O-mama - Opinionated Moms

• By Claire Dederer • 10 Comments
• Tagged in: For Moms

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Last week I hosted Thanksgiving for 20 people.  Not potluck this time.  I did the whole nine yards—and it was great—fun, even…!  I like cooking.  I like entertaining.  I can honestly say that I really didn’t feel a ton of “stress” during the whole deal.  It’s my favorite holiday—other than massive gluttony, it’s pretty sin-free.

So yesterday, I was having lunch with a dear friend of mine.  Monday is my “day off” because I work Tuesday through Friday and we all know moms don’t really get weekends off.  Usually, on Mondays I do all the housework, laundry, marketing etc. and then give myself a little extra time than usual for exercise and coffee drinking and by then it’s time to pick up the kids.  Well, yesterday, I jammed all the above into the first 4 hours of the day so I could relax over lunch.  (added to the above chore list was cleaning the shit house that our garage turned into overnight because our aged and arthritic dog had some powerful, explosive diarrhea in the wee hours.  Poor baby.  Poor me!)

But now I’m at lunch.  I’m happy.  I have wine and chips and guacamole and good company.  The mariachi music is a little loud.  The waitress is wearing a weird Santa hair-band and it’s still November and that just bugs me and I did have to battle some mysterious midday traffic on the freeway, but now I’m at peace and relaxed.

Or so I think.  I suddenly have this weird sinking sensation—a dizzy spell I guess.  Back in the days of corsets and smelling salts, I probably would have been fine—or simply fainted dead away on my special fainting couch, but I thought I was just overtired or underfed or over-caffienated or under-loved and so I excused myself to the ladies room and took some deep breaths.  I thought about splashing water on my face but that’s stupid when you are wearing make-up so I just sort-of ran the water over my wrists and headed back to the table.

So I make small talk and sip my wine all the while thinking: what the hell is going on?  The dizziness is increasing and now my heart is suddenly racing.  Bear in mind that my resting heart rate is like 40.  I’m basically dead normally and now it’s beating out of my chest.  It’s visible beneath my sweater.  Symptoms of dread mysterious illness are worsening!  My hands start to shake and now the kicker:  the vision clouds!  I officially have tunnel vision and to top it all off, I break out in a cold sweat—I have beads!  Beads of sweat on my upper lip but I feel shivery with cold and I officially can’t breathe and I think I’m having a heart attack.

Time to fess up. 

“I think I’ll just step outside and get some air,” I say casually.  I take a sip of water.  A sip of wine.  A chip.  Another sip of wine.

“Are you okay?” my dear and lovely friend asks.

“I’m not sure,” I try to laugh it off, “I feel a little funky!  My heart feels funny and it’s beating really fast and I can’t really catch my breath.”

“Sounds like an anxiety attack,” she says.

“But I’m not anxious,” I say.  “I’m so relaxed!  I’m so happy to be here!  I have wine! And a friend!  And 2 ½ hours before pick up!”

“Well, what you’re telling me,” and she reaches over and feels my wrist, “and what I’m feeling here…is anxiety.  You need to breathe deeply.  It will pass.  Let’s go outside.”

I feel so lame and so weak, but I agree that air might be a good idea.  But part of me thinks I should just start doing tequila shots.  What the hell is going on??

So we talk outside for awhile and eventually—quite honestly almost 40 minutes later—things sort-of subside.  The whole episode was alarming for a couple reasons.  One: the physical manifestations of anxiety are INSANE.  I thought about calling 911.  I swear to God.  And just to put that in perspective, I once cut my thumb so badly that I needed 10 stitches and I put a rubberband around it for 4 hours to stop the bleeding so I wouldn’t have to deal with the ER.  I almost lost  my thumb.  I am an alarmist when it comes to my kids, but for myself, forget about it—in the sage words of Ferris Beuller, “I’d have to cough up a lung,” to take myself to the doctor.

Okay, and #2: at the time that the “attack” started, if you’d asked me how I felt I would have said, “I am HAPPY AND RELAXED.”  So, the creepy thing is: my body said—oh no you aren’t!  You are super stressed and edgy and about to completely lose your mind and you are not going to ignore this any longer because I am going to ACT OUT like a crazy toddler and expose you for the fraud you are!!!!  That’s my body talking!  Crazy talk!  But maybe a grain of truth somewhere in there?   Maybe it’s time to face the music: my body is saying that I can exercise and drink wine and make “to do” lists until the cows come home but that will only get you so far: you can run, but you can’t hide!  Our bodies are programmed—like primally and atavistically—to protect us and inform us,  and you can only ignore the warning signs for so long.

