This morning in my gardening class Nissa talked about not getting too bogged down by creating the perfect garden.  “It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae,” she said, concerned solely with what the experts say is “right.”  “The important thing,” she emphasized, “is to enjoy yourself.”  These words, simple as they may be, are rife with complexity and contemplation, and it immediately got me thinking what good advice it was for living a life.  How often, I thought to myself, do I get mired in the day-to-day details that don’t really matter and forget the big picture?  How often do I tune in to others’ opinions before tuning into myself and my own sense of enjoyment?  Sometimes I feel like I am a radio dial being madly spun between stations, forever on “Scan,” never quite settling into my own groove.  It’s easy to spend our lives searching for the optimum and forget that “good enough” is usually just that.  Sometimes we are paralyzed into inaction, waiting for just the right moment, the ideal circumstances, to present themselves before moving forward.  But if that is our metric, most of us – myself included –might wait a lifetime to do anything.

Beauty in imperfection

I saw a great deal of this behavior at play in my work as a career counselor, especially with younger clients.  Having grown up in a world of so much choice and abundance it made choosing the “right” path an anxiety-provoking affair.  “Just do something – anything,” I would often say.  Although I often have a hard time living this simple truth, doing something is generally better than doing nothing, no matter how imperfect.  (Sometimes, I realize, sitting still is the best course of action, but even then we are doing something, even if the results aren’t outward or tangible.  Internal work, though largely invisible, is difficult and important.)  Because I am often disappointed when things don’t fully live up to (overinflated) expectations, during the past year my personal mantra has become, “Something is better than nothing.”  I don’t mean this to be defeatist and under-achieving.  Rather, this mindset helps me to accept and appreciate the moment for what it is.

Tomorrow I will head to the airport hours before the sun rides over the Sandia Mountains, bound for Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on a whirlwind 64-hour adventure.  It is a long way to go for the weekend.  The petulant part of me that wishes I was leaving today and coming back on Monday , that longs for a more leisurely getaway than I can afford.  But an even larger part of me is grateful to be going at all.  It is the part of me that is looking forward to the renewed pleasures of traveling light, reading a book in-flight, eating peaceful meals, having time to do yoga, focusing on my writing, enjoying the fall colors in a part of the country I’ve never been to, kindling online friendships in person, and simply being. And while I think the “old me” would have enjoyed this weekend, I don’t think she could have fully appreciated it.

Remember how, when I returned from my retreat with The Tribe, I concluded that my work for the year involved “manifesting a new reality?”  Part of that process was captured on film by my very talented fellow Tribe Member Sarah Gervais, a photographer and social psychologist who blends her two passions into a fascinating project called Repicturing Women. (She is also the one who coined what has now become an oft-repeated phrase, “The Universe has room for all of us.”)  On her site she features women — herself included — exploring their relationship to their bodies.  I am honored that Sarah decided to feature me at her site in this interview.  Thank you, Sarah, for the opportunity to be a part of the good work you are doing in the world.

On Thursday morning I made my way through the still-dark streets, my headlights searching the road for other signs of life and finding very little.  By the time I made it to Nissa’s house the sun had begun fingering its way into day as the pale moon still glowed above.  A small circle of women, just four of us, quietly gathered on tree stumps while I promptly planted by sneaker in a bed of cilantro.  After whispered introductions our first assignment was to find a spot in the garden that spoke to us and to write about it for a few minutes.  We’d visit this same spot in a month at the conclusion of this course, “Inside, Outside:  Learning About Ourselves Through the Garden.”  As someone who is constantly attuned to change – and of what stays the same amidst the chaos – I loved this idea.  My eyes scanned the overflowing, wabi sabi garden in search of inspiration.  I considered the sunflowers, whose gigantic heads drooped and lolled over the fence.  I thought about the lacy veil of beans.  But ultimately my attention was called to the pumpkins, which I first mistook for watermelons.

