As I read the article an unexpected wave of sadness crashed over me, its reverberating ripples still washing against me days later, and I wasn’t sure why; when my dad sold the bakery nearly 10 years ago I felt nothing but relief.  But now, the sands of time having obscured so much of the remains of my mother’s life, I realized that the bakery was the only physical structure that persisted.  The house I grew up in has been sold twice over.  Even the apartment my mother was living in when she died was converted to condominiums.  Although I haven’t been to visit the bakery in years, the place where she poured so much of herself in the final years of her life, I always knew it was there, a steady heartbeat thrumming in the world.  Over the years I had come to regard it as my mother’s mausoleum, a solid touchstone of her memory.

The last time I saw my mother was a week before she died.  It was early November and we went to an exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum featuring the work of Frida Kahlo, a painter we both admired.  It was part of an exhibition on Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where loved ones who have passed are honored.  Altars, filled with photographs, favorite foods, candles, and marigolds, are erected in people’s homes and public spaces.  Family members make pilgrimages to the cemetery where they lay out food for the departed and “welcome” the return of their spirits.  My mom and I were both fascinated by the ritual and beauty of recognizing that, as poet May Sarton says, “death ends a life, but not a relationship.”   Afterward, as we sat drinking coffee and discussing plans for her bakery, as we often did, she said a funny thing.  “If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any regrets.  At least I know I died having made my dream come true.”

Last Sunday Abra, I, and a fellow group of mothers and babies marched in Albuquerque’s Dia de los Muertos parade.  I spent the week leading up to the parade dashing around town trying to find facepaint after Halloween (difficult) and dug costume pieces out of the recesses of my closet.  In the hours after Abra went to bed I transformed humble tissue paper into complicated marigolds to decorate her stroller, my fingertips stained gold and orange.  With each passing day I felt a deeper understanding of how my own mother had spent the same countless hours, stitching costumes, baking cakes, performing her own special alchemy.   As I pinned frilly marigolds in my hair and threaded calavera earrings through my lobes, the hassles of the week fell away; I smiled back at my painted reflection and thought, Mom would have loved this.

I pulled Abra’s festooned stroller from the car, a flurry of tissue paper flowers dancing in the wind.  We strolled around the staging area where homemade papier mache floats with dancing skeletons skirted the parking lot.  A sea of people, young and old, all festively dressed, smiled back at me and I thought, Mom would have loved this. We processed down the street, the world’s slowest parade, a series of fits and starts that allowed us to really take it all in.  I flung candy out to the children lining the street, who skittered to claim their loot.  I watched an old woman standing on her front stoop, a tattered sweater crisscrossed taut around her middle, bracing against the chill of the late fall afternoon.  I saw looks of sheer delight come over people’s faces when they saw our clutch of babies wheel toward them, and I couldn’t help but smile back.  A hard-looking man, thick arms blazing with tattoos, clapped his meaty palms together and shouted, “Let’s hear it for the moms!”  Even as I struggled to grasp once again the reality that, yes, I am a mother, the daughter in me couldn’t help but think, Mom would have loved this.

Someone recently asked me if I still miss my mother a lot.  “Every day,” I replied.  But the times I miss her most is when I find myself in the midst of something that I know she would have loved being a part of.  These are often small moments:  enjoying an especially tasty salad, discovering an interesting coffee house, or marching in a festive homegrown parade.  It is these times that life yawns wide, providing a space in which I connect with her spirit.  The bakery is incidental, a mere mantle of who she was.  My mother resides in the world around me – the crinkle of fall leaves, a bubbling apple crisp, the flap of a bluebird’s wing – and I honor her memory by connecting to these moments that life offers up every day.  As I held Abra snug after the parade, covering her against the cold that advanced into the lengthening shadows, Maikael captured a rare photo of the two of us both looking completely overjoyed.  It was a flash of what has passed and a glimpse of what is yet to come, a mother and daughter delighting in a shared experience.   Peering at this photo I understood, in the fullest way possible, that life goes on.

After doing everything in my power to encourage her walking, I finally accepted the words that I had spoken so hollowly to every person who asked if she was walking:  Not yet, but in her own time.  As soon as I released my death-grip on the idea that she should be walking by now, she lunged from the coffee table to the couch, her little legs hitching forward.

