I am awash in nostalgia these days.
Certainly it has something to do with the impending transformation of my status into “mother of two.” One child, Mike and I agree, is an accessory. Two children is an adult family. Who can approach such a spectre without a slightly longing glance back at the days when I was a member of the target audience for romantic comedies?
But in large part I blame the demographics of Asheville. There must be an awful lot of early-40’s, dreaming of their youth types like me here. How else to explain the fact that the radio station I used to not be embarrassed to listen to emerged from several weeks of annoying Christmas music into a playlist of catchy, roll-up-the-windows-so-no-one-hears-you-singing songs of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s? Every single one of them is guaranteed to jerk me immediately to some indelible moment of my youth — speeding down Olympic Boulevard at 2 a.m. in the Dodge Omni I drove through high school even though it stalled out every time I stopped for a light (“Girls Just Want to Have Fun”); dancing on the porch of Sigma Chi during Spring Weekend (“Mony Mony”); making my way down the unremittingly sad sweep of road to my townhouse in Williamsburg (“Long December”).
And it doesn’t stop with my dreamy driving moments of remembering what it felt like to believe I was on a trajectory toward something. There’s the Facebook fever that causes me to search for long lost (boy)friends and to scroll through my high school classmates without ever once contacting one because, well, that would suggest that I’m still interested in being the person I was in high school when I emphatically — for reasons obvious to anyone who knew me then — am not. I remember old friends, I get in touch with some of them, and I feel a blast of energy and satisfaction at how far I’ve come and how much I’ve come through in shaking some of the craziness of the days when I first knew them.
But even if I’m happy to have moved beyond the girl who had an anxiety attack if her every moment wasn’t filled with activity, who felt always a little short of where and who she thought she should be, and who frankly didn’t know how to love herself, I still miss being young. Not just the unlined face (though the amount of money I spend trying to slow down the inexorable track of crows feet would probably go a long way toward economic recovery). Not just the body parts that did not yet have a beef with gravity.
No, what I miss is the sense of possibility.
Remember when you dreamed of something big for yourself? I’m not saying it isn’t far, far healthier to enjoy where and who you are now than to keep trying to attain something that exists only in your mind. I’m just saying that it’s fun to dream. It’s fun to imagine what life might bring you — who you might end up married to, what you might end up doing when you grow up, where you will live and how cool you will be.
Now I know all these things. And it’s all good. But, still. I know.
More to the point, I have a kid. I’m about to have another. I find it hard to believe my life is moving anywhere unexpected any time soon. And where’s the fun in that?
First of All, I Know I Don’t Want to Go Back
Did I mention how many of my nostalic moments center around a feeling of unshakable melancholy, a recollection of what it felt like to long for something — for a center, another person to share my life with, a career that fed my heart?
I know — most of us know — that nostaliga is about producing a Hollywood movie of our life. I cry at the movies. I like to cry at the movies. But it’s not the same as crying when something is really happening to me. So, from the distance of ten or twenty or even (gasp) thirty years, I can cry for what I was going through without really feeling it.
It is, I suspect, a way of running from contentment. When I’m feeling good, when my life is without any major traumas, as it is now, I find myself missing that volatile first-year law school student my then-boyfriend described as “peaks and valleys.” The term pleased me then and I’ll admit it pleases me a little bit now, even though I know better than to venture back into that territory.
And yet, I think, life was full of drama then! I was like a character in Felicity (only not as New York-y) or The O.C. (only not as vapid and not clad in designer clothes).
Except, of course, I wasn’t. I was a person in search of something, and it wasn’t really a movie-ready life. It was, it turns out, a genuine life, the kind where I know what my heart wants and I therefore don’t want all the accoutrements of expensive clothes and loud parties and the perfect brown eyeliner.
So my heart may have to find its excitement in getting new windows for our bedroom. But it is, I know — despite the Run for the Hills! feeling of having a second child — exactly where it should be.