“I never knew how a pumpkin started:  small, round, hard, striped the color of seaweed.  But before that it sprang from a bright orange flower, a starfish in the garden, a soft tropical flower right here in the high desert.  Clubbed hands cascade and twist their way over the cool ground, the spiny stalks keeping you at a distance.  Just as the rest of the garden is beginning its slow descent back to the earth, singing its swan song, the pumpkin is just beginning its journey.  Soon these dark green globes will flame a brilliant orange:  waiting to be carved into toothy grins, baked into Thanksgiving pies, rending their seeds.  Its insides are scooped hollow, a reminder that all the best parts dwell deep inside us.  ‘Grow,’ says the sign looming above the pumpkin patch, its letters etched in cool metal.  That’s what I’m trying to do:  to cast aside the protective shell that keeps me from risking, digging deep into my flesh in search of the soft, tender parts that are my life force.  All around me one journey begins as another ends.”

I love this banner that hangs in the garden

I’ve never considered the garden a place of contemplation, but as I huddle for warmth against the cool morning air I am beginning to see why people retreat to these leafy oases.  Although I love the idea of growing my own food, gardens have traditionally been a source of stress for me.  I don’t know anything about caring for plants and my approach has always been slapdash and haphazard, the result of which, you can imagine, hasn’t been good.  There has been nothing intentional about my method, and I limited my time in the garden to the bare minimum required to keep it alive.  Sometimes days would pass without thinking about the garden, and when it entered my consciousness like a thunderbolt I raced out back to find a zucchini the size of a loaf of bread, tough and woody.  Unlike Nissa, who is clearly in her element, exuding quiet confidence, I am as wobbly as a newborn foal here. Her reverence for the garden is clear, and all around us Nissa points out lessons for living a life.  “We need to thin out the carrots,” she explains as she points to clusters of frilly shoots that have just begun their ascent out of the earth.  “They’re sort of like people:  they don’t like to be crowded.”  As I continue to misidentify plant after plant I am delighted when I recognize a verdant patch of strawberries by their telltale leaves.  Nissa laughs.  For years she had unsuccessfully tried to plant strawberries from seed.  Then, she believes, a tiny strawberry seed from her compost bin made it into the soil, the result of which is a burgeoning patch of strawberries.

I turned the story over in my mind as the day wore on.  How often in life do we try to bring something to fruition through brute force?  The more effort we exert, the worse the results.  The moment we stop trying so hard things just happen, exceeding our wildest expectations.  We let things unfurl in their own time and watch a miracle take hold.  This is the lesson of my life these days.  I’ve tried to manifest a new way of being through rigid schedules, regimes and timelines.  I’ve tried to coax new life out of dormant seeds that weren’t ready to sprout.  I’ve been going through the world with a battering ram this past year; I am the hard green pumpkin, waiting impatiently to turn bright orange.  Perhaps I am here not to learn about how to become a better gardener so much as a better person.

Fall blew in over the weekend.  On Saturday morning Abra and I took an early morning walk, donning jackets for the first time in months as we braced ourselves against the wind and cold that stirred around us.  I noticed that, literally overnight, the trees had begun to shed their leaves, leaving a carpet of crunchy brown at their feet.  Although Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer it rarely feels that way in New Mexico, with hot days often lingering well into October.  But this year feels different, for reasons not just pertaining to the weather.  It’s funny to have a child born on the cusp of a season.  The turn toward fall has taken on added weight and meaning, as I am discovering that the years are suddenly delineated in new ways.  Waking up on September 8 felt a bit like New Year’s morning; change was palpable as the world opened itself to new possibilities.  As an adult I don’t feel this same shift on my birthday – the world operates in fundamentally the same way as it did the day before – but beginning year two alongside Abra opens up a world of freedoms that I’ve been longing for.

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?

“This is not how I thought it would go,” I say, propped up in my bed in triage, watching the light contractions ebb and flow on the monitor.  “It never is.”  It was still dark when we crept through the empty streets on our way to the hospital in the first hours of Labor Day, the significance of the day not lost on me.  The seasons of the world, and of my life, were slowly turning.  The swollen clouds that had made the atmosphere thick and unbearable the past few weeks had suddenly cleared, making way for a sliver of moon that shone above.  We were on the cusp of a new moon, yet another sign that my old life had begun its slow demise.  Our microwave, a stalwart companion that had served us unwaveringly for 10 years, suddenly stopped working two days prior.  My car battery had died twice in the past six weeks, most recently leaving me stranded in the grocery store parking lot nearly 41 weeks pregnant.

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.