I know that Abra has a great deal to teach me about patience and letting go.

I have never understood why parents spend so much time fawning over their child’s developmental milestones, the ones that every single human being passes through at one time or another.  Now here I am, snapping so many photos of her first steps in the world that I could create a flip book of her journey.  I have taken dozens of video clips trying to capture a significant sequence of sturdy steps, and I watch them over and over and over again, as if each loop will reveal something previously unseen.  Puzzled by my own behavior, it finally dawned on me as I was running this weekend – my old, practiced legs having carried me thousands of miles over a lifetime – that I wasn’t trying to memorialize a moment so much as I was seeking to understand myself.  Each time I see Abra working hard to master a basic skill that I tend to take for granted, such as eating or walking, I can’t help but marvel at the fact that I went through the same process.  I think of the years of slow and steady practice that were involved in allowing me to run for a full half hour around a sunny park on a crisp autumn morning.  As I learn to be a runner, huffing and puffing my way through the trees, I reach a point halfway through my run where I feel like giving up.  I remind myself to take it one step at a time, to concentrate on the slip of trail just in front of me and no more.

I love the motion blur.

On Saturday afternoon, as light streamed through our bedroom window, Abra launched herself from our desk toward the middle of the room, a clear runway of carpet stretching ahead of her.  Usually she takes a few halting steps, her arms raised overhead like a goalpost, a smile stretched gleefully over her face, before tumbling down.  But this time I stood in front of her with arms outstretched, urging her forward.  As I shuffled backward she confidently walked toward me, taking one and two steps, then a dozen, then a record twenty before falling down in a heap.  Struggling to understand the difference between this and previous attempts, I realized that she had been focused on me, that proverbial slip of trail just in front of her.  And in one gasping breath I suddenly understood a basic fact that had somehow escaped me all these years:  My own mother or father had been by my side as I took the same tentative steps into the world, agonizing as I teetered and threatened to fall flat on my face.  I was overcome by a rush of love and gratitude as I thought of the hundreds of hours that someone stood by my side, waiting to catch me if I fell, teaching me to move through life in the only way possible:  One foot in front of the other.  No matter what divergent roads our tired legs may have carried us down, despite the loneliness we sometimes feel, we all learned to walk with the help of somebody else.

That evening I head to yoga class, my first time back on the mat without Abra since I was 40 weeks pregnant (which, as you can imagine, was not a very vigorous practice).  It is a yin style class, meaning that poses are held for longer periods, upward of five minutes.  I have never attempted this method, usually gravitating towards classes that move more quickly through poses, which seems “harder” and therefore, I reason, more worthy of my time, money and effort.  I sit cross-legged on the mat, simply breathing.  At first it is easy.  Then, after a few minutes, it becomes increasingly difficult to support my posture, and I begin shifting uncomfortably.  We swoop our arms overhead in giant circles, our palms coming together at the top in prayer pose, then easing down gently in front of our chests.  As we repeat this motion time and again the instructor reminds us that yoga is often a physical manifestation of our lives, this pose a tangible reminder of how we are often “brought back to ourselves.”

The next morning I go running.  I am halfway through a training program, working my way toward being able to complete a 5K run.  Unlike Maikael, who is a descendant of the Tarahumara Indians, a tribe of famed runners, my body is not built for running.  Whereas his long, lean legs could seemingly carry him forever, mine are drumsticks that begin aching almost immediately.  Within two days of starting the training program my ankles are throbbing with every leaden step, and I convince myself that I am not cut out for this.  After each run I do long series of complicated stretches, which don’t seem to help.  I have inquiring conversations with exercise scientists and long-time runners, wondering if I should throw in the towel, but the general consensus seems to be, “Take it easy, and keep going.”

Slung over the edge of the porcelain bathtub I “shh” over and over and over again, like a mantra, rubbing gentle circles between the scaffolding of Abra’s bird-like shoulder blades.  She stops for a moment, studying me with her doe eyes, and just when I think she’s finished she winds up again.  I continue my “shh-ing” and my patting for what feels like hours, but is probably only 10 minutes, breathing in and out, in and out.  For reasons unknown she suddenly stops, picks up the gauzy loops of the loofah sponge, and begins happily babbling.  We have made it to the other side.

