1 Year Later

“Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver, the other is gold.

A circle is round, it has no end.
That’s how long, I will be your friend.

A fire burns bright, it warms the heart.
We’ve been friends, from the very start.

You have one hand, I have the other.
Put them together, we have each other.

Silver is precious, gold is too.
I am precious, and so are you.

You help me and I’ll help you
and together we will see it through…
Girl Scouts of the USA

Friday, June 14, 2024. What would have been a typical Friday. Dropping my daughter off at school. Staying for an Early Childhood (EC) Shabbat morning gathering at her preschool. But today, in a mere moment, I’m catapulted into a time machine. I drop my daughter off at her “old” school for the summer. (It is a family run daycare that has a preschool within it). She will attend from mid-June to mid-August, just barely two months. No big deal, right? It was a logistical decision really, to bridge us from one school year to the next at our new Jewish community day school, where our daughter has thrived this past school year. She’s grown by leaps and bounds. There have of course been some bumps but we have ridden the waves of transition and she has settled into a new “home.”

Finding ourselves back at the doorstep of our “old” school is like putting a mirror in front of us where I’m unexpectedly reflecting back on myself and this past year. Am I proud of what we have accomplished? Can everyone see my wrinkled forehead now? Why does it feel like we continue to ride the waves of a new family? The transitions just keep coming…

And this “old school” is the school where we first dropped our daughter off when she had barely started walking, at about 14 months old. She was known for her “babbling,” going on and on and on with gibberish before she learned to put her words together. Before she started singing Moanna lyrics and dancing to her new beats. This is where her teachers picked her up to change a diaper on the large wooden changing table and slobbered sunscreen on her before going outside. Where she had her first skinned knees. Where we learned she was a “jokester,” egging on the other students to join her in a mischievous rebellion. Where we learned from her teachers that she was incredibly bright and hard-willed. Standing in the center of the room, refusing to leave when the rest of the group was transitioning from one activity to the next. “I don’t want to X, Y, Z!” she would exclaim. Transitions have always been hard for her (and now I know where she gets that from).

Last summer when we said goodbye to her old school, she had just turned three. She was so brave and went with the flow as we moved her in July for her birthday to a new preschool room within the school and then again at the end of August to a whole new school. She looks around the room this morning, following my eyes looking nervously around the room too. Wondering perhaps, where do I put my lunchbox here? I hang my backpack on a hook and not in a cubby? My parents come inside for drop off instead of saying goodbye outside? All seemingly innocuous, trivial concerns, but in the head of a toddler, not insignificant at all.

Our daughter’s time at the “old” school last summer was a fog. A blurry haze. On June 15, 2023 I broke my ankle in a freak accident. One week later I had major surgery and two weeks later I started a new full time job. I stumbled into this school on my crutches most of the summer to do drop off.

And today I find myself asking, what have I been present for in the last year? What has changed? What has stayed the same?

It’s now summer 2024…I’m jogging (albeit slowly) again. I’m more confident working full time again since having my daughter. I have colleagues I respect. We’ve weathered (and continue to weather) deep, deep trauma from upheaval in Israel and Gaza…the existential threats and panic it’s brought to our bodies and our people. It has been all-consuming. And yet, after a year attending a Jewish day school, our daughter can now recite the prayers on Shabbat. She hums and mumbles tunes in Hebrew, without being aware that I’m listening. My heart warms for the community she’s created and the safety and comfort of her “new” school.

AND I can be grateful that she will be held in safety this summer too. She will step back and forward at the same time. She will continue to stretch and grow, even with the time machine we’ve placed before her.

I stand back in awe as she points out letters on the carpet she knows and peers through the window at the gaping playground she just barely remembers climbing on as a 3 year old. “I remember that playground. I love that playground,” she says. My heart constricts and then releases. And I remember, we are okay. We have been through a lot this year, AND we are okay.

We can take two steps forward and two steps back at the same time. This is not a contradiction. Or perhaps it is and then life is a moving target of contradictions.