So on the long drive home after this alarming and eye-opening lunch, I thought to myself: maybe it’s time to go back to yoga.  This will shock you but I was quite the little yogi many years back—a long time ago and in a different house and in a different town, I had a newborn and a toddler and I was desperate for PEACE and more than one person suggested YOGA and I finally tried it and I was hooked, for a while anyway. 

Just so you know, this amazing book: Poser--is not a book about yoga.  This is a book about life.  If you are a mother—and if you are reading this you probably are—this is a book about you.  It’s about love and life and our failings and our relationships and our love for our children.  I found Poser to be extraordinary--#1 because it made me want to know the Claire Dederer, the author and hang out with her and her friends—she’s smart and funny and my favorite: self deprecating.  And #2: Dederer ingeniously uses yoga—and her discovery and eventual embracing of yoga--as a backdrop for an incredibly intimate memoir.  The practice of yoga and the beliefs and the poses are the frame of a story about real people and being a mother and loving your children and just doing your very best every day.   Claire learns so much about herself through yoga and through her children, but she’s able to bring the reader along for the ride in such a way that the practice of yoga becomes absolutely secondary to her experience of just the practice of life.

I came to yoga very much the same way that Dederer did.  I had a baby and another baby and I was lost and afraid and so consumed by the love and worry I felt for my kids that I had no energy or time or space left in my world for anything else.  I still feel like that sometimes, my love/worry is so endless and vast and constant that it utterly consumes me and overshadows everything.  Add fatigue to that and a friggin’ shark attack of a c-section and fairly radical post-partum and a mild addiction to Percocet and you’ve got someone who needs another outlet.  (btw, if you have a c-section DO NOT let them send you home from the hospital with a prescription for Darvocet.  They give you Percocet in the hospital and that’s what you need at home.  Demand it.  Darvocet doesn’t do squat.)

But I had all the same hesitations and fears that Claire had:  Yoga is sort-of cultish and weird.  I’m not limber enough.  It’s really not that great of a work-out and if I want to be thin I need to just run many miles and only eat popcorn and drink Diet Coke.  Plus, I had never done it.  And I hate doing new stuff.  Don’t we all?  I’m the old dog who is actively avoiding new tricks. I was convinced I would be the dork in the class and everyone else would be balancing on one toe with their arms wrapped around their groins and chanting and lighting incense etc. etc. 

Well, some of that was in fact true.  Incense: check.  Funky, super bendy people? Check.  Me having no clue what any of the poses were? Check.  But, then, there was Geo—the man, the myth.  The reason I DID yoga, and the reason I stopped.  He was serenity in a man.  He was older, shorter, hairier and calmer than anyone I had ever met.  He played Norah Jones on his little ghetto blaster and told us we were all beautiful even when we face-planted out of the crow pose. 

He was hard core though too.  He made us do push-ups in between poses.  We did reversals and held poses for longer than I ever thought I could, but somehow, the breathing and the strengthening and maybe just leaving my house for an hour and ½ a couple times a week—all of that helped me eventually find myself again.  I got pretty good at it.  I really loved it and I felt really good and strong and that feeling is addicting.  And then we moved and I didn’t want to drive a long way for class or find a new teacher or a new studio and now here we are almost 7 years later and I think maybe it’s time.  I’m pretty sure my body thinks it’s time, anyway.  Apparently, I need to learn to breathe again.

Dederer’s unflinching honesty about every aspect of her life makes this an extraordinary read.  She picks the scab off of her seemingly good marriage and seemingly idyllic suburban Seattle life and takes a long hard look at what’s underneath.  But the yoga has taught her that she is up to the challenge.  That’s one thing I miss that this book reminded me of—I realize now in hindsight that every time I went to Geo’s class, I did something that I didn’t think I could do.  After a few years I could do poses and balances that I had never dreamed possible when I started.  It’s good to have those little moments of accomplishment in life.  Its good to savor them.  And it’s good to remember to just keep breathing.