Back on the mat we are descending into “pigeon pose.”  My front leg twists into a hairpin, my back leg a rod reclining behind me.  Much like the breathing it is easy at first, but as the minutes tick by heat radiates into the deepest layers of my thigh’s muscle tissue.  The impulse to release the pose and seek relief is gnawing at me, but the instructor, as if tuning into my internal radio broadcast, urges us to, “Stay with it.”  So I do.  I breathe in and out, in and out, and soon I am riding the wave of the heat.  Rather than focusing on how much it hurts I find my mind drifting to other topics of mental chatter, and it’s then that I know I’ve pushed through to the other side.

As I run I huff and puff, a steam engine charging around the park.  The first couple of laps are easy, but soon my energy begins to flag and I can feel my pace slowing.  I am aware of every heel strike against the pavement that sends shock waves through my legs, and each sharp breath singes my lungs.  But like The Little Engine That Could I find myself repeating to myself, “I think I can, I think I can,” and I stay with it.  Suddenly I realize that my ankles no longer ache, and I know in a rush of adrenaline that I’m going to make it through the rest of the training program.  I am Charlie in his great glass elevator, crashing through the ceiling of the chocolate factory, soaring high above the world.  I am floating and free, not just riding but inhabiting the wave.  Just when things should be getting their most difficult I hit my stride, and what was agony moments ago is suddenly effortless.

I remember someone telling me toward the end of my pregnancy, “Just when you think you can’t take it anymore is when you know it’s time to push.”  I can certainly remember that moment in my own labor when I crossed the valley of despair and emerged on the other side, knowing with every fiber of my being that I could complete the journey.  There is something about having given birth that has changed how I move through the world.  It is not that things are any easier:  I still want to run screaming from the room when Abra wails uncontrollably, and release the yoga pose, and abandon the run.  The difference is that I don’t.  There is an odd satisfaction – perhaps even pleasure? – in going the distance.  Each of us learns this lesson a different way (I am aware that some run actual marathons to fully live what it means to go the distance, something I don’t think I could ever do), but for me giving birth is what shifted my perspective.  It taught me that I’m capable of running a marathon, even if I’m a sprinter by nature.  And I’m beginning to see the benefits of learning to approach life as the marathon it is.  I’ve spent a lot of my life tearing through experiences, never letting myself sink into the discomfort that is inherent in the “working through” stage of any long-distance race.  But I’m beginning to see that in doing so I’ve robbed myself of the euphoria you feel when you push through to the other side, that moment when you realize that, even though there are miles yet to run, you are going to be just fine.

Our bodies reveal a secret language, and the fact that I was afflicted in the eyes, the proverbial mirrors to the soul, seemed significant.  Two years prior, when that same dry patch, like a crust of day-old bread, arrived as suddenly and unannounced as an unwelcome visitor, it was a week before returning to the country after eight months abroad.  That I had managed to avoid the host of illnesses the developing world taunted and teased me with for months on end, only to find myself hunched into a mirror in a palatial tiled bathroom in Quito, Ecuador, just before returning to my comfortable life in the States struck me as ironic.  I expected a dramatic change to occur, an intense shedding of skins, going into the experience, not coming out of it.  I had spent much of the past eight months wanting to go home, and now that reality was literally striking me in the face, my body seemed to be saying otherwise.

Standing in front of another mirror, a world away and two years apart, I am faced with the same sobering thought:  what part of your life isn’t working anymore?  And, perhaps even more troubling, did the last two years teach you nothing?