And rather than resist and make sense of all the waves intellectually, we can exhale and let go of the resistance and the constriction. I will accept that this summer will bring with it a new journey for her and for us. A new plethora of trail heads. All pointing in different directions. And our daughter will bravely explore them all. With gratitude for new beginnings and old memories all seeped into one. I’m still a bit hesitant but grateful to be welcomed back.

Perhaps our reflections and “time travel” do not need to be projected on our children. Our waves of emotions and dizziness at times do not have to dictate their journeys.

As I exhale and buckle in for this next chapter, I draw wisdom from this classic campfire song I started singing last week when explaining that she was going to a “new/old school” this summer… “Make new friends, But keep the old. Some are silver and the other gold.”

May we lean into each day at this “new/old school,” making new memories, built upon layers and layers of old ones, that form a foundation on which we keep moving forward.

Meditation on Change

“Open the window of your mind. Allow the fresh air, new lights and new truths to enter.”
Amit Ray

Aging is a funny thing. It happens constantly. In every moment. While we are awake and while we are sleeping. Most of these moments just pass by, unnoticed. It is a natural and inevitable part of life and yet we often fight it. Or at least I fight it.

The gray hairs that start to slip through, harder to hide. Wrinkles on my face. An increase in aches and pains when I don’t work out as much. Or when I do work out. I’m growing older. Most of us don’t have too many outlets to make sense of this process. Instead we buy our way into stopping the aging process. Try this beauty service. Use this jade roller. Meditate more. Eat lighter foods. All of these recommendations on their own are perfectly reasonable and ones we could likely benefit from, but taken together, they feel overwhelming and at times counterproductive.

Our six year old Portuguese water dog, Halligan (aka Hal), was recently diagnosed with aggressive liver cancer. He was given a prognosis of about 1-2 months, if we pursue treatment. And if we don’t pursue treatment then we are looking at weeks or even days. Of course no one can say for sure and the research is spotty but either way you look at it, we have very little time left with him.

How on earth do you process something like this? One moment he’s seemingly healthy, running 2 miles in the woods with us and the next we are talking about comfort measures and how we want to talk to our toddler about mortality. (Tips on this are welcome by the way.)

As I remain hyper vigilant to Hal’s symptoms, I notice that so many of my waking hours are spent in a state of subtle scanning. I think I’m channeling my ancestors and looking for a fire to put out or a threat from neighboring tribes. I’m almost always in problem-solving mode, planning out my week ahead or doing the math on how I’m going to get to my new job on time while “lightly” guiding my daughter through her morning routine. (She’s rounding 3 years old and the concept of “threenager” feels apt.)

As I prepare to return to work full time, I’m asking myself, how did this happen again? I took the last year a half to step back and find a sense of calm and balance from the the frenzied pace I had been moving at. And, yet, if I’m being brutally honest with myself, I think I’ve recalibrated bit by bit so that I’m still following the same patterns just a little less intensely. All of these behaviors I’m sure are adaptive and in place to protect me from unseen threats. However, they are still getting in the way of me being in the here and now.

In this next phase, as I return to work, I want to reflect on what I’ve learned since “Taking a Pause” 20 months ago. In no particular order…

Our relationships are sacred. Our partners, our children, our parents, our colleagues, our neighbors, our friends…They are primary and deserve to be elevated above all else. No work stress or drama or inconsequential, petty argument is worth jeopardizing the connections we’ve built with those around us.
Parenting is hard. Full stop. Give myself grace as the journey continues to unfold.
When I feel cynical, which I do often, try to reframe or consider a new perspective. How am I learning, growing, and stretching through this hard thing? What is another way to look at this moment?
Dream. Imagine. Rest. Allow myself space for rest and creativity. Having just finished Tricia Hersey’s, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, I’m moved and saddened by how consumed many of us are by “grind culture.” The oppressive nature that white supremacy and capitalism have on us is dripping in plain sight and yet we can’t see it because we’re too busy grinding away. It’s in our blood and our social makeup, but it doesn’t have to be our fate. We can resist.
It’s okay to not have it all figured out. Multiple times throughout the past year and a half I thought about making major career and life changes. I researched schools, ministries, organizations, yoga teacher training programs, etc. I shadowed, I prayed, I asked for answers.