I’m not going to lie:  it’s been a hard week.  A really hard week. Maikael has been out of town on business and, like clockwork, Abra always chooses this time to cut new teeth.  The days are punctuated by crying, screaming, wailing, shrieking and fussiness that persist for hours on end, and the nights don’t offer much reprieve.  Despite my best efforts to stay calm, I am frayed.  As the author of an article I recently read said, “I don’t speak crying.”

At times like this, I search hard for life’s small but unexpected pleasures.  Luckily for me, they’ve been offered up in abundance this week.  Upon the recommendation of a friend who used to be a local librarian, Abra and I made a point to attend the Ernie Pyle Storytime.  Set under the leafy arms of an old tree, toddlers plopped down on colorful blankets to listen to stories, poems, and songs.  We played finger games as the sun peeked through the branches, casting a dappled kaleidoscope on the ground below.  Abra was more interested in the little girl sitting next to her, but I was content to sit in such a lovely spot for half an hour.

Afterward we peeked inside the tiny library, which is actually the former home of Ernie Pyle, a famed foreign war correspondent.  Inside, memorabilia from Pyle’s life is cleverly displayed amongst stacks of books.

Looking like a bibliophile’s dream house, old closets play host to towers of books.

The converted living room, which still boasts the original fireplace, houses the travel section.

We passed through the old kitchen to get to the children’s reading room, undoubtedly an old bedroom packed to the hilt with literature.  It had the feel not of a library but of a small town bookstore, an edited collection suited to browsing.  Completely charming, and a tangible reminder that bigger isn’t always better.

As we left the house, I noticed a beacon of green at the end of the street, a shimmering mirage in the late summer heat.  I was delighted to discover Hyder Park, a shady expanse of undulating emerald hills dotted by mature trees.  What a find in the middle of this high desert city!  Certainly a place to return with a picnic lunch.

One afternoon I went to the thrift store in search of picture frames, and as I was pawing through bins I stumbled upon a tray of old Polaroid cameras.  A number of my friends are Polaroid aficionados, and while I don’t consider myself a photographer, I’ve long admired the dreamy, ethereal quality of the images that the camera produces.  On a whim, I picked up a $6 Spectra and decided to buy it.  I don’t tend to do things just for fun; my inclination is to spend time at tasks that are part of some larger, productive goal.  I am also apt to invest my energies in activities that I feel confident or proficient in (i.e., not photography).  There was something thrilling in purchasing a piece of equipment that I have absolutely no clue how to use (seriously: I don’t even know how to turn the thing on), in pursuit of a pastime in which I hope the end result will be pure, idle pleasure:  a hobby in the truest sense of the word.

Finally, I am grateful to Trader Joe’s Spinach Ricotta Ravioli.  Abra devoured an entire bowl at lunch, offering the only smile of the day.

What small and unexpected pleasures are YOU grateful for this week?

Last week I had lunch at a friend’s house, and as we munched on chicken salad sandwiches she asked me what I had been up to since I last saw her.  I stared at her blankly.  Not only could I not remember the last time I’d seen her, I couldn’t recall a single thing I’d done, my memories an inky smudge.  Time has taken on a funny quality this summer.  Even sitting here today, typing these words, I struggle to remember how I spent the days – which felt so full and packed at the time – that made up this season.  I know I’m not alone in feeling that summer has disappeared before my eyes like a clever magic trick, all of the goals, dreams and best intentions having slipped through my fingers once again.  Every May my friend, Meghan, and I excitedly share our summer plans through letters penned on milky sheets of stationery, and every August we regret everything we didn’t get around to.  (I wish I’d planted a garden!  I never made it to the summer concern series!  We didn’t take a single road trip!)

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.

On Sunday morning, just as I had gingerly placed Abra in her crib for her morning nap and crept out of her room, I rammed my baby toe into the doorframe.  Hard. I exhaled a quiet expletive, careful not to wake the baby, shaking my foot vigorously.  Already waves of hot pain were radiating through my toes, the smallest one ballooning to an angry red.  I have a penchant for spraining the parts of my body that seem inconsequential to daily locomotion, but once rendered useless prove to be a major inconvenience (you don’t know how much you use your toes until one of them is out of commission).  These injures aren’t serious enough to merit a trip to the doctor, but are just painful enough to slow me down for a day or two.  Over the years I’ve learned that, whenever this happens, it’s a somatic reminder that I’m doing too much, moving too quickly through life, absentmindedly tackling too many things.  It’s my body’s way of saying, “Hey, if you didn’t get the memo from your subconscious that you’re overloaded, I’m going to force you to rest.”