When my friend, Kristen, suggested we attend Dani Shapiro’s memoir writing workshop at Kripalu, a yoga retreat center in the Berkshires of New England, my mind screamed yes! and no! in equal measure.  I read Dani’s book Devotion just before Abra was born, a memoir that affected me deeply, and in which Kripalu appears as almost a character in the book.  The idea of one day visiting enchanted me; I immediately sent away for their quarterly catalog of offerings, and when Dani’s workshop appeared on Kripalu’s roster for September, it felt like kismet.  For months I’ve been paralyzed about how best to move forward with my writing, completely at a loss for how to harness my scattered energies.  A vague idea for a memoir has been brewing at the back of my mind for over a year, but the idea of actually sitting down to write one seemed impossible.  The thought of investing the time and money required to attend a workshop on writing a book that I’m not even exactly sure what it’s about, on the other side of the country, for 64 hours, seemed frivolous, if not ridiculous.  I think I secretly hoped that over the course of the weekend my fears would be confirmed, and that I could finally put the idea to rest before moving onto more modest writing projects.

“Writing a memoir is like running a marathon,” said Dani on the first day, which stopped me in my tracks.  As I have written before I am no marathon runner, preferring to sprint my way through life, even though I recognize that life itself is the greatest marathon of them all.  Despite the fact that I shouldered my way through college and graduate school I tend to lose steam when it comes to almost any slow-and-steady task.  And while, at the outset of the workshop, I stated my modest goal of simply “getting an inkling as to the next steps in my writing life,” a vision for a memoir quickly started to tiptoe out of my peripheral vision.  Something shook loose for me, and though I was terrified to realize it, by the end of the weekend the urgency to write this memoir was parading in front of me.

As my plane soared toward the flaming orange horizon on Sunday night, I read Melissa Coleman’s new memoir, This Life is in Your Hands, about her experiences growing up off-the-grid with back-to-the-land parents.  “It’s no life for dabblers.  You’ve got to dig in wholeheartedly, for if you don’t, you just simply won’t be happy nor successful at what you do.”  I continued to read, and as I absentmindedly touched the crease of my eyelid I noticed it was perfectly smooth.

This post was inspired by this post at Lindsey’s site, A Design So Vast.

Fall is here

No one knows how they’ll react when a baby enters their lives, which is part of why making the leap to parenthood, in its enormity and permanence, is so terrifying.  Our fundamental beliefs about ourselves are both challenged and confirmed, rattling the delicate cage that encircles the core of our beings.  It can be grossly uncomfortable to discover that you are not the person you thought you were, capable of actions and feelings you didn’t know you were capable of, even if they are largely positive.  In the same breath, the rigors and stresses of parenthood reinforce personal truths which, while unsettling, has the potential to be deeply clarifying.

Although I might have listed “independent” as an auxiliary personality trait – important, but not at the top of the list – this past year revealed otherwise.  I visited a psychic many years ago who described my personality as a horse running free in a big, fenced-in pasture.  “Even if you don’t see the fences on a day-to-day basis, you know they’re there.”  In other words, I need to be free to roam wild while sensing the parameters, and most of my life has passed in this bounded-boundless way.  But this past year?  I felt as if I was constantly running into fences.   I remember when Abra was about three weeks old we encountered a day that I’ve come to refer to as “The Terrible Saturday.”  I spent ten hours in a chair trying to nurse a baby that didn’t want to eat.  After frantically calling Heidi, who wisely suggested that I get out of the house for a change to scenery, I took a late afternoon walk around our park.  The ill-fitting maternity shirt I wore was covered in vomit.  My hair was a mess.  I had hardly slept the night before.  Feeling a bit like Dracula emerging from his crypt in the midday sun, I squinted against the glare of life going on around — and without — me.  As I took in a park full of carefree people enjoying a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, fat, hot tears began rolling down my cheeks as I pushed the stroller around the park, for in that moment all I saw was a future of being tied down to an oversized chair stretching before me.

My souful daughter, taken this week

Now, months later, I am able to reframe my situation as not tied down but tethered, and certainly not as intensively as those early months demanded. As the scope of her world widens, Abra needs me perhaps not less but in different ways – ways that, I’m beginning to see, involve a lot more independence on each of our parts.  And I can already tell that the wild horse in me is better suited to this stage of parenting.  So with the simple flip of a calendar, a new season of my life rushed in last week.  I finally feel as if I’m on the cusp of reclaiming parts of myself that circumstances have required me to set to the side.  I’ve got some exciting plans on the horizon that I’m looking forward to sharing with you in the coming months as I prepare to stretch my wings again:

• I am getting back into shape!  I just started a “Couch to 5K” program, and am reviving my lapsed yoga practice.
• The next four Thursday mornings I will take a class that my friend, Nissa, is hosting  in her beautiful backyard garden called, “Inside, Outside:  Exploring Ourselves Through the Garden.” (Isn’t that the best title?)  I look forward to learning more about myself and gardening.
• After years of intending to go, I am finally going to make it to the Festival of the Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.  As I’ve written before I’m passionate, although largely uneducated, about winged creatures, and the sight of wintering sandhill cranes is supposed to be breathtaking.  In other news, I was completely delighted when one of Abra’s first words was “bird.”
• In two weeks I am going to Dani Shapiro’s memoir-writing workshop at Kripalu, a long-held dream.  As a bonus, I am rooming with my blog friend, Kristen, of Motherese.  It promises to be a magical weekend.
• Have you heard of Freedom?  It’s a productivity application for your computer that locks you away from the internet for up to eight hours at a time.  I think it’s what I need to help me cut down on my on-line time.  This may be my last “full-time” year with Abra and I’d like to create memories with her that don’t involve spending hours a day on Facebook.
• Now that I’m no longer operating in survival mode, I am going to start taking some tangible steps towards starting a writing career.  I’ve got some exciting news to share on that account in a few weeks!

Like my friend Meghan, I’m a big believer in putting it all out there and seeing what flows back.  While scary and vulnerable, there’s real power in concretizing your goals.  So, in the words of Meghan, “Universe, do your thing.”

What goals are you working toward right now?  Do you consider yourself independent, or is that phrase fraught?

The night before we had eaten fried chicken and watched a movie before heading to bed, but I had been restless and wired and couldn’t sleep.  I sat eating cereal and checking my horoscope by the dim glow of the computer screen at the kitchen table before settling back down, only to be woken suddenly an hour later, a thin stream of chartreuse-colored amniotic fluid leaking down my leg.  Babies who are post-term frequently defecate in utero, turning the water that surrounds them frighteningly hyper-color.  While it doesn’t pose a direct risk to the baby, the chance of infection is elevated and a 12-hour clock toward delivery starts ticking.  As one nurse explained to me, “It’s way more fussy when your water has broken because you’re committed to doing something.”

It is amazing to me how quickly we get attached to an idea of how we think things will go, even when we know rationally that rarely happens. When I took my birthing class, the instructor warned us time and again that it was important to be flexible with our birth plan when the day came.  I nodded in understanding while secretly believing my best-laid plans were impervious to being rewritten.  Despite my efforts to remain open and flexible, a clear vision of how my birth would go had solidified in my mind:  I would labor at home for hours before going to the hospital, I would labor 100% naturally, and I would forgo the hospital’s standard post-delivery Pitocin drip, a common labor-induction drug that is also used to prevent hemorrhaging.  Oh, and that was another thing:  I wasn’t going to be induced.

After rushing out of the house – so confident was I in my plan that I hadn’t finished packing – I was now being monitored while we waited for a room to become available on the labor and delivery floor.  My contractions plodded along as the hours dragged on, slow and steady, just like everything else in my pregnancy had.  But I was still only one centimeter dilated and my broken, meconium-laced water had set a clock ticking.  Hours after arriving at the hospital, my midwife and I had a heart to heart conversation.  I could continue to wait for labor to begin on its own, but should I need to be induced — as I likely would, given how things were going — starting an induction late in the day might mean laboring long into the night, at which point exhaustion often sets in.  I went deep inside myself to a place where I could clearly see the handwriting on the wall:  this labor wasn’t going like I thought it would, and the quicker I accepted this new reality, the better.  I surprised myself by how quickly I released my death-grip on my idea of the way I thought things should be.  Six hours after arriving at the hospital a cervical-ripening “balloon” was inserted and a Pitocin drip was started, and within 30 minutes my contractions were reliably strong and suddenly just two to three minutes apart.

