtime is causing a whole lot of tears and exhaustion all around.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
PUMPKIN COOKIES WITH CREAM CHEESE FROSTING
While the pumpkin days are still among us, between your Halloween and Thanksgiving festivities, I cannot recommend this seasonal recipe highly enough. This treat, which has a consistency somewhere between a cookie and a muffin, is fluffy and moist. With such spices as cinnamon, ginger, and cloves, it tastes like autumn in a baked good. Here is the recipe from Gimme Some Oven.
