Tangled up in Love

The women in my family love to cook.  We adore spending hours and hours, days even, in the kitchen. Chopping, dicing, kneading, rolling, sautéing, baking, simmering.  Combining flavors into food.  There’s something sacred about it, it seems to me.  Thanksgiving is a time when we have been known to pull out all the stops.  Menu planning has been known to begin in October.  Feasts have been laid that are the result of three talented cooks, at least one day of prep,  and a day-long marathon of juggling dishes into and out of a single oven and four stove-top burners.  This year Thanksgiving was a little different.  The menu was pared down to the basics.  The day held only the essentials.  It was quieter.  It was simpler.  It was punctuated by cuddles and hours of nursing on the couch, in the rocker, and at the dinner table.  

A newborn changes the rhythm of life. 

Thanksgiving as a holiday, despite its problematic history of intolerance and genocide, is for me primarily a time for drawing close with loved ones, celebrating the inherent abundance of the universe, and for gratitude.  This year was FULL UP of those.  So much love of ones so close, so much gratitude.   

One month ago, I welcomed my daughter into the world.  Avery Iona was born gently, into water, just as the sun was rising behind the snow-clad birches. 

My gratitude list this year is simply a litany of her name.  Over and over.  Gratitude and love.  It gives life a whole new sense of meaning, wrapping intention and purpose around this brilliant spark of light and love in a tiny human body.  

This year, for her first-ever Thanksgiving, she joined us in the kitchen.  Wrapped in a sling, sleeping and awake on her mama’s chest, she helped prep the turkey and get it in the oven.  Granted: we spent plenty of time nursing on the couch while Grandma kept the kitchen company; and she spent time cuddling with Grandma and with her dad while I chopped and mixed… But for a bit she joined in the grand kitchen dance, learning the rhythms of the cook.  And that is as it should be.  That is my thanksgiving.  

Today, she is one month old.  One month since my world changed forever. Babies are magic, it seems to me.  They indelibly change the world as they enter it, shifting the fabric of the universe with their very presence.  As they birth themselves, they birth parents, sometimes siblings.  They birth a whole new family.  They tangle everyone up in love. 

And for that, dear existence, I thank you.

Taking Leave

I make a living holding space for people to take time for themselves, guiding people –women especially – to listen to and to honor their own deep inner wisdom.  I advocate for self care.  “May you give not from an empty well, but from a well that is overflowing” is my tagline as a teacher and a healer.  It is what I remind my students of, what I encourage my clients to realize in their lives.

Sometimes I forget that it also applies to me.

When I got pregnant and started setting money aside for “maternity leave,” I gave lip service to the idea that I would stop teaching if and when baby needed me to.  But really, I planned to keep teaching until baby arrived.  I mean, I teach gentle yoga.  And prenatal yoga.  And women have been working and having babies for millennia.  There’s no reason I can’t continue – mindfully and gently, but pretty much as normal – until this baby arrives, right?  Wrong.

For the most part, this pregnancy has been a beautiful experience.  Emotionally, spiritually, energetically, creatively.  Pregnancy looks beautiful on me.  It feels beautiful on me.  Except for one thing.  One at times excruciating thing.  I’ve had the *ahem* opportunity to experience pubic symphisis pain for the last several months.  (For those of you unfamiliar with what this is… basically:  The pubic bone is actually a joint.  Pregnancy floods the body with relaxin hormone to help pelvis open for birth and body to be able to grow with baby.  One of the places where pelvic opening happens is at the pubis.  Sometimes the two bones get out of whack with one another and it hurts a whole lot.)  I made it a priority to take good physical care of myself through this pregnancy: regular chiropractic, massage, Arvigo Mayan abdominal massage, acupuncture.  But none of it helped the pubic pain for more than a few hours.

I powered through.  Taught class.  8 of them a week.  I had a commitment to my students, right?  
But I found myself dreading the next class, sitting in my car outside the yoga studio unwilling to go in.  Finally one class I shifted position while guiding a meditation and literally started crying – in the middle of class! On the teacher’s mat! – from the pain in my hips.  I realized that I had to stop teaching.  I needed rest and space more than I needed the money or the extra month of connection with my students.  I’m so grateful to my fellow yoga teachers, to the owners of the studio where I teach for swooping in and supporting me in this decision.  

It was really really difficult to give myself the permission to take the time and the space and the rest that my body, and this baby, were demanding.  I felt guilty.  I felt selfish.  It’s amazing how pernicious the ego can be.  Expecting and demanding I live up to some standard that I’d not fully consciously set for myself.   When I made the choice to start my babymoon nearly a month earlier than I’d planned?  Full-body sigh of relief.  

And let me tell you, it has been the right choice.  It has been a couple of weeks now since I taught my last class.  My energy is better.  I’m able to take things at my own, slow, baby-induced pace.  I’ve been spending so much time at home.  Making things in the studio.  Rearranging the downstairs living space.  Sorting baby clothes.  Nesting.  I needed this time.  This space.  This rest.  And you know what?  My hips hurt less.  Because I’m no longer tempted by all the inappropriate-for-me yoga poses I was teaching my students.  No longer running across town to get to the next class.  No longer requiring that the deep inner rhythms of pregnancy modulate themselves to those of the external world.

