Essays

It’s a humbling day when the book you’re reading about baby behavior better describes your own. I’ve now had the experience enough times in the past 10 months to recognize the hard truth behind the cliches: When you’re getting to know your baby, you end up encountering yourself in ways you hadn’t counted on, ways that can be brutally jarring, both for the unexpected content of what can now not be unseen, and for the stakes of the seeing. 

You thought you knew yourself, and your life, and suddenly everything is on the table, about who you are, who you can be, who you must become in order to be the person specifically worthy of guarding and guiding your child.

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A mudra is an intentional positioning of the body into a shape or pose that expresses specific, sacred meaning. Most commonly they are identified with special ways of arranging and holding the hands and fingers within yoga practice and meditation. You might have seen someone sitting cross-legged, with thumb curled to index finger, while the other three fingers remained unfurled, resting on the leg, palm up. 

That is a more recognizable mudra, but there are hundreds of them within South Asian yoga lineages.

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When I had my daughter I knew nothing about babies. The pregnancy has been a shock, arriving long after I’d relinquished procreation and moved on. I remained in delighted shock through the entire pregnancy. Even in the last stretch, as I went to the hospital, as I stood rocking for 20-some hours with my husband using a wire gizmo to scratch my head, as I tried everything my midwife suggested and then savored the epidural trance state of rapt focus as I pushed in a monumental full moon dance with my baby to bring her out—even then I still couldn’t quite believe I was pregnant.

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Any standard article on the web about the postpartum period will include these two gems in its bullet point list: Don’t Skimp On Self-Care + Go On a Date with Your Husband/Spouse/Partner. 7 months in, I can attest that as simple as these well-intentioned suggestions may be, the likelihood of them happening in any robust way is pretty slim, unless a not-insignificant web of factors aligns. 

You have to have the means to be able to pull either of these great ideas off.

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