Hey Babe, Where’s the Mayonnaise?

by | Feb 8, 2012 | Motherhood

Something I’ve struggled with since I started blogging, and writing such a personal memoir, is the fact that we Americans just love to talk about ourselves. It’s not lost on me that psychoanalyzing my two-year-old and rehashing the events of my week, though cathartic and, I hope, marginally enjoyable to read, is a pretty privileged vocation. I belong to that camp that believes that human pain is human pain; even the most privileged people in society have problems. And I think if you spend all your time saying, I don’t deserve to feel what I feel, because of the starving children in India, you’re going to wind up with some really specific and bad neuroses. Nonetheless, there are vastly different human experiences, and sometimes it boggles the mind. I always remember the time my good high school friend L said to me, when things were awful in Haiti about two years ago and we both had small babies and were sleep-deprived and generally unhappy, “I do not even know what I would do if my kid was crying because she was hungry and I didn’t have anything to feed her.” I remember we both sort of stopped short and thought about it for a second, feeling very, very grateful.

I have very little idea about what’s going on in Syria at the moment, mostly because my experience of listening to the news goes something like “Scott Horseley, NPR News. In Damascus today“?”Mom! I need more milk!”?forces pushed into?”Mom! I need a snack!”?UN Resolutions?”Hey babe? Where’s the mayonnaise?”, but yesterday in the car I heard that children are involved in the violence and have been murdered, tortured, kidnapped, and sexually abused. I’m not sure whether the horror of those crimes is more horrific to me now that I have a child myself and can imagine being in a place where children were caught up in something like that?but any way you slice it, it’s horrific. And I just wanted to acknowledge that, I guess.

Hmm, mayonnaise

Close to home, things are going well. February has thus far been kinder to me than January was (which strikes me as odd since I think of February as the cruelest month. The kindest? September). You’ll remember I took that yoga workshop last weekend, and it changed my life. Not my life life, but my immediate actions, attitude, and the day-to-dayness of here and now. We started off by writing, and in that brief ten minutes I articulated for probably the first time how depressing and demoralizing I find the competitiveness around trying to get published (a man in the workshop helped me come to this, when, after 20 people had introduced themselves with variations of the phrase “I’m a writer” he said, “I’m an author,” and, well, I did not feel the yogic loving kindness heading his way). Then, we did some asana, just simple yoga but at a perfect pace and difficulty level. Then some meditation, during which time I had my second important realization: that my next project will be about childbirth. Then came the best part. One of the teachers pointed out that many of the students had said that they were feeling “stuck.” “In my experience,” he said, “being stuck just means that you’re hammering away at something from the same angle over and over again. Try something new.” How is it that something so obvious could have been so completely lost on me until that moment? And that was realization #3: I need to stop sitting in the same coffee shop day after day pulling my hair out. I need to go for a walk with a tape recorder so I can hear my own voice again. Or put the book away for a while. Go to an art museum. Do a prompt. Write a poem. Do yoga every day (I have been; just ten minutes in the morning, but it’s ritual, and it’s good).

In other good news L has started at his new daycare. Those of you who have been around me of late know how worried I have been about my dear sweet L, who proved to be sensitive, clingy, sad, and whiny at his old daycare. I assumed for four months that this was just who he was when I wasn’t around. But now after two days–two tiny days–at Lorena’s he is a new man. He didn’t ask for me once. On the ride over, he said, “you dropping me off, Mumma?” And I said yup, I sure am. See you after lunch. No problem at all. I am cautiously optimistic that this will keep up. He even told me he’d like to try taking his nap there on Friday. Could be a disaster; we’ll see. And as though to drive home the rightness of this decision, today we visited his old daycare, to say a proper goodbye. I noticed that while I was enjoying the camaraderie of the women, who are chatty and fun and sweet, L was sort of lost. He didn’t want to ask for things. He didn’t have any skills when another kid didn’t want to share. He was out of sorts. So I think we have made a good choice.

This is getting awfully long, so I’ll stop there. Blessings to you, party people.