I’m a huge advocate for parental leave policies that support the realities of life, pregnancy and birth.  Scandinavia is on the right track, y’all.  So is Italy.  Minimum 6 months paid leave for moms?  Should be standard.  Current US practices?  Ridiculous.

And yet, somehow, I felt guilty giving myself the same time and space I advocate for others to have.  Felt guilty for my privilege of having a supportive working spouse and just enough money set aside that we won’t default on our mortgage for me to take a few months off.  Because I know there are women who work up to the day they give birth and are back at work 2 weeks later.  My heart bleeds for them, and for their children.  I cringe at the reality of the toll that takes on their bodies, on their physical and mental health for the rest of their lives.  And so I felt guilty for giving myself time off not only after the birth, but during this last month of pregnancy.  I’m endlessly thankful for good friends who call me out on unreasonable guilt.  Who remind me, if not in so many words, to be the change I want to see in the world.  How is it helpful to the cause of reasonable maternity leave to push through my own need for leave?  And you know, I am a teacher.  I’m a teacher of prenatal yoga, and as such a model for how to use yoga to support the journey of pregnancy…  what am I saying to my students if I deny myself the space and depth of connection I hope to guide them towards finding?  

Besides which:

Baby may still be on the inside, but I’m a mom now.  And it’s as true for moms as it is for healthcare workers… you cannot pour from an empty cup.

“May you give not from an empty well, but from one that is overflowing.”
-ancient sufi prayer

Good Night Moon

This fall I participated in the Great Competition of Weavers .  It was so so so much fun, and a really useful kick in the rear end to sit myself down at the loom!  It is a competition of weavers of babywearing wraps from all over the world.  If you are interested in such things, or would like to vote the next time around, go join Loom to Wrap on Facebook and keep an eye out for the 2016 competition(s).

The theme this time was "Children's Literature." Honestly, I was a little bit on the fence about whether I wanted to enter this fall.  I had only just found out about it, and with the baby on the way, I was debating the wisdom of diving quite so headfirst into such a project.  But when the theme was announced, I knew there was no choice.  I had to do it.  And I had to do "Good Night Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown.  I have to admit that I second guessed myself a number of times, most notably perhaps when the yarn showed up at my door.  The bright and primary colors used to illustrate "Good Night Moon" are SO not my colors.  I almost threw in the towel right then.  But I'm so glad I didn't.

I was an English major in college, and as such the word 'literature' has certain connotations for me.  I recognize that the genre of "children's literature" contains any story for children that is printed on a page and disseminated in the form of a book.  But for me, not any story would do.  Literature is somehow something more.  And you see, "Good Night Moon" taught me to read.  It was therefore the only book I could do.

I don't have any memory of not being able to read.  I remember not being able to write.  I have memories from an age at which I know that I was not yet reading.  But I have no memory of written words as a code that I did not understand.  My mother read "Good Night Moon" to me over and over.  Hundreds if not a thousand times or more.  She tells me that I had it memorized, that I would "read" it to friends and visitors before I had actually acquired reading as a skillset.  But between being read other books (lots of them!  all the time!) and a constant repetition of "Good Night Moon," I decoded written language and began reading on my own at age 3 or so.  So in a very real way, beyond being a great kids book, "Good Night Moon" opened my doors to the vast and wonderful world of literature.  

I wanted to honor the words of the story, somehow pay homage to the code of the writing that this book illuminated for me.  So in addition to choosing the colors of the book for the pattern of the warp, I decided to weave the story into the weft.  The weft alternates between black and white, and by a very happy accident this alternation along with the stripes in the warp combine for a gorgeous tartan effect.  

I assigned each letter in the alphabet a number, 1 through 26.  I assigned the spaces between letters the value of 2 and the spaces between words the value of 5.  And I proceeded to weave the letters in black and the spaces in white, spelling out the text of the story.  So if you were to spend the time counting the threads of the wrap or happened to have a scanner with the correct programming, the wrap can be read similarly to a bar code from tail to tail.  It begins "In the great green room...."

The colors of the warp are pulled from this page:

They are a stylized representation, perhaps a distillation, of the patterns of color as they move across the page (and across the width of the warp) from left to right.  You can see the stripes of green and yellow for the curtains, the little rainbow for the bookshelf on one side, and the blue and white stripes of the bunny's pajamas on the other side.

All in all, I'm very happy with how the design turned out.  I hope that someone enjoys the tartan wrap as a staple of an autumn wardrobe, as a Christmas-y accessory, or on a future trip to Scotland!  I'll be selling it via draw real soon on the 14 Mile Farm Facebook page.  

"Goodnight room, goodnight moon, goodnight cow jumping over the moon."