And…now….I find myself returning to something very familiar, to an organization for which I worked previously. I think my search and quest for change has ironically (or not so ironically) brought me back to where I started so many years ago when I first moved up to CT.

Perhaps though, while I have come full circle in some ways, I have changed in the process. I have grown and surely aged (as is evident by my greys). And hopefully I’ve garnered a little more wisdom about what matters.

In this next chapter for myself and for all of us, may we go easy on ourselves and others. May we see the world for all its beauty and all its pain. May we stop for snuggles and cuddles and belly rubs and know the sky will not fall if we don’t send that last email. Perfectionism is dangerous and a form of violence and is perhaps the biggest threat of all to this messy and sacred process of living.

Sending love and blessings for whatever small or big steps lie ahead.

1 Year Later: Mindset Matters

“Perfection is the mountain that has no peak.”
Emma Norris

If you had told me last year I would be celebrating New Years Eve 2022 embarking on the joys of potty training I would have probably said, “that sounds like a cruel joke.”

Today we introduced our daughter to “big girl underwear.” Getting to choose among patterns including owls, mermaids, tropical fruit and trucks was a really BIG deal. In full transparency, I was dreading this process. It brings up in me all my angst around ceding control, embracing messiness (literally and figuratively) and transitions. Moreover, asking a toddler to give up a security blanket (the diaper), which is often all they have known since birth is a tall order. It’s scary and uncomfortable and not intuitive in the least. And yet, our children have to learn eventually (my older, wiser friends have promised me they won’t go to college in diapers).

As I reflect back on 2022 and what lies ahead in the new year, I continue to see my daughter and parenting as my biggest teachers. It’s been a year and counting since I started this blog. From the get go, I’ve struggled with issues of productivity and perfectionism. Through my research and writing I’ve come to see just how deep-seated these traits are in our modern culture and way of being. I touched upon this theme in one of my first blog entries, noting how tied up our sense of self-worth is with our notion of accomplishing and chasing that illusive something, whether it be a job, relationship or some idea of happiness.

Gradually, I’ve spent this last year slowing down and scaling back what is possible to produce or accomplish. Through this process I’ve recognized how habitual my “need to please” is. Whether it be through seeking validation on a parenting choice or trying to fit my life into a perfect mold of what I think it “should” look like, I continue to put increasing pressure on myself to “get it right.” Contemplating the next right move professionally, personally and spiritually consumes my thoughts most days. Making a decision about what preschool to send our daughter to next year has been like asking me to choose just one sushi roll off an entire menu. Impossible! You can’t make a perfect decision. There is no such thing and even if there was, it won’t live up to the ideal I have conjured up in my head.

At the end of the day, most of this pressure is self-imposed. We want to “do right” by our loved ones and set ourselves and them up for success. And, yet, we have to balance that idea of success with the excruciating truth that life will be hard. We will fall down, a lot. We will have “accidents” (pun intended) and there is no prescribed school or methodology that will shield us from this truth.

Perhaps then our growth comes from learning to relate differently to our pain and worries. How do we respond and react when things get hard and there is no template for how to move forward? How do we hold compassion for ourselves in the process?

Can we begin by accepting that we don’t know all the answers, nor should we? We do not need to decipher every possible outcome and algorithm when making a decision. Instead, what would it feel like to connect with humility to the messy, tangled process of living itself?

In this New Year, may a “good day” or a “good choice” be measured not by what we’ve accomplished, but instead by how we’ve related to ourselves. Did we revel in picking out the best pattern of underwear (or socks) in the morning and then remember to laugh at our bumps and “boo boos” along the way.

To all my friends and readers, happy 2023 and happy stumbling.

Note to Myself: Reflection on Parenting

“What would it be like if I could accept life – accept this moment – exactly as it is?”
Tara Brach

Laurie Berkner at The Bushnell, Hartford, CT 10/15/22

Dear Momma,

This wasn’t about you or your parenting in any way. Your daughter is fine. You are learning alongside her.

