WANDERLUST OR BUST (part 2)

August 3rd, 2011 by Diana
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On day two of the Wanderlust Yoga & Music Festival, I started to make friends with the Beautiful People who’d so intimidated me at first.  I even began to enjoy the eye candy, mostly young and female, that enticed at every turn.  In my Advanced Kula Flow class, I tried to focus my gaze on my own navel during Downward Dog but had to pause and admire the magnificent booty of one woman behind me—a luscious peach in her snug Lululemon Groove pants.

Michael Franti & Spearhead- yes I was there!

My husband likewise got distracted by ample cleavage in a pink halter top and found himself wondering (before he caught his monkey mind and brought it back to the present) whether his neighbor’s assets were real or silicone. Eventually we both saw a spectrum of physical beauty—all ages, all sizes— like the radiant older yogis invited before the crowd at the Michael Franti & Spearhead concert Saturday night.

“Is there anyone out there over sixty!?” asked Franti—a dreadlocked social justice rocker with a global band.  Screams and whoops erupted from the audience, and a handful of women (and one lone guy) came up on stage for the final encore.  I watched as a silver-haired goddess boogied with the rock star.  She shook her hips with unabashed joy, on fire from the music, reveling in her own hotness as well as her proximity to Franti.

Maybe it just gets better, I thought.  Maybe we lose our self-consciousness as we age, maybe we keep becoming more fully who we are.  I thought of the sexy tattooed yoga nymphets from class, and for that evening felt grateful and content to be myself, in between young and old.  Everyone at Wanderlust radiated a “yoga glow” after intense practice, something no skin-care line or clothing designer could package and sell, no matter how they tried to co-opt the intangibles of yoga as a marketing force.

Over the next 24 hours, I piked up into Handstand, put my foot behind my head, and did Breath of Fire for 11 minutes with my arms stretched up high, shaking, exhilarated.  Advanced practices, yes, but all of them infinitely easier than motherhood.  I could do yoga and meditate for three days straight and it would still be less challenging than one afternoon with two unhappy squabbling children. [Read more →]

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WANDERLUST OR BUST (part 1)

August 3rd, 2011 by Diana
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I worked hard to get to Wanderlust.  Three days of “Yoga, Music, and Nature” at Stratton Mountain, and I was determined to be join the party, no matter how much sleep and money I lost in the process.

Famous yogis Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidmann at Wanderlust

The chilled-out Acro-Yogi moms were bringing their kids with them, I knew, letting them run free by the pond where the Yoga-Slackers practiced lunges on a slack-line and the Hoop-Yogis spun like whirling dervishes besides the eco-friendly rubber mat vendors.

But I planned to leave my offspring behind—even if it took an elaborate constellation of babysitters to make it happen.  At night I’d drive home and put my girls to bed.  By day I’d be released from all my mom duties—simply practice yoga, take classes with superstar teachers I’d only read about in magazines.

Was this too much to ask?  I imagined I could channel my younger self, the idealist who was up for anything, who went to Kripalu Center 15 years before it was trendy, unafraid to bunk in the dorms and scrub toilets as part of her Seva (selfless service) in exchange for sauteed kale and yoga instruction.

Two weeks before the festival, I started to suffer a heady mix of excitement and anxiety.  A much younger friend from my 20-something life was going too.  I hadn’t seen her in years, and on the phone she laughed, “We’re calling it Wanderslut here”–  referring to her group of sleek, childless yoga teachers.

Wanderslut? Oh dear.  I was going to be out of my element.  A decade ago I could have joined the crowd and been a Wanderslut, but not anymore.   I didn’t tell her that the in-joke effectively excluded me from the festivities.

Didn’t the word “Yoga” mean union?  Wasn’t it about liberating ourselves from the illusion of separateness, the false gap between the individual ego and the vast oneness of Being?  We’d all felt this at the end of yoga class, lying in Savasana (corpse pose), literally “practicing death,” leaving behind the mundane tasks and lists of daily life and merging—if only for a moment—with the infinite.

Wasn’t the purpose of yoga to master the critical, judging monkey mind?  Didn’t we want to shed our shallow, external selves like dead skins and drop into bare bliss?

But the yoga cliques were forming, the anticipation was building, and by the time I got to Wanderslut—I mean Wanderlust—my worst nightmares had come true.  I was surrounded by Beautiful People:  young, tan, toned 28-year-olds from New York and San Francisco, their gorgeous bodies bedecked in boutique yoga-wear, laughing over their green juice smoothies in the Stratton Mountain Base Lodge.  They sported sexy tattoos and feathers in their hair and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.  As you get older, you start to feel invisible.  Maybe the purpose of my yoga practice was to dissolve the prison bars of the ego and free myself from the mind’s ceaseless commentary, but that whole first day, I was trapped in it.