Early labor, final smiles

Like everything else that had happened that day, active labor came as a complete shock.  Despite the weeks of prenatal yoga classes, the birthing course, the books read, the countless conversations shared, nothing could have prepared me for the next 13 hours.   My memories are spotty, bright moments of clarity piercing the darkness, and at times I felt like I was looking at life through a funhouse mirror.  In the early hours I intently watched the clock and studied the contractions on the monitor, each rise and fall charting my course.  But as I fell deeper down the rabbit hole – for that is the closest feeling I can compare it to – I became more attuned to my interior life as the outside world slowly slipped away.  My intuition kicked in in powerful ways, my body seeming to know exactly what it needed.  Time took on a bizarre quality; there were hours that felt like minutes, and minutes that felt like hours.  As the clocked ticked life became smaller and smaller, such that my existence felt as if it was balanced on a pinpoint.  For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to live completely in the moment, shouldering my way through each crippling contraction, sinking fully into the rest between, setting a steady rhythm of holding on and letting go.  I remember someone asking me to make a decision about something inane – the temperature of the room, the firmness of a pillow – and responding firmly, “I can only talk about right now.  This moment.”

I was running a marathon of indeterminate length, in which the finish line was unknown.  And it was this uncertainty that rattled me to my core, eventually leading me to feel that I was on a runaway train.  After languishing in the “transition phase” – often the most intense but shortest part of labor – for six hours, panic set in as I felt my contractions slipping out my grip and my labor began spinning out of control.  While I had prepared myself fastidiously for the physical rigors of labor, I never accounted for how mental the process would be.  As soon as I lost my mental grip the physical part followed:  the contractions slowed down, their reliable pace becoming ragged and uneven.  Like any good marathoner, I knew I needed a brief pit stop to regroup if I was to continue the race.  A low-dose painkiller that took the edge of the contractions, providing 30 minutes of reprieve before wearing off, was just enough to bridge the valley of my despair.

Once I made that slow, jagged climb to 10 centimeters, I felt like I had summited the mountain.  Perhaps it tells you something about me that the physical act of pushing was far easier than the mental acrobatics of active labor.  Like most things in life, the thinking about something is far more difficult than the actual doing.  One of my crystal-clear memories is being quietly ringed by a small circle of people and feeling the quiet focus of everybody who surrounded me, silently urging me on.  After an hour of productive pushing Abra emerged, her lusty cry filling the room.  She was pink and healthy, a shock of coal hair matted to her head.  I had been plagued by a nagging feeling throughout my pregnancy that something wasn’t quite right, and when she was placed on my chest moments later I incredulously cried, “She’s perfect!”

First moments

Even in that overwhelming moment it struck me that, as is so often the case in life, I had worried about all of the wrong things.  And yet, despite all my worrying, I had still managed to be broadsided by the sheer force and intensity of labor, with its mental traps and pitfalls.  As a natural-born “sprinter” I hadn’t bargained on the relentlessness of the experience.  I didn’t know that I was so strong, that my intuition was to be trusted implicitly, that, as my doula said to me at one point, “you have what you need in every moment.”  I never could have imagined last September 7th that the lessons I learned in labor would continue to reverberate through my first year of motherhood and, I imagine, for the rest of my life.

Last moments of the first year

Happy First Birthday, Abra!  This past year has been an altogether different marathon than how I spent my last Labor Day, but you are teaching me daily, your reluctant student, to pace myself, to trust myself, and above all to live my life in this one precious moment.

Working back through time, my friend and I finally calculated that it had been a month since we’d last seen each other.  So rattled was I that an entire month of my life was a complete blur that I sat down at my computer to thumb through the photos I’d taken on my iPod to jog my memory:

Adventures in eating

Dinner and drinks on the patio, enjoying the sunset

The children's museum

An early morning at the Botanical Gardens

Taking a breather in Santa Fe

Learning to stand

Summer storms

Two exceptionally good books

What struck me is what I suspected all along:  life had been full, but unremarkable.  There were were no major mileposts to mark my journey.  My camera was crammed with everyday moments, small but special.  When, I wonder, will I finally adopt the mindset that those moments are the mileposts?