Even if my mind still does go somewhere else when I hear “I Don’t Want to Wait” and am suddenly back in 1998 driving to community theater rehearsals and wondering if I will ever have the time to act again.
Secondly, Our Lives Are Always Moving Somewhere Unexpected
On Monday I decided to try a new yoga class. “Astanga 1” it said on the schedule. Although I don’t practice astanga while I’m pregnant, I thought maybe a Level 1 class would be manageable.
I arrived to a studio set up for traditional astanga — two rows of mats facing each other as if to give everyone an opportunity to draw inspiration from the person across from them who actually can do a drop-back. This was not, I noted, the sort of set up where a teacher in front of the class leads students through the fundamentals.
I caught the teacher’s eye as she passed. “What does ‘Astanga 1’ mean?” I asked her, perhaps a bit late, since my mat was already set up. “Just so I know what to expect.”
“It’s the first series,” she answered cheerfully.
I froze. The first series is not easy. It is not an adequate substitute for what I would be doing if I weren’t pregnant. It is what I would be doing if I weren’t pregnant.
Panicked thoughts ran through my head — rushing because class was about to start and I had to make a decision. Would it be safest to tiptoe out staring pointedly at my belly so everyone would understand that, really, I would normally not shrink away from this practice? Was my ego getting in the way of rolling up my mat and calling it a day? Quite simply, was it time to accept that my glory days of astanga were over?
I stayed. Of course I stayed.
And I was careful. I modified. I recalled the days when I could do supta kurmasana without the teacher having to haul my ankles behind my head (yep, you heard right) but I didn’t grasp at them as I frequently grasp at the days conjured up by the guilty pleasure song on the radio.
Instead, I remained present. I celebrated what my body could do and what made it feel good. And I honored what it could not, whether because a certain belly was in the way or because it was just too hard while carrying an extra twenty pounds.
It was the best practice I’ve had in a long while.
This, I am reminded, is what I’ve always loved about astanga. It’s a set sequence, so you can relax into the illusion that you know what’s coming up. Like having appointments and plans marked out on the Library of Congress movie posters calendar hanging in our kitchen.
But as you take each step in the direction the practice leads you, you discover that you really don’t know what lies ahead. You don’t know what shape your body will take today, which poses will open up to you in new and profound ways and which ones will elude you. You discover, by being in the moment, that life is, in fact, always unexpected.
And so, next time a song transports me back to my early twenties, next time my first love rediscovered on Facebook tells me I look just like I did in high school, I will celebrate the youth and the hope and even the longing that made my life then so active, so ready to explore, so willing to believe that something special lay around the corner.
But I will also honor the moment I am now able to live in. I will cherish the wisdom in recognizing that I don’t need something around the corner because, honestly, I don’t believe there could be anything better out there than what I’ve got right now.
And I will admire and feel gratitude and, just a little, envy my children for having it all out in front of them — that chance to explore before you find out that your heart has taken you to a place where you want to stay.
A Practice in the Present
Every asana practice is designed to remind us how to stay in the present. It’s about presenting us with challenges and distractions so that our minds get the workout we think we’re giving our bodies. Quads killing you in Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I)? Actually, once you go inside, maybe not as much as your mind was telling you. Suddenly overwhelmed by the pressing matter of what to cook for dinner tonight? Go back to your breath and find something new to experience in janu sirsasana (seated head-to-knee).
But not every asana practice ends up being about being present. Especially, I can say from personal experience, when you are gaining about a pound a week and worrying far more than you should be about how a 42-year-old body rebounds from a pregnancy. At these times — and others that have nothing whatsoever to do with pregnancy and everything to do with the expectations and pressures of life — a yoga practice is suddenly about getting into shape, looking good, being flexible. Everything but being in the moment.
Yet it is about being flexible — just not only physically. It’s about moments like this where we can be flexible enough to accommodate the days when we move away from the essence of a yoga practice and to put ourselves back on the right path when we’re ready.
So today I invite you to practice being in the moment, whatever your practice is.
A Suggested Sequence
1) Begin with at least five minutes of meditation — even if you are taking a class somewhere. Resolve to arrive five minutes earlier than usual so you can sit and experience stillness before you start to move.
2) Practice four-part breathing throughout. The pause between inhale and exhale, and between exhale and inhale, brings you right back to stillness, to where you are at the moment.
3) Let your breath move you in the standing poses. Rather than going through the automatic motions of surya namaskar (sun salutes), concentrate on letting your inhales and exhales initiate the movement. This will take your practice away from your mind and let your body take over.
4) Try to incorporate a balancing pose — best would be vrksasana (tree pose). I love to practice vrksasana after a good, heating round of standing poses and vinyasas — my heart is beating, my body is used to moving, and then I am still again, aware of and moving with slight changes around me, as a tree bends in the wind, bringing together energy and stillness.
5) Truly explore your twists and forward folds. There’s no easier time to drift toward tonight’s dinner than when a teacher leaves you in kapotasana (pigeon prep) or pascimottanasana (seated forward fold) for a minute or longer. Most of us rush into the deepest expression of the pose we can and then let our minds wander. Instead, go inside and explore your body. Find little ways to adust, to move, to open your heart. Find new places of tightness. Find more space in your spine. This is called being in the moment.
6) Be open in your backbends. A lovely one for staying grounded while offering your heart is ustrasana (camel). Think of lengthening your spine so that your heart lifts on its own. And then focus on what happens in the moments when it does.
7) Find time for an inversion. If sirsansana (headstand) is more about the work for you than the relaxation, do sarvangasana (shoulder stand) or viparita karani (legs up the wall). And don’t be shy about doing it even if the rest of the class is doing something else. By now you should be nearing the end of your practice, and an inversion is truly a time to let your body do the work while your mind is completely at rest. Make it restful.
8) Savor savasana (corpse pose).
And savor the stillness that comes with age. And all the joy and possibility it brings.
YogaMamaMe 
It has come to my attention that I have offended at least one single-child family by making fun of me and Mike for considering one child an “accessory” and two children a scary, grown-up family.
Which just goes to show that, in making fun of myself, I inevitably end up sounding like I’m making fun of someone else. Something that is, I can’t stress enough, against the rules of the game, as far as I’m concerned. But there goes the power of words and our limited power to control how they’re taken.
Because I feel so strongly that I intend to offend no one with these posts, I’d like first to point out that I know just how hard it is to parent one child. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have had much to write about for the past 10 months or so.
And, too, I’m sensitive to the fact that many single-child families didn’t choose to limit themselves to one child. I’m sensitive to this fact because there was a time before I became pregnant with Jack when I didn’t think I could have even one child biologically and didn’t know if I had the wherewithal to go through the grueling adoption process more than once.
So my point, if I can clarify in the name of a big mea culpa to anyone I hurt, was only that in the face of having two kids, Mike and I are waxing nostalgic in a quite unrealistic way about what it is like to have one. Suddenly — in tune with the nostalgia that is the subject of this piece — I am looking back at having only one child as a little piece of heaven because I am so very scared of having two. One child means I can go out to eat with my husband, even if we don’t actually eat together since one of us will inevitably be running around after Jake. Try to take two Jakes to a restaurant, however, and no one will be eating anything because it takes two parents to run after two kids.
And so I end up where I end up in this essay: Feeling like I am moving inexorably toward a place where I am no longer young, no longer open to the broad spectrum of life experiences, stuck, more or less, in a role that belongs to my parents, not to me. Mother-of-two. An “adult” family — and that isn’t meant to sound like a good thing.
Once again, I say all this as I try to say all on this site, with a sense of humor and more than a little bit of exaggeration about what I’m thinking and how motherhood strikes me sometimes. So, if you are inclined to feel angry with me, I ask that instead you laugh at me (not even with me) if you can find it in yourself to do so.