It was about this time that I noticed a canker sore had erupted, yet another sign that I was under too much stress.  I didn’t feel overloaded, but I knew I must be.  I thought about what I’d been doing lately.  While I’ve been having fun, life is full, constantly scheduled and in a state of perpetual motion. I recalled a dream I had last month, still visceral.  I am a big deliver in dreams as messengers, delivering the letters that we refuse to open in our waking lives.  The details of the dream were fuzzy, as they so often are, but I awoke in a sweaty tangle of sheets with the clear thought that I needed to do less and flow more with life.  Not quite sure how to go about doing either of those things I promptly forgot the dream and carried on with my too-busy life, my appointment book bulging with obligations, just as I proceeded to ignore this painful telegraph from my body.  I refused to ice it or elevate it, insisting on powering through what I had already deemed would be a productive Sunday.  By evening I was hobbling around the house, dragging my foot along behind me like Richard III, the inner quadrant of my toe having turned a deep shade of purple.

I finally relented, letting Maikael take over bathtime duties while I propped myself up on the couch with a bag of ice cocooned around my foot and dipped into Ann Patchett’s new book, State of Wonder, which I started over a week ago but had barely made a dent in.  The next morning my foot still ached, and as I limped around the kitchen making breakfast Maikael suggested that he could stay home and watch Abra, a surprisingly physical task, so that I could rest my foot for the day.  I looked at my day planner and a full day stared back at me:  a morning walk with a friend, a play date, a scheduled phone call, a trip to the gym for which I’d booked our babysitter. It seemed silly – two perfectly capable adults leaving their work behind because of one trivial toe – but as that familiar throbbing started up again I conceded.

After rearranging my day I stationed myself back on the couch, flipping open my book, while Maikael took Abra for a walk.  I lost myself in the story, a rarity at 8 am on a Monday morning.  I put Abra down for her nap and read some more, pausing only to reposition my bag of ice.  Maikael fixed me lunch; then I took a nap, and read some more.  Late in the afternoon I ventured out briefly to visit my friend, where we lingered over coffee and raspberry bars while our girls played together.  Once Abra went to bed Maikael and I watched an episode of a new series we’ve just become hooked on.  Then I curled up in bed and read a little longer, having reached the halfway point of my book.  I can’t tell you the last time I read half of a book in a day, but I do know that as I drifted off to sleep I realized that I felt good.  And I found myself longing for more days like this one.

Today it is back to business as usual.  But I’m surprised how beneficial taking one full day to recharge – rather than brief snatches of time over a week or a month, as I tend to do – was to my health, both physical and mental.  Sometimes our misguided attempts to be productive end up setting us further behind.  Sometimes what we most need to move forward is rest.  Our bodies are speaking to us all the time, a conversation flowing through our veins.  I remember, just before leaving a particularly stressful job a number of years ago, that I developed a mysterious tick in my eye.  I knew then that the herky jerky muscles, dancing their convulsive tango, were a message that I needed to quit, and just as soon as I did my eye returned to normal.  I remind myself daily that this all-consuming job that I’ve embarked on — and life itself — is a marathon, not a race.  And like any marathon we’re entitled to a pit stop every now and then.

“One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.” ~ Pindar

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.

Last week, after a long hiatus, Abra and I returned to our mama/baby yoga class.  Once a faithful part of our weekly routine, the frantic pace of summer, with its travel plans and swim lessons, got in the way.  It was the first time we’ve been back since Abra became mobile, a mere two months spelling the difference between a baby who was a shaky sitter to one who crawls with confidence.  I unrolled my familiar blue mat and placed Abra alongside me on the blankets; where she was once content to lie in the cushy piles and let her body be gently twisted to and fro, she quickly squirmed onto all fours and made a mad dash for the knots of rope hanging from the wall.  Yoga prop or instrument of infant death? I wondered.

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.