Many practitioners had been together at Wanderlust for days already.  I felt like the new kid at sleep-away camp, bewildered and a little homesick.  “What am I doing here?” my mind repeated like a mantra during my second class—“Superheroes Training”—an arm balancing flow done to live music. Students whooped and cheered like they were at a rock concert as the flawless teachers showed off advanced poses on stage.  Was this a performance or a meditative practice? My unruly mind was full of judgment—not love and equanimity.

[Read more →]

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SHE’S GONE COUNTRY

July 28th, 2011 by Diana
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I spent my high school years disparaging country music.  My best friend Sarah and I would make merciless fun of her dad, a bearded orthopedist who drove a shiny pick-up and only listened to 107.7 Hot Country.  Our favorite joke went:  “What happens when you play a country song backwards?”

We delivered the punch-line in a fake Southern drawl:  “You git yer wife back, you git yer dog back, you git yer pick-up truck back…”

We thought this was hilarious, and because we were lovers of deep, meaningful lyricists like the Indigo Girls and later, Ani diFranco and Tori Amos, we sneered down our noses at the formulaic stories and twangy guitar of Country.

But a decade later, I’d changed my proverbial tune.  I worked for a landscaper friend in Northern Vermont and we drove around in her turquoise Toyota Tacoma blasting “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” We kept a big wheelbarrow and our dogs in the back of the truck and wore strappy tank-tops that showcased our tanned biceps.  I built stone walls and dated young farmers and somehow, came to love country music.  Not everything, and not all the time, but on humid summer nights driving home alone from the dive bar with all the windows open, the mixture of bare longing with a sense of humor captured my mood.

One of the best parts of getting older is that you don’t have to be ashamed of your tastes anymore.  I’ll admit to anyone that I like country, and I’m thrilled when I discover fellow appreciators.

En route to my mom’s house with the girls last weekend, I got tired of our usual G-rated listening:  Mary Poppins, Wee Sing Silly Songs, The Mouse and the Motorcycle… Instead I cued up an old country mix that opened with Faith Hill belting “She’s a Wild One,” and hoped my daughters would accept the new genre.  They were riveted.

“Mommy, what’s this song about?” asked Ava.

It was Trisha Yearwood singing “She’s in Love With The Boy,” a feel-good (if clichéd) tale of young love.  That’s the thing about country— it thrives on cliché, and those of us who’ve been schooled in discriminating literary analysis at elite academic institutions have to throw away our snooty training and go along for the joy ride.

“It’s about a girl named Katie and she loves a boy named Tommy, but her Daddy doesn’t like him,” I explain.

Ava listens, her face intent on the lyrics.  “It’s telling a story!” she says happily, the 5-year-old hallmark of a good song.  From them on, she wants me to explain everything, but the mood of my mix shifts from sunny to dark. [Read more →]

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THE BEDTIME BLUES

June 22nd, 2011 by Diana
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The heat wave catches us by surprise.  From the gloom of a cold, wet spring comes blazing sun, two girls frolicking in shorts and Crocs.  My energy lifts, the world expands, every day dawns full of possibility.

We swim in the river, plant a sunflower house, eat juice popsicles in a “Girls’ Club” built out of sheets in the sumac grove.  Summer is what we wait for all year, what we dream about in the depths of February, in the chill April rains, and finally it is here and we revel in our new freedom!

The only problem is bedtime.  I remember the old days of 7 0’clock bed, when a nap-less toddler would conk out before her head hit the pillow.  Back then I believed the many promises made by my faithful sleep book, The Sleepeasy Solution, such as:  the earlier you put your child to bed, the better she will sleep.

Said book, our guide during the insomniac years of the Baby Cave, has been collecting dust next to such out-grown classics as Your Two-Year-Old:  Terrible or Tender and Mothering Your Nursing Toddler.  The Sleepeasy authors warn parents that the very LATEST bedtime for children up to age seven should be 8:30 pm.

8:30 pm? What about when it stays LIGHT till 8:30 pm?  How do you convince young children that it is sleepy-time when the green world is still bright outside their windows?  The girls morph into wild creatures after dinner—racing, chasing, rough-housing with Daddy, doing tricks and somersaults on our bed, performing dances, winding themselves up like crazy monkeys. [Read more →]

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FOOD SERVICES

June 8th, 2011 by Diana
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After my first baby was born, I lay in a milky haze in a dim room with dark crimson sheets.  We nursed and slept, nursed and slept as late summer pulsed with cricket-song, and sunflowers blazed in the garden below the window.  My body, which had previously been decorative, had become functional.

I fed the baby and she gained a pound a week— until by fall she was a delicious little butterball with fat rolls on her thighs.  “She’s already 13 pounds!” I said to my neighbor, an experienced mother of three.

