Cece Loves Rock 'n' Roll...

Last week Lucia's best friend Cece got her hair chopped off. Cece's always had beautiful, long, dark hair and thick bangs. Now she's in kindergarten and she likes "to wook wike a wock and whoa-ler." She likes black nail polish and black t-shirts with skulls and crossbones. And she wanted a rock 'n' roll hair cut too. So her mom took her to get her hair cut like Joan Jett.

When I saw Cece for the first time with her new haircut, it was as if I was meeting a new person. The haircut somehow made her more Cece-ish. She was radiant. Her smile looked more beautiful, her eyes were more twinkly, she was more Cece than Cece had ever been!

I've never had a haircut that made me feel the way Cece seems to feel in her new do. When I was eleven, I had a seersucker skirt-blouse ensemble that, with french braids, really suited me, but even then I am not sure I was completely in my skin. I was always shy, self-conscious, not sure, so feeling like "me" was often elusive. I don't think that amazing look of joy that Cece had right after her haircut was not in my repertoire of facial expressions. At age 6, I was more the kid sneaking a look at the girl next to me to see if my shoes were as cool as her's.

Finding my way into my skin came through yoga. Something happened when I started practicing. Whether my practice of the day sucked or soared was irrelevant. I was newly, often uncomfortably looking at myself, eventually seeing myself through a different lens. I had to listen to my body. My defenses were broken down and somewhere along the way I shed my self-consciousness and there I was. Me.

Then I started teaching yoga, and I had to do it all over again-- lose the self-consciousness, the fear of being looked at, of saying something stupid, of losing composure in a room of strangers. Sometimes I still feel like an impostor when I am practicing or teaching. More often, though, I get that twinkly-eyed feeling like Cece. The feeling that my skin suits me and I'm exactly where I should be.

Practice Sucks

No matter what kind of yoga you practice, whether you Om, use blocks, stretch naked in your bathtub, or sweat your brains out for 90 minutes, the constant of any yoga practice is that you are doing a practice. Practice, by definition is "to do or perform customarily or habitually." I know this because I just looked it up to win an argument with my 5-year-old. Lucia is taking guitar. I argued that playing Frere Jaques once is not a practice, that it had to be done at least twice, and then I looked up "practice" in the dictionary and won the argument.

"It's hard" Lucia says. "I know honey." I say, "But you still have to practice. It will get harder and easier and harder again and easier again." For me, guitar practice means sitting with Lucia while she lectures about the different parts of the guitar (the bridge, the neck, the frets, the sound hole, the strings....), comments about how my guitar looks different from her's, stops to have a sip of orange juice or just has to stop practicing a minute to tell me this funny story about Greta (her guitar teacher). A ten-minute guitar practice turns into 40 minutes. It takes ever fiber of self-restraint in my body to sit in my chair acting like I am enjoying myself, pretending to be interested in her philosophy of why you use the first or second finger for different strings, smiling through the up-down-up-down-up-up-down strumming exercise, grinding my teeth through the achingly halting rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The act of practicing anything is a challenge. Try it- practice putting all of your clothes away exactly where they go every night. Practice not swearing. Practice fifteen minutes of morning mediation. Practice hanging up your phone while you drive. Practice anything that doesn't come easily for you. Whether you are adding something or eliminating something, it's like swimming against a current. It's hard. And in the end, satisfying. For me, nothing is less easy or more uncomfortable than my yoga practice. It is the thing in my life that I love and hate the most. It's hard for me. It makes me mad. And, it makes me so happy, so connected, so grounded. All of it.

For me, the hardness of the practice, the discomfort of it, brings me closer to who I think I am supposed to be. I never feel more like myself than when I am practicing yoga. The idea that something being hard is good is a difficult concept to explain to a five-year-old (I tried), but I think Lucia is subconsciously getting it. After our last grueling practice where Lucia whined and cried and tried to bribe me out of practicing, at the end of it she said, "Mommy, let's do the hard parts one more time."

Happy-sad

On Sunday morning at 8am, Lucia said, "Mommy, this is the best day ever." Four hours later, after brunch with a bunch of friends and a few kiddie-altercations under her belt, she said, "Mommy, this is the worst day ever." What?

In that instant, I thought about, as I often do lately, yoga. I thought, "That's just like in camel pose when I feel like I am going to laugh and hurl at the same time."

My sister Kat used to describe this emotional chaos as "happy-sad." "Joey is happy-sad," she'd say and my family would know that her son Joey would be somewhere on the emotional continuum for a while..

When an adult is "happy-sad" they go on anti-depressants. They seek therapy. They find religion. We label these people a pain in the ass. They are unstable. Adults know better than to wear their emotions on the outside. They are supposed to have skills. Maybe kids can teach us something with their emotional candor. Not that we should be explosively regurgitating our baggage all over the place, but that there is room for all of it.

I wonder when we lose that permission to move through our emotions. Tonight at dinner when Lu and I were doing our evening ritual of "roses and thorns" (goods and bads of our day), she began to describe a fight she'd had at school and, just as she started to get emotional, she stopped herself. "Never mind", she said, as if it was just too much work. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she wanted to be done with dinner. Maybe she was over it. Or maybe she's already starting to filter, sensing from me that I'd rather hear about the roses than the thorns.

I frequently tell my students, as I look at them sweating, grimacing, struggling, "Get comfortable being uncomfortable." Basically, be okay not feeling exactly right for a moment, and in the next moment, without even knowing how or why, you'll feel okay again. Give all of your feelings, the good, the bad, the ugly, some space to get out of the way and they will.

How sweet it is.

I am having a renewed love affair with Yoga. Obviously I've always liked Yoga. But something's different. Two weeks ago, I had a class with Meghan that made my skin tingle. Every part of it was lovely. Her voice, her cadence, her tan. And then there was today's class with Frances. After a few really dreadful classes where I just wanted to puke my brains out, I had a boom-chicka-boom-boom class with her. Not nasty boom-chicka-boom-boom, rather, "I'm on fire, I could do these postures all week long chicka-boom." It used to be that I'd regularly get into a cycle of boredom/resentment with my practice. "Why do I have to do this bullshit?" I'd think to myself. "It's too hard. I'm going to go swimming instead and stretch in the sauna afterwards." But then, after doing the Master Cleanse last time, I quit sugar (it's been almost 3 months).

Sugar used to be a little treat, something I got to have because I was a good egg. And I must have been really, really good because I was a major sugar addict. In the health-food-heavy house of my childhood, I was the kid precariously balancing tip-toe on the pantry counter to get my dirty little paws on the Bakers unsweetened chocolate (it was all there was). There was the time I spent all of my allowance on candy before a family road trip, then proceeded to lie to my mother, telling her that Debbie, the clerk at the corner store had forced me to take the candy because, just like Vitamin D, all kids need sugar. When sugar stopped being my treat option, Yoga sneakily slipped into its place. I don't recall it being a conscious replacement, it was just suddenly, "I get to do Yoga? Awesome."

Maybe I am finally mature. Maybe I finally get the idea that gratification is not necessarily the rush of sugar on your tongue, that little burst of energy (that ultimately drops like a ton of bricks). I think I might actually get that, when you wait a little bit, struggle a little bit, sweat a little bit, the treat at the end is much, much sweeter.

A day at the beach

Last weekend I took Lucia to Carlsbad, California to hang out with my sister's family in Lego Land. Lego Land is weird and kind of creepy because the Lego structures are all faded-- it's more like a haunted Lego Land. My sister was obsessed with how the management could ever keep up with the dilapitating Lego structures. It's a valid concern. The 280,000 piece mini Taj Majal must be a bitch to rebuild or even keep clean

Thankfully, we only spent one day at Lego Land. The rest of the time we lazed on the beach with the surfers and stoners. Being in southern California is always a trip for me. I feel like a species from another planet, at the very least from another country. While I sat with my book in my practical black bikini, feeling pale and pasty, musing about about what it would be like to be blonde and tan, Lucia had a wholly different experience.  I remember being a kid at the ocean-- soft sand, infinite water, sun sun sun. I was never bored at the ocean.

I still don't get bored at the ocean. I read, I people watch, I tan, I swim. But I'm a grown up. I know I'll have to leave beach-heaven at some point. I don't get the sand-salt water-sun intoxication I got when I was a kid. Last weekend, I watched Lucia and it all came back. Between applications of sunscreen and snack breaks, she explored with her older cousins. They wandered down the beach to the Boccie Ball game where she and her cousins giggled at the old guys barking "shit, fuck and damn." Lucia went off on her own, and I watched her as she repeatedly stomped on the sand, contemplating the effects of her feet on the sand. She sat for a good 15 minutes, staring at the Pacific, singing to herself.

When I was in my twenties, someone told me that having a child was a great opportunity to have the childhood you never got to have. I actually did get to have that beach-heaven childhood, but, lucky me, now that I'm a parent I get to have it all again.

You can't always get what you want

There was a period growing up when The Rolling Stones was always playing on our stereo. In dealing with her three rivalrous daughters, Mom had a fairly regular mantra, "You can't always get what you want."

There are probably three times each day when I have to tell my daughter that she can't have something that she really wants (like dessert, or skipping hair washing or a sleepover with Cece on a school night.) No matter how big or small the disappointment, Lucia's frown face is always dinosaur-sized. But her recovery is usually speedy. After a whine, a cry, a kick, she's over it. Usually.

Last week when Lucia really wanted to take a night walk, I blew her off, telling her it had gotten too late. Her disappointment was monstrous and her recovery was not speedy. She had a volcanic melt-down in which, through sobs and head-flailing, she managed to explain that we'd agreed. We had a plan. As I was gearing up to give Lucia my you-can't-always-get-what-you-want speech, I experienced a rare moment or maternal clarity. I understood her disappointment. She wasn't asking me out of the blue to take a night walk. We'd agreed and she'd prepared and she had a plan in her mind. So, in our pajamas, after brushing teeth, we put on our boots and walked to the alley to look at the waning crescent moon and the sun setting over the Olympics. It was lovely.

Since that nanosecond of clarity with Lucia, I've been thinking about my own relationship with disappointment. Whether it is my self-restraint keeping me from buying the $300 boots at Anthropologie, my quiet resolution in accepting that Lucia might not go to a bilingual school, or an unrequited crush, I know the feeling of disappointment. "These things are out of my control" I tell myself. My recovery, like Lucia's, is pretty good. I have the moment, and then I'm over it. There is always the part of me that wants to use the credit card or beg the school district or work magic, but mostly I accept my disappointment and move on.

The next line of the song "You can't always get what you want" is "But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." And it's true. In the midst of accepting that I can't have everything I want, it becomes glaringly clear to me that I absolutely do have what I need.

Big Feelings

I met Carol in a writing class. She was close to 70 and had a head full of shock-white hair. During each class we had to read our pieces aloud. When Carol read, she always sounded like Meryl Streep reading a book on tape. The first time I spoke to Carol was a break. I wanted to ask her about the commune she wrote about in an essay about her early life. I squatted down next to her and interrupted her as she flipped through her notebook. She nudged her reading classes up, angled her body slightly toward me, put her hand on my shoulder and looked down at me. I asked my question (something insignificant enough to forget already) and she answered me, never taking her hand off of my shoulder and never shifting her gaze from mine. The interaction was so brief yet I walked back to my seat wanting more. It was a couple days later that I realized that I didn't want more from Carol. I wanted more from myself. I wanted to be that grounded and calm and present.

I took the writing class in part to find a way to integrate all of the new feelings I was having as the result of some big life changes (moving, divorce, parenting) I'd experienced in recent years. I am on a road trip through the land of feelings. My emotions are all over the map- happy, melancholy, nostalgic, angry, mountains, hills and plains. At Lucia's preschool, they call all range of emotional expression "big feelings". I love this term to describe the emotional state of kids. We often have no idea what a 4-year-old is thinking. It's all just a morass of sensations they are trying to figure out. As adults, all we can really do is help the kids to name it. "It's okay honey, you've got big feelings about that toy (or that friend or that blanket or that apple)." I use the term "big feelings" for myself too. I even refer to "big feelings" when I am teaching yoga. It makes sense. Most of the time grown-ups can't decipher what's going on in their heads any more than kids can.

I've always been really good at dealing with physical discomfort. Rigorous chores, 42-hours of labor without meds, lack of sleep, hunger. I'm told that I have an incredible pain threshold and good stamina. But with emotional discomfort I am remedial at best. This past week I was having one of many bouts of big feelings. It felt messy, like the junk was seeping all over the sidewalk. While trying to "manage" my big feelings, Carol popped into my head. Her silver hair, her melodic voice, her clear, calm blue eyes. What would Carol do? She'd put her hand on my shoulder, look me in the eyes, and in her Meryl Streep voice remind me, "It's okay Laura. You've got some big feelings right now."