Shavasana with a baby

One of the things I’ve been trying to get back into is a short morning yoga routine. Even though YouTube abounds with yoga practices, I find I can focus better without the visual element so I usually use yoga podcasts to guide me. I know I could always just turn the volume off of a YouTube video, but I find that the people who lead the practice are less descriptive when there is a visual component. My current ideal yoga routine length is about twenty to twenty five minutes. I can do a longer practice in a class, but for some reason when on my own, I can’t focus as long. (I know the point of yoga is focus, so this is a little ironic).

The kids are now of an age that they can fend for themselves for twenty minutes in the morning while I slip away to the basement and roll out my yoga mat and put my earphones in. I’m not quite sure what they do for those twenty minutes, but I don’t think they are getting into the knives or burning the house down, so I figure they’ll be fine. Sometimes they are getting into my chocolate stash, though, which is almost as dire. On a good day, they are getting dressed.

The other day, as I was doing my yoga, the baby came down. She thinks it’s great fun to crawl all over me while I’m doing yoga. Something about the various poses screams “HUMAN JUNGLE GYM!!! OPEN FOR CLIMBING!!!”. She’ll sit on me while I do bridge pose, and giggle as she goes up and down with my pelvis. Warrior two finds her climbing up on my bent leg to hang on to my arms. Downward dog makes a tunnel for her to crawl under. It does make it a little difficult to move into chaturanga or plank pose to have her lying under me. Sometimes we play “squish” the baby when that happens.

In a way, it reminds me of when the kids were just born and I took a post-natal yoga class at my local hospital. They were held on weekday mornings and the new moms would always come in gingerly with their little squishy babies. The instructor was so amazing and she taught us to be as gentle with ourselves as we were with our little babies. Some classes, I spent the entire 45 minutes nursing, though I did manage to figure out how to nurse a baby while in bridge pose…. I’m listing this as one of my hidden talents.

At a birthday party recently, I talked to someone recently whose son was in the same pre-school class as my five year old. Turns out we had been in the same post natal yoga class with these boys who are now about to start Kindergarten. She commented on how she felt like she spent the whole class nursing and was always a little frustrated by that. “I finally got out of the house to do something,” she said, “And I still ended up attached to the baby. I felt so frustrated because I just wanted to spend some time doing something. It was supposed to be me time!”

I feel that resentment sometimes when the baby interrupts my yoga. This is me time, not mommy baby time. Yet the other day, when she came down and proceeded to insert herself into my routine, I tamped down my annoyance and tried to lean into it. I tried to savour her playfulness and her big smiles as she looked at me from below as I attempted some kind of Warrior. I took on her weight when she jumped on me as I was doing a seated forward fold. And I gave her kisses as I went from cow to cat and back again.

And then I settled into shavasana – aka corpse pose, aka the pose at the end of the practice where you just lie on your back and let go. The moment I was supine, the baby crawled on top of me and put her head on my chest. Well, actually at first she dug her pointy little chin on my chest, which was not relaxing. So I said, “Can you put your cheek on my chest?” and she turned her head to one side and laid her pillowy round cheek over my heart. And as the voice in my ear told me to relax and breathe and empty my mind, I thought, “With a thirty pound toddler on me? You’re kidding right?”

Then something happened as I tried to obey the voice in my ear that told me to breath and let go. I took deep breaths, and the baby breathed with me. And as we lay there, breathing together, I realized, “Okay, this is ‘me time’ too.” And all my resentment went away. Because I realized, right now, in this season of life, these kids are a part of me. I don’t mean that in the scary self-erasing, symbiotic almost parasitic sense that I sometimes feel when my kids are draining the energy from me. Nor was it one of those sentiments where I’m sacrificing myself and my tranquility on the altar of motherhood for these little terrors, you know, all the toxicity of the tired mom trope.

It was just this realization that our lives have been so intertwined and close, particularly these past two years, and that yeah, I do identify a lot as a mom these days, and it’s absolutely okay to allow myself to feel so defined by that. If a lot of the stress and anger and despair I feel within me some days come from parenting, then certainly a lot of the joy and wonder and peace does to. Like this moment, trying to squeeze in some yoga with a toddler interjecting at every turn. Come the following week, the kids will all be in school, and me time may look very different. For now, though, me time can be mom time, savoring the sweet weight of a little person doing Shavasana with me.