“That’s because her mama makes cream,” my friend replied with a smile.  Pride flooded through me.  I might be chronically sleep-deprived and on the verge of sanity, but look what my body could do—nourish a growing creature entirely on its own!

Six years later I look back on that primal, exhausted time with nostalgia.  Now I don’t make cream, I make dinner.  And breakfast, lunch, and snacks.  Back then, I thought only about food for myself (and sometimes my husband), resting assured that our baby was getting all the nutrition she needed from my milk.  What luxury.

Nobody tells you that by the time your children are 30 pounds, you will constantly be feeding them or planning what to feed them next.  I am now in the era of mass consumption.  I buy Big Block cheddar, bags of apples, vats of peanut butter, pounds of pasta.  C. comes home from preschool ravenous, despite the oatmeal and eggs she ate for breakfast and the copious lunch and snacks I packed in her butterfly lunchbox.

“Mommy, I’m HUNGRY,” she moans, proceeding to down a bowl of ramen noodles, carrot-sticks with hummus and a strawberry smoothie.

It’s gratifying to watch my healthy child eat, but I confess I am not a woman who loves to cook.  A friend told me about her grandmother who raised 10 kids on a farm in the Midwest.  This woman woke at 5 am to start cooking breakfast, then cooked all day until dinner.  This is my personal nightmare.  I struggle to pull off a simple family meal that everyone will eat, and often resort (guilt-ridden) to spaghetti with red sauce from a jar.

One mother of two teenagers assuaged my sense of inadequacy.  “At our house, I just have a drawer—it’s mostly healthy food and snacks,” she told me.  “At dinnertime I don’t even cook anymore.  I just open the drawer and let them have at it.  Why should I slave over some meal they won’t even eat?” [Read more →]

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Growing Season

May 30th, 2011 by Diana
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The garden is no place for perfectionism.  Especially with a toddler running wild at your feet.

I’ve always had ambitions of building a Sunflower House—a fortress of Mammoths interspersed with Moulin Rouges, roofed with Heavenly Blue morning glories.  By late August, my children would have a natural playhouse, an enchanted hideaway for picnics.  We could make it a family project—plant it together and watch it grow!

But gardening with young children can be a set-up for frustration, despite its potential for joy.  Last year I finally got started on the Sunflower House on a hot day in early June.  Amanda Ellis-Thurber of Lilac Ridge Farm had given me a flat of sunflower starts for my birthday, so I no longer had any excuses.  My daughters (then aged 2 and 4) frolicked in the zinnias and raced through the basil patch while I laid out supplies.  I should’ve known to lower my expectations, but I was full of romantic visions.

“Look at all these baby sunflowers, girls! If we give them a cozy bed in the earth and some water, they’ll grow 10 feet tall!”

But the girls had already stripped naked and turned on the hose.  They didn’t care about planting seedlings; they wanted a mud pit.  While I dug up sod for the sunflower bed— jumping on the shovel, banging dirt off squares of sod, heaving them into the wheelbarrow— my daughters made mud.  Soon they’d turned my new flower site into ankle-deep ooze.

remains of The Sunflower House

Playing in mud is a primal childhood instinct.  Mud in hair, mud on faces, mud on bellies:  my girls morphed into two brown mud monsters, until someone threw mud at Mommy and she lost her temper.

“STOP IT!  I’m trying to make our sunflower house here!  I need some space and cooperation.”

But whom was I making this house for, anyways?  My type-A green thumb was inhibiting their play.  My husband’s mantra for gardening with kids is:  GO WITH THE FLOW.  “You have to be flexible, do what they want to do,” he says.  His most successful toddler garden activity is digging worms to feed the chickens.  If he really wants to finish a big project like weeding the raspberries, he works alone (usually after 8 pm). [Read more →]

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SPILT MILK LIVE!

May 29th, 2011 by Diana
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Come hear me read Spilt Milk at Next Stage Arts in downtown Putney, VT,  along with New York Times columnist Bob Morris. Hope to see  you there  Saturday, June 11, 7:30 pm!

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Of Mice and Moms

May 3rd, 2011 by Diana
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It’s Friday afternoon before April vacation, and I’m loading up the car with bulging folders of artwork, spare mittens, muddy socks, naptime bedding, and a glass cage of mice.  On a whim, I’ve volunteered to take home Buster and Harriet, the preschool pets.

I’d like to be the kind of mom (laid-back, yet nurturing) who takes care of the classroom animals– as compensation for my other maternal failings.  Of course my daughters are elated, especially C, who wants the rodents to live on her bookcase for nine days.

