I’m happy! When you’re here, I’m happy. When you’re not here, I’m not happy, she proclaims, tossing her arms around my neck. I’d just gotten home from teaching. We are racing around the living room in wide loops. This song blasts through the speaker. We break only for the occasional a bite of peanut butter toast. This must be the place in toddlerhood where they casually say things that break your heart and stop you in your tracks.
I know she meant physically here, but what she really meant was mentally, emotionally, energetically Here. When we are running around, leaping over the foot stool, laughing and breathless, I am really There, and the There feeling is a much different, much more all-encompassing feeling than default here-ness. Default here-ness is the bare minimum. Default here-ness is a body in a room. Real Here-ness is to place yourself decidedly in that body, and to engage only with what is right in front of you.
I can feel the difference, and she can too. I feel it when I’m reading to her and my mouth automatically wraps around the words of Mo Willems and Alice Schertle and Margaret Wise Brown (apparently Goodnight Moon postal stamps are forthcoming?!) while my brain is on another planet. Tara Brach calls this “falling into a trance”— a trance of remembering, of planning, of ruminating. I can feel it when we’re playing mouse house, but I’m checking my email or folding laundry distractedly on the side. The myth of multitasking so alluring, I switch the gears of my attention from sock-balling to self-important-response-tapping to list-making at lightning speed, then attempt to skid back down to the timeless, shimmery field of imagination.
I can feel it when she and I are hiding under the blankets, and Dad is a crocodile, and his stomping feet and low growls evoke genuine suspense and fear in my body, even though my logical mind assures me that there is not actually a crocodile in my house. This is real Here-ness — giving yourself over to the game, the story, the moment, losing yourself in it entirely. I’ve read about it, this concept of “entering the child’s world,” but have felt it only a few times. It’s something like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. It’s stunning, really. When I actually allow it to happen.
Sometimes our days feel like a dream. Sometimes they feel exactly like that final scene in Matilda, where Miss Honey and Matilda move the furniture and do cartwheels around the sunny living room and Rusted Root plays in the background. Sometimes it feels like I am living out the plot of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie every single day. Other days I get so swept up in the drama and frustration of toddlerhood that I see myself veering dangerously close to a version of myself I despise. I’ve read the Montessori books, I know what I should say, how I should carry myself. I understand, more or less, how a toddler’s brain works, their emotional capacity, they’re just little people with big feelings— I know. Still, I am, at times, impossibly irritable and short-tempered. This surprises me. I get paid to teach other moms how to manage their stress, to share tools for slowing down and dropping back into the body. It doesn’t matter. It’s one thing to have the toolbox. It’s another thing to choose to open it.
They’re right when they say that becoming a mother will unearth all your buried, emotional shit. There’s the old, familiar shit you already knew about, but what is even more shocking is the surfacing of shit that you never knew existed.
So. I’m beginning to grasp the importance of centralizing self-care as a mom. I think I get it now. It is not optional, as it turns out. It is as important as meal prepping and sweeping the floor and cleaning the tub. Can’t pour from an empty cup, and all that. Little shifts: More yin, or reading, before bed. Less TV. Ensuring I eat some fat and protein before my second cup of coffee. Not having the third cup of coffee (??? ok, maybe sometimes). Exercising often, and not just for the sake of bullying my soft, round belly back to an irrelevant baseline. Water, with trace minerals.
Most of all: noticing the subtle-yet-significant effect my choices (caffeine, wine, staying up late, not moving my body, too much phone time) make in my mood, in her mood, in my capacity for Here-ness… and they are significant. This does not mean trying to attain perfection, it does not mean being overly rigid, or punishing myself. It means noticing. And from that place of noticing: smart, considerate and embodied decision-making.
Working on it.
I’ve been quiet lately. Winter has been pleading with me to give myself over to its quiet slowness. Substack was feeling energetically overwhelming. I haven’t felt like adding anything to the internet, and my brain has felt almost at capacity for everything I’ve loaded onto it. This is, generally speaking, the way I like it. If I do not take myself right to the edge, I get restless. But then, there’s the aforementioned irritability and short-temperedness, so I don’t know. I’m doing things I love, things that are fulfilling and interesting to me, and I am lucky. But the weeks fly by, and Grandma’s in Florida for 3 months.
In December, I paused paid subs til March. I just felt like that was the right move for winter. I haven’t gotten around to telling you that until today. Why March? Not sure! Feels like a reasonable time to start writing more intentionally. Less foreseeable work and external commitments. If you’re a paid subscriber, first of all, I love you — second of all, you still have access to the archive and bonus yoga classes, but you won’t be charged til I unpause.
Today I’m doing something different: sharing some smaller things I’ve written over the course of the last year. These are products of writing exercises from Writing in the Dark (my digital happy place) than never really came to fruition, but I like them anyways: