Into the New Year with Questions Unanswered

“What if you finally saw that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day and every day — who knows how, but they do it— were more precious, more meaningful than gold?”
Mary Oliver

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

As I lay on the chiropractor’s table earlier this week for a routine appointment, I reveled in the fact that no one could reach me in that moment. My phone was on but in silent mode (which is typical for me in recent years). I took a deep breath into my sky blue surgical mask and let out a sigh of relief.

Sometimes I feel like crying when I realize I’ve given myself permission to be still. It would be a cathartic cry if I let it out. As though I have finally allowed myself the time and space to exhale and stop whatever I was doing. Sometimes it’s my mind that’s moving a mile a minute, sometimes it’s my body and sometimes it’s both. I’m holding my breath for no reason so much of the time and the tension in my body is palpable.

As we all round the corner into 2022, it’s typical to turn into reflection mode. Have we accomplished everything we intended to in the past year? Have we lay a good foundation for the year to come? Have we reached that professional or personal benchmark we set for ourselves a year ago? If you had told me a year ago that I would have quit my job at the end of 2021 I would have laughed. That’s simply not an option.

This is just life…feeling overextended and grasping for air at every corner.

This is the life of a working parent and we have no choice but to muddle our way through the best we can.

Now my body tenses up in defensiveness in response to questions about my future. At least once a week someone asks me, “what are your plans for next year?” or “how are you enjoying your free time?” “How’s the time off?” It’s funny because a year ago I would have probably asked a peer in my shoes the same questions. From the outside, perhaps this does look like “time off” or “free time.” But from my vantage point today, this IS my plan. This IS my work. This IS my future.

My wife and I made a calibrated decision to shift the division of labor and our budget so that I could be home full time with our daughter and we could catch our breath as a family. My plans for the first time in as long as I can remember do not involve networking or applying for jobs or updating my LinkedIn profile. I’m home. I’m taking my daughter to the park at 3pm on a Tuesday or meeting a friend for a toddler playdate at KidCity (a local children’s museum) on a Friday morning.

I’m using small moments to engage with her in her surroundings and to walk two steps backwards into the fall leaves instead of two steps forward.

Allowing oneself to simply “be” in the world and lean back from the rush and pull of “doing” is uncomfortable and scary. Yet, it’s also the most natural feeling in the world.

I realize it is a privilege to be able to lean into life this way. It does come with sacrifice but it is not in the realm of reality for most parents and caregivers, particularly those from marginalized communities and those who are parenting solo. Why is that? Why are most moms expected to return to work in a matter of months (and sometimes weeks) after giving birth?

“The U.S. is one of just seven countries around the world that doesn’t guarantee any paid maternity leave, leaving the vast majority of workers with nothing at all.” In a recent interview on NPR’s FRESH AIR with Terry Gross, Claire Suddath, discusses her recent article for Bloomberg Businessweek entitled, “How Child Care Became The Most Broken Business In America.” In it she examines why childcare costs are prohibitive for most families and attempts to provide federal funding for care continue to fail in Congress. As a result, families are caught in a Catch-22 and ultimately face burnout. This puts a strain on relationships and forces families into a near impossible dynamic of constant negotiation and sacrifice just to make ends meet.

What we are doing in my family as we move into 2022 is unconventional and perhaps unsustainable. But it is a “Hail Mary” at reclaiming the sanity that we lost in the past two years. I am willing to step away from my “9-5” for as long as it takes to get that sense of balance back. There is another formula out there – which I will find in 2022 – that allows for each parent to take time for themselves and to contribute to the family unit in tangible and intangible ways.

I don’t have all the answers and know this is a leap of faith, but hope and trust that it will be worth it. And that I will find a few more creative ways to exhale beyond just my chiropractor’s table.

Wishing a happy new year to my friends and fellow readers. May this year bring peace to all of us with questions that remain unanswered.

~~~~

A poem by Mary Oliver
HOW WOULD YOU LIVE THEN?
What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks
flew in circles around your head? What if
the mockingbird came into the house with you and
became your advisor? What if
the bees filled your walls with honey and all
you needed to do was ask them and they would fill
the bowl? What if the brook slid downhill just
past your bedroom window so you could listen
to its slow prayers as you feel asleep? What if
the stars began to shout their names, or to run
this way and that way above the clouds? What if
you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves
began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang
from its painted branches? What if you suddenly saw
that the silver of water was brighter than the silver
of money? What if you finally saw
that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day
and every day —who knows how, but they do it—were
more precious, more meaningful than gold?
Mary Oliver ‘Blue Iris: Poems and Essays’ Penguin Random House, 2006

Relationship to My Body

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”
Amy Bloom

I took my first in-person yoga class today in over two years. The last time I attended a yoga class that wasn’t virtual was probably November or December 2019. It wasn’t a fancy class. I saw it advertised through my local gym and figured I’d give it a try. I saw it as an opportunity to decompress and move my tired joints, even if it was under bright overhead lighting and with blaring workout music in the background. In the end, this class exceeded my expectations and provided elements of surprise and reflection on so many levels.

For under 55 minutes, my phone tucked away in my jacket pocket in the back of the room, I was able to arrive in the moment and just feel my body move. In the midst of my contorted, stiff, inflexible stretches, my mind floated to just how much I had taken my body for granted prior to having a child. I haven’t written much about this topic to date so bare with me.

My relationship to my body over the last 2+ years has taken on so many new layers. When I learned I was pregnant, I remember having an irrational fear that I was going to “lose” my body. It was a fear of something taking over (like a parasite) and being at the whim of new forces that were outside my control. That, in addition to terrible nausea and morning sickness. Admittedly, the irrational fears did prove somewhat true. I was taken over by forces outside my control and my body did take on a life of its own. I ultimately came to a place of acceptance though and even awe in what the body was capable of. (I could write an entire blog piece on the body and the pregnancy journey.)

What I wasn’t prepared for though were the postpartum physical and hormonal changes that would continue to play out for months (and maybe years) beyond giving birth. Even as I approach 18 months postpartum, my balance is off. I am clumsier and a little clunkier in my movements. I wasn’t flexible prior but now my back can get thrown off by just crouching to put the baby in her car seat. My neck feels stiff just about every morning and I am not a stranger to muscle spasms at random points throughout the day.

I still love the same forms of exercise. For me it’s swimming and a slow walk/run ratio I picked up years back when training for a half marathon (which feels like a lifetime ago). And maybe it’s my middle age creeping up on me, but my body just isn’t the same. It’s subtle, but I’m keenly aware of how my clothes fit differently now. A little less give, a little less stretch. My body didn’t simply bounce back. It bounced into a whole new space.

I guess what I’m talking about is that both my relationship to my body and my body itself have changed in recent years. My rare moments to exercise are no longer with an end goal of a certain figure so much as just the freedom to move…The liberation I feel when I can find a moment in the early AM to do a “cat/cow pose” or “puppy pose” before the baby stirs. My joints are stiff and most days I just long to move. I now wear sneakers almost all the time, even when I’m putzing around the house, giving my daughter a bath, or going to the grocery store. It gives me the most subtle sense of satisfaction that I’m exercising. That I’m moving, even if it’s from one room to another.

As I sit here typing away, my upper back is talking to me. It’s telling me to sit up straighter and to stand up and move around. It’s achy when I sit too long now or when I stand too long. Maybe I need to listen more and respond “thank you” every once in a while. Thank you for making yourself more aware to me in recent years. Thank you for helping me to see that I am intrinsically tied to you and you to me. That we are here together to explore the world and accept the ebbs and flows. And perhaps to slow down enough to catch an extra breath or two even when life tells us to keep going.

As I hunched over in child’s pose this morning and stayed put 5 or 6 breaths longer than instructed, I realized that perhaps I need to fully accept this new reality–This body in all it’s floppiness and less than shapely beauty. Maybe part of its purpose is not to achieve some unattainable shape or figure projected on us from external pressures, but instead to simply stretch and rest and carry us through life’s ups and downs. And maybe it’s not just my body, but my entire being that never simply “bounced back” after having a child. I have yet to get to know a new and evolving version of myself that has bounced into an entirely new way of being.

Glass is half…

Let the splash of colors in the setting sun remind you, at the end of it all, you have permission to be undone here.
Morgan Harper Nichols

The other day my daughter discovered she could climb up onto our black Ikea recliner chair. She would climb up, turn around, sit back down and slowly slither off the chair, only to repeat the same thing probably 20 more times over the next 20 minutes. I was in awe of her discovery and so proud of her for having the courage to flex this muscle. She was mesmerized by her newfound skill and this sense of wonder trickled out to every corner of the room.

In the short month that I’ve been home from work I’ve had several insights. One glaring insight which I’ve known to be true for countless years but am only just now starting to see more clearly is my tendency to focus on productivity. I am a hopeless perfectionist, always looking to identify what’s missing, what I have yet to accomplish, what is one more thing I can get done before the timer goes off. Not working in the traditional sense, over the last month it has become painfully obvious just how much I’ve valued productivity as a marker of my self-worth. Even though I no longer have a task list in Outlook that I’m monitoring, I can feel myself fighting the urge to fill every moment of the day with something worthwhile.

I’ve been listening to a book on Audible called Laziness Does Not Exist, by social psychologist, Dr. Devon Price. In it, Price provides a social and historical backdrop for how humans have come to see productivity and overachieving as a measure of self-worth. Through interviews, research and personal stories, Price explains that people today work far more than nearly any other humans in history. And yet, we often still feel we are not doing enough and we are not good enough.

In the months immediately after our daughter was born, when my wife and I were caring for her around the clock, I lamented often that I was getting “nothing” done. Laundry would pile up, the house unraveled, any form of exercise took a backseat. I struggled to find time to even return a phone call. I started obsessing over how many thank you notes I was able to churn out in a given day. Even putting a stamp and address on an envelope felt gratifying. In spite of the fact that we were literally keeping a tiny human being alive, I was grasping for what more I could do to feel productive. Taking a nap was hard. It meant I was losing precious hours in the day. I was a walking, breathing zombie but my internal task master persona was screaming from within.

Today, as my daughter rounds the 18 month mark, I am starting to realize I may have had it all wrong the past 20+ years I’ve been working. I can see now that I have been running on a false “high” in chasing my email inbox and to-do list every day.

I still have a deep yearning to check things off my personal to do list (returning calls, bills, chores, sending out the infamous thank you note). I am often carrying around a subtle sense of guilt and even shame for not “producing” enough. One friend likened this new space that I’m in to a period of detox. Amidst the fog I can start to see and feel what happens when I don’t count the seconds of productivity in each moment of the day.

My daughter continues to test her boundaries. Whether transforming an Ikea chair into a slide or dropping food onto the floor and then cracking up, she has a way of making time stand still.

May the color she brings to my life and the lessons she continues to teach me every day about slowing down guide me in the unfolding and unraveling of this need to produce and fill time with such precision. As Morgan Harper Nichols quotes, “…the permission to be undone here.”

The Journey Begins

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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I’ve been asked many questions in recent days. “What the heck are you doing? Why did you leave your job? What are you going to do now? How are you going to make this work financially? When are you going to start looking for another job?…” All of the questions are well-meaning. I can’t help but wonder though, is there a deeper meaning behind them? Is there a subtle judgement laced behind some of the questions? It’s okay. I’m asking myself some of the same questions.

There is a judgmental voice within that I’ve been trying to quiet for much of my life. It continues to rear it’s ugly head and did so with gusto last week on my 40th birthday. The questions and doubt were swimming around me… “you’re pathetic. unemployed and 40. You have nothing to show for yourself. Your accomplishments are null and void.” I can be pretty vile at times and with the advent of my 40th birthday I turned on myself.

When I take a step back though, and give myself just a little bit of room to breathe, I can see a light. A clearing. It’s still a bit hazy but I can see that I took this leap of faith for one of the most dignified reasons there is. I decided to leave my full-time job and insert a pause in my career for the sake of my family and my mental health. The last 3 years, since fall 2018 have been some of the most magical. And yet, at the same time, I’ve experienced some of the most challenging feats of my short life, trying to juggle what some say is “having it all.” A young marriage, buying a new home, the birth of our daughter. When I peel back the layers though, it’s been a much more nuanced journey.

From navigating the fertility process as a same-sex couple, a high-risk pregnancy, the mental toll we’ve all endured through the pandemic, the birth of our daughter in July 2020, a rippling postpartum anxiety and depression, the transition back to work over the last year, juggling a full time job and motherhood and what I am realizing now has been a slowly simmering state of Burnout.

I don’t think I’m unique. I know there are millions of other new moms (dads and caregivers) who are trying to navigate this balancing act. With this blog, I am hoping to document and reflect on the meaning behind taking a step back from the 9-5 grind while trying to raise a young child and preserve a family that has been tested through the waves of a pandemic. I realize I am fortunate to be able to take this leap of faith. Most women (and new parents) in my situation are not able to leave their jobs.

I hope that in taking this pause to be home with my young daughter and heal from what I’m realizing are years of running on empty, I can provide a glimpse into the benefits of slowing down. I will share stories, small moments, reflections on the past months and years leading up to today and will not be afraid to ask some hard questions of myself.

I invite you to join me on this journey, keep me company and let me know what you’re thinking. Let’s explore the art of taking a pause…