Bringing home the mice feels a little reckless.  It’s as close as I get to spontaneous these days, a ragged mama who pays bills in the evenings and goes to bed by 10.  There’s also real risk involved, as we have two fierce black cats who were born in a cow barn in East Hardwick, VT, and now spend the warmer months hunting squirrels, chipmunks, rats, snakes— anything that moves—no matter how many bell collars we snap round their necks.

It would be tragic if Rascal and Nomar managed to paw off the top of the mouse cage and sink their claws into Buster and Harriet, who are fat, sleek, and happy, burrowing in a cardboard tube, racing madly on their plastic yellow wheel.

So the girls and I pile the heaviest books we can find on the cage as cat-blockers:  The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh, The Twentieth Century Book of Children’s Literature.

Back in the preschool classroom, these mice were not as fascinating to my daughter as the water table, the nail-pounding station, or the play-doh spaghetti maker.  But once instituted in her very own bedroom, they acquire the magic of newness, and she pulls up a chair to the side of their cage to watch them scrabbling.  Every day she gives them a careful scoop of Mouse Max grain mix, proud to rise to the challenge of responsibility.

Meanwhile, down in the kitchen, her father and mother are cursing like sailors at the mice who are living under the kitchen sink, destroying the dishwasher.

“I can’t believe I’ve willingly brought two new mice into this house,” I lament, calling the appliance repair guy for the fifth time.

Mice have come in through the foundation, nibbled through the floorboards, and eaten the wiring and drain-hoses to our Kitchen Aid.  They’ve also raided the vitamin drawer and absconded with 24 honey-lemon Ricolas, snacked on various tubes of Arnica and first aid creams, enjoyed helpings of fish-oil caplets, and generally made a disgusting mess everywhere. [Read more →]

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Three-peat?

April 13th, 2011 by Diana
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I wake from a nightmare at dawn, tangled in damp sheets.  I was pregnant, just starting to show.  Tired, swollen, and depressed, I wanted to go hiking to boost my mood, but I was ravenous and needed to eat something first.  All I could find was a fluorescent buffet bar in a hotel lobby, loaded with doughy white pastries.  My husband and daughters were gone, and these strange people insisted on chaperoning my hike to make sure I didn’t over-exert myself.

A cloud of lethargy and worry press down on me in the dream.  When I wake, I’m nailed to the bed by the weight of that dark mood.

We’ve been talking about Number Three lately.  After one friend confessed her desire for a third baby, the floodgates of longing opened inside me, and the subject was officially out on the table.  I assumed my husband would shoot down my fantasy with an immediate, “Are you crazy?” but I was dangerously wrong.

“I love babies!” he said, smooching me.  “We could make another little nipster…”

Talking about a baby infuses a relationship with hope.  It fills a stale world of to-do lists, work, and chores with fresh, blossoming potential. Babies are miraculous creatures and they smell like heaven.  I started teaching Mama-Baby Yoga to get babies out of my system, but then my plan backfired—I was entranced with the chubby, cooing infants, their sudden toothless smiles, their warm weight in my arms, how easily they were comforted by their glowing mothers.

At night my husband and I stand together watching our sleeping girls (now comparatively enormous), and imagine we could do it again.  This time, it would be different.  The prenatal depression, the emergency c-section, the colic— none of it would happen, or if it did, we could handle it because we’re be older and wiser.  Right.

My readers offer useful advice.  “What the h-ll are you thinking?” writes one mother of two, who like me, will come out of the Baby Cave this summer.

“I don’t know whether to recommend one puppy or two,” sympathizes a college friend.

One man from Goshen, VT urges me to be environmentally conscious and follow his philosophy of procreation, whereby two parents limit themselves to only two offspring, creating a net-zero population balance and lowering their carbon footprint.  Someone else suggests adopting another child, which is certainly a good option. [Read more →]

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The Writing Life in The Baby Cave

March 31st, 2011 by Diana
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Fuzzy Jacket

All of you know that I haven’t exactly taken to the blogosphere like a duck to water.  I don’t have a SmartPhone or do Twitter (yet).  There are over two million Mommy bloggers on the web and some of them are even making a living at it, and a very few of them (ie, Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com) are topping six figures.

Meanwhile, I still can’t organize myself to post regularly and reply to comments and create daily, thought-provoking LOLs for an online community of loyal readers.   It’s mostly my friends and relatives who read my blog (and I love you guys for doing so!)…

I entered (and lost) a Blog contest for Yoga Journal, despite being sure that because I was a yoga teacher AND a writer, I should win and skyrocket to fame as a big-shot YogaBlogger.  I’ve also been rejected from Mothering magazine, Parents magazine, Family Fun, Glamour, and countless more print and online publications.

But … I was recently a Guest Blogger for “The Writer’s Life blog on Her Circle Ezine.  Here’s a link to my post.

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