Despite my sadness that the summer has passed me by, I’ve spent the past few weeks moaning incessantly about the heat, which presses down on me from all directions.  At the grocery store I skip the strawberries, which have passed from small and succulent to overly large and dry, as if they’re trying unsuccessfully to hang on to the season.   As I took a walk around the park this morning I felt a chilly bite in the air, the first blush of fall.  A small thrill shivered through me when I heard the rumble of a big yellow school bus as it wended it way through the streets, marking the first day of school. I am ever-conflicted, lamenting what didn’t happen, wishing away what did, pining for what’s to come.  Here I am, singing summer’s siren song before Labor Day is even here.  The truth is, one of my favorite things about living in New Mexico is that we will be blessed with warm days well into October.  There is no reason to write off the season quite yet, and in these waning days I can keep reaching for those delights I haven’t gotten around to (yet):

homemade ice cream
making a peach pie
a trip to the local pool
an early morning walk in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains

The garden can wait until next year.

Standing at my bedroom window, peering through the slats of the blinds, I watch the falcon perched on an obliging branch, focusing intently on the ground below.  I have seen this falcon – or one just like it – before; I am almost positive there is an aerie in my neighborhood park.  I cast my gaze downward, where it falls on a fuzzy halo of downy grey feathers limping lamely along.  A baby dove.  “Maybe he doesn’t see it?” offers Maikael.  Just then, the falcon wings its way to the wall that the dove is slowly inching his way along, eyes trained down, eliminating any doubt that it hadn’t seen the dove.  “Should I go chase it away?” asks Maikael. Torn between protecting this defenseless creature and letting nature run its course I bite my bottom lip and contemplate what to do, the thought of this tiny chick becoming lunch piercing my heart.  I feel as if I’m watching a real-life nature show unfold before my eyes:  I hop up and down in place, wildly flapping my hands like a mama bird in distress, nervously awaiting the outcome.  Suddenly the falcon swoops down, talons extended, and scoops up the dove.  In a flash they are gone. Maikael and I exchange a bewildered look, truly shocked by what has just transpired.  “I guess there’s a reason that falcons are called ‘birds of prey,’” I say, flatly.

My mothering instinct often surprises me.  That I feel this way toward my daughter isn’t a mystery, for it is what I am biologically programed to do.  But since giving birth to Abra this need to protect all living creatures leaps up out of some hidden crevasse I never knew existed, always astonishing me.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve never thought of myself as particularly maternal.  Although I played with dolls as a girl I never imagined cradling my own, fashioned not from plastic and nylon but skin and bones, someday.  While my friends declared that they wanted to be “a mommy” when they grew up I was already envisioning a future as a writer or an artist, believing the two paths to be mutually exclusive.  Choosing to become a mother was never a forgone conclusion but a decision made late in the game.  When I was pregnant I worried that I had been born without a mothering nature and that my baby would suffer because of it, not understanding that the latent instinct to mother was birthed right alongside my daughter.

It is funny to think of yourself as one way, only to discover that a concept you built your identity around doesn’t, in the end, prove to be true.  I still wouldn’t describe myself as “the mothering type” – if there is such a thing – but the instinct is there.  I watch a little boy skid off his bike in the park and find myself clutching my throat, adrenaline racing.  A snaggletoothed girl stares back at me from the newspaper, and when I read that her body has been found in a river I feel genuine sadness for this nameless face.  I pick up someone else’s crying baby without a thought.  I worry about the lithe toddler who has lost her parents at the botanical gardens.  My heart aches when the helpless dove is spirited away.  The abstract has been made personal, sympathy replaced by empathy.  Perhaps it is true that we are all mothers to one another, tending to each other’s aches, ministering to our needs, soothing our collective souls.

Now I stand back and watch Abra confront the world head-on, her bumps and bruises the evidence that, like all of us, she is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the universe.  She eats a cherry, her eyes bulging as the thin ruby skin catches in her throat, causing me to shudder.  I lunge the moment her chubby knees slip in the cotton candy pool.  One moment she is steady and the next she is not, tumbling into a great heap of gasping sobs, and I am by her side in an instant.  It is just the beginning.  I wonder what bird of prey is looming darkly on the horizon.  But I know now what I couldn’t trust when I was pregnant:  there is an invisible net that supports her, the delicate threads that bind one life to another.  They are the gossamer strings that suspend us all.  My instincts have come out of their hiding place for good, and should they fail me, I take heart in knowing that another mother will be flapping her wings, watching, waiting to swoop.