You got her tickets to see Laurie Berkner perform live in Hartford, CT. Her favorite artist! You blocked off the day. You carved out precious time for your family. You agreed not to invite anyone else so this could be a true family outing. It was just her, Mommy and Ima. You made every contingency plan necessary, got everyone out the door in enough time. Checklist–snack, diapers, hands, face, teeth, shoes and socks. And managed to get another pair of pants and socks on when the first pair got wet from stepping in your dog’s water bowl.

You bought these tickets months ago and were thrilled to give this experience to her. As a gift, a memory she would never forget.

And yet, when we settle into our seats and you look around, you can tell she seems unsettled. Maybe overwhelmed? Unsure what to make of her surroundings? A baby born during the pandemic, this is possibly one of the largest crowds she’s been around.

Laurie comes dancing down the aisle with her guitar and sings a familiar tune… “When I woke up today…I shouted out Hooray!…” My eyes light up and my ears can’t believe what they are hearing. Is it really her? Live, in the flesh? Strumming her guitar 20 feet away. Unbelievable.

I glance over and see my daughter melting to the ground. Shrinking into a cocoon. Eyes glazed over, lying on the floor, attempting to do a summersault in the aisle and trying to get away. She seems somewhere else. She doesn’t know what to make of it perhaps? Looks out at Laurie a few times and tries to take it all in, but then retreats again. Too much? Tired? Hungry? Cautious? Worried? I may never know.

Maybe she is unable to express how unbelievably strange it is to see this icon live, a blink of an eye away, after only seeing her on a screen or dancing to her music on Pandora. Yes, Laurie Berkner is real. She’s a person too.

I’m so incredibly disappointed in that moment. Yet, in reflecting back, I realize that as much as much as I want my daughter to fall in love with Laurie Berkner in concert, to jump up and down to “Chipmunk at the Gas Pump,” like the other kids, that’s simply not what she is feeling today. She is being her authentic self.

Perhaps to be accepting of my own thoughts, feelings and actions is an admirable goal for myself too. To share our emotions with our children and allow them to share theirs with us. And to be validating and at peace with the “let downs” and inevitable perplexities and complexities of childhood and parenting that will come.

—–

A few weeks later, this experience helps me stay much more grounded on Halloween night when my daughter refuses(!) to put on her Halloween green dinosaur costume to go trick-or-treating. She has been talking about this costume for weeks and practically every day leading up to Halloween. And yet, when push comes to shove, she decides that she doesn’t want to wear her costume and instead prefers to walk around the neighborhood and simply ask for candy.

Yet, what starts off as another huge “wait, you have to like this” (oh, what did I do wrong?) moment ends with a renewed appreciation for my child’s intuition. We must trust them, to know what’s best for them and find ways to trust ourselves in the process too.

Ultimately, my daughter decides that instead of wearing her dinosaur costume for Halloween she is going to cart it around the whole night in her blue car. It will go trick-or-treating with her!

Thank goodness for children’s creative spirts and our ongoing practice as adults to stretch — and be true to ourselves — alongside them.

Meditation on Parenting

“What would it be like if I could accept life – accept this moment – exactly as it is?”
Tara Brach

Accept that I do need my family’s help, a lot.

Accept that I clogged a toilet 5 minutes before signing on to a virtual meeting this morning and had to wait till after the meeting to plunge it.

Accept that as I’m about to take my daughter out for the morning to a museum, I learn that she might have an ear infection and need to stay local and schedule a last minute doctor’s appointment instead.

Accept that during our “local” playtime when we went to the library, my daughter showed that she definitely doesn’t fully understand the concept of sharing. (Snatched toy train cars from a child’s hands, proclaiming “mine!”)

Accept that my daughter said “mommy and daddy” as I was putting her in her car seat after the library. (She does not have a daddy.)

Accept that her lunch with egg salad was VERY messy and went all over her and the floor.

Accept that all I could do with the dog today was a short 5 minute walk.

—
Accept that parenting is hard. So much of it is outside our control…in fact every tiny moment is outside our control. The more we can let go of expectations and lean into acceptance and grace the better. Perhaps then we can laugh and lean into unexpected moments of joy along the way. (photo taken that same evening when we made it to Middletown’s Crystal Lake Park)

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.”