I surveyed the room, studying the newborns in fuzzy pajamas that snuggled in close, laid patiently on their mats shaking a rattle, and nestled in their carriers for a long nap while their mothers struggled into plank position.  While she was now the oldest one in the group, I couldn’t help but remember the first time I brought Abra to class at eight weeks old.  She alternated between crying and nursing the entire hour, seeking comfort in my arms.  As the months progressed yoga quickly became her favorite weekly outing, fulfilling her need for quiet activity and demanding little of her introverted nature.  Now she was banging on the wooden blocks we use to help position ourselves, crawling up my arms as I reclined into downward facing dog, and lunging for the nearest baby.  Where she used to giggle and bat at my pony tail as I kneeled over her, now she fussed when I placed her on her back and tried to massage her legs.

At the end of the class I was exhausted from trying to corral a curious baby for an hour, and realized that I had done very little yoga in the process.  It used to be so easy, I thought to myself.  As I rolled up my mat I spoke with a few of the mothers who I remembered from the previous months, one of whom invited me to join the group for lunch.  “I can’t,” I replied.  “I need to get Abra home for lunch and then her afternoon nap.”  Gone were the days, I explained, where I could reliably place Abra in her car seat alongside me at a noisy restaurant, trusting she’d nap through a meal.  In a matter of months we had graduated from rookie to veteran, and it suddenly hit me that Abra was much closer to being a toddler than a baby.

Although this is what I’ve wished for all along – a little person who could move about on her own, take consistent naps, eat her own food – a wave of nostalgia crashed over me as I realized that we are no longer at the beginning of the beginning.  Marks have been made on what was previously a blank slate.  History has been created, memories traced on what was once a clean page.   I feel a little pang every time I see Abra’s skin pocked with barely perceptible bumps and bruises.  The faint tan line below her tiny socks tugs at my heartstrings, a reminder that, in some small way, life is taking its daily toll.  Sometimes I think this ache has less to do with Abra and more to do with an awareness of my own life ticking by.  I am no longer reliably the youngest one in a crowd, perched on the precipice of the unknown.  Hopefully more life stretches ahead of me than falls behind, but so many of the decisions I’ve made are indelible, writing the story of what will unfold for years to come.

Time has played tricks on me, as the longest shortest year of my life draws to a close.  The days have often run slow as molasses, and I have pined daily for its swift conclusion.  Now I am shocked to discover that it is nearly here, a meager six weeks away from Abra’s first birthday.  A few nights ago I thumbed through Abra’s newborn photos, and she is barely recognizable.  I see a tiny baby whose wide mouth, often contorted into a cry, is out of proportion.  The roundness of her face has smoothed into the contours of a small child.  Her smooth black hair, slicked to her head like a seal pup, has given way to downy brown locks that stand on end, as if she’s stuck her finger in a light socket.  How, I wonder, can someone change so much in the course of a few months?  She is a shadow of her former herself, and so am I.

Although years and years still stretch ahead of us, sitting in that yoga class was the first time I’ve caught a whiff of lamentation, longing for what was.  I remind myself daily that every stage of life is a tradeoff, a constant exchange of freedoms and obligations.  And yet I unexpectedly found myself wanting a small baby to hold, knowing as soon as the thought was formed that’s exactly what I don’t want.  No, perhaps it is the painful realization that, while I had been away, a door closed silently behind me.  So often in life we don’t have a choice about what doors close when.  Sometimes we don’t even know the door has creaked shut until we try to walk through it again and are surprised to discover it’s locked, the key long gone.  We try furiously to pry it back open, even when we know our only option is to keep walking forward.  We wait for the next door to softly usher us in, knowing there are some doors you only get to walk through once.  After class I half-heartedly asked the instructor if it would be okay if we came back next week, knowing even as I spoke the words that this would be the last time we’d walk out of the studio.  Some doors are better left closed.