Labor of Love

Meditation for New Mothers

During a recent meditation retreat, I was asked about how motherhood affected my meditation 
practice.  My friend Megan was worried that unless she had an established meditation practice prior to childbirth, she would never find the time or energy to do so as a new mother. 

Her question forced me to reflect on my life as a new parent nearly three years ago.  Back then my daughter was tiny and prone to wail if she was not sucking on my breast or being carried in a sling.  So I spent the first six months of her life either nursing her on a rocker-glider, or walking at a snail’s pace with her curled up in a sling. 

Prior to Ayla’s birth, I was an avid yogini with a spotty meditation practice.  I meditated only in times of crisis, and found that I wasn’t able to concentrate for long periods of time while my world fell apart.  But yet another miracle of childbirth is that you are forced to learn to meditate—you have no choice in the matter. 

As a newborn, my daughter would fall asleep on my lap and refuse to move an inch for hours at a time.  The conditions were absolutely perfect for meditation.  The house was empty, the phone didn’t ring much (as I had taken a leave of absence from work) and I was physically trapped in a chair.   I had nothing to do but breathe in and out, while gazing at my daughter.

Mommy meditation was a tremendous gift to me.  I had spent the better part of my life racing around trying to achieve success and social change, and when I gave birth in my mid-thirties, I was very stuck in my ways.  Slowing down was going to be hard for me.  As would the transition from thinking solely about myself to thinking mostly about my child. 

But learning to meditate with my daughter eased the transition.  Meditating while feeling the warm weight of a newborn child on your lap is pure bliss.  After tasting Mommy Meditation, I would turn off the phone for long stretches and revel in the quiet perfectness of my new life.  Whenever I felt restless, I would gaze into my daughter’s eyes and return to a place of inner calm. 

I assumed that raising a newborn was mindless work—but becoming a mother was my first real taste of mindfulness.  The gift of new motherhood is that there is no place you would rather be than in the present moment—with the doors of your heart blown open by the love you feel for your child. 

After we finished talking, Megan was no longer worried about whether she would be capable of cultivating a meditation practice after giving birth.  Instead, she was worried that she wouldn’t want to end the mommy meditation to return to the outside world.

Body Love

I’ve learned to love my body, slowly, over several decades, part by part.  Pregnancy and motherhood were the catalysts for the final shift, from conditional love, to unconditional love of my physical self.  This is how it happened.

 

Hatred, like racism, can be so deeply internalized that it is hard for the hater to see it.  I was fond of saying, “I hate my thighs” or “I can’t stand my behind” but I didn’t ever think of myself as self-loathing.  But when I looked in the mirror, I silently whispered rebukes: This part is too large, this one too small, this other one completely misshapen.  In a typical face-to-face confrontation with a full-sized mirror, I found more to dislike than like.  And so although I didn’t actually say the words, “I hate my body,” the feelings of disgust and disappointment were always there.

 

After twenty years of being overweight—I usually weighed between ten and thirty extra pounds more than I should have—I traveled abroad for a year and half and managed to shed most of it.  The last remaining pounds disappeared after I contracted dysentery in India and literally couldn’t eat a full meal for two weeks.  By the time I returned home, I felt, for the first time in my life, happy with how I looked dressed, and undressed. 

 

Upon my return, I worked reasonably hard at keeping the weight off—practicing yoga, running, working out at the gym and counting calories during the week (I allowed myself the pleasure of splurging on weekends.) In some years, I gained a few pounds but I always managed to lose it again.  Although I was happy with my body, my love was conditional.  Were I to have gained back more than a few pounds, the same hateful scripts would have been rekindled and spewed forth.  My body demons had not left town; they were merely hiding around the corner from where I lived, waiting for a chance to move in again.

 

And then, in my mid-thirties, we conceived Ayla.  With each week of my pregnancy, I felt love for all of my parts, especially the ones that I had disliked the most.  I recall looking down at my belly, and feeling a surge of love rather than disgust.  When I looked in the mirror, I felt certain that every part of me—from my nose to my toes—played a vital role in protecting or nourishing my child.  As Ayla grew inside my womb, my skin grew taut and my entire body felt silky smooth and firm.  Looking in the mirror was no longer punishment; instead, I gazed lovingly at my profile, at my backside, at all the vantage points that I had avoided for so many years.

 

And then, after a beautiful home birth, I experienced my first taste of pure awe at the human body.  How had I so grossly underestimated my body? Years of hatred began to unravel, leaving threads of unconsciousness in it's wake.  I forgave myself my ignorance.  How could I have understood the miracle of the human body before giving birth?  Now I knew that my body was a wondrous thing, and it was a feeling that I knew I would never forget. 

 

It took almost a year to shed my pregnancy weight.  Even after experiencing unabashed body love, or maybe because of it, I wanted to maintain a healthy weight.  I wanted my body to have the right balance of food, water, exercise, play and rest.  So I worked hard at getting to post-natal yoga classes and watching my diet but this time my calorie counting was imbued with a quality of gentleness. The weight would disappear when my body was ready to shed it.  I exercised, but without the fervor that seemed to afflict so many others in the gym.  I began to align my eating with the seasons, unconcerned when I gained weight in the winter and unimpressed when I lost it in the summer.

 

Now when I look in the mirror, I see my body or my individual parts anymore.  Instead, I see a whole person--a person who is at peace with many of her parts (the ones I can see, and the ones that I can't...)  I also see a person who has learned to listen to her body—and to follow its lead rather than mindlessly ordering it around.  If I look really closely, I might see a body too.  But instead of sucking in my belly and throwing back my shoulders to "make a better picture," I can look at my body as it is, without reacting in any way.  The only feeling I might have is gratitude; because now when I look in the mirror, I can see a body that has willingly travelled to the four corners of the earth with me, that has weathered sickness and injury, and that by no small miracle, springs to life each morning, ready to graciously carry me through yet another day…

Sleepus Interruptus

Some things in life are constant.  For example, there is nothing that I enjoy more than a good night’s sleep.  I love every part of the process—the onset of sleepiness, bedding down under the duvet, the delicious fog of pre-REM sleep and then kicking off the covers in the morning and taking a few minutes to contemplate the world before I get up.  Before becoming a parent, I slept for 8 hours a night and often spent Saturday morning in bed, making up for any late or sleepless nights.  More than the physical rest, I loved the way the sleep changed my inner world:  a good sleep stole the heat from my anger and the despair from my worry.  When I woke up after a good night’s rest, I felt perfectly in balance—like Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree knowing that everything was exactly as it should be.      

So you can guess how I felt after I gave birth to Ayla and realized—firsthand—that one of the great losses of parenthood is sleep. I willingly gave up my privacy, my time, my ability to chew while eating.  But sleep.  Ah.  I struggled with that one.

My coping strategy early on was to go to bed at the same time as Ayla.  Since I was exhausted from the birth and since we were co-sleeping, it was easy enough to climb into bed at 8 or 9 p.m.  I much preferred sleep in long stretches rather than short bursts, but I wound up getting about 8 hours a night, and decided that I could sacrifice quality so long as the quantity was right.

But then, as Buddha calmly predicted, impermanence set in.  I eventually found myself wide awake at 8 p.m. and realized that my body no longer needed as much rest.  I spent evenings cleaning, cooking, emailing, writing, and doing anything else I fancied.  Sleep was good, but I was beginning to miss my adult life more.  I began to invite friends over for dinner or visited with family instead of catching extra zzz‘s.  For a time, that worked too.

But the winds of change swept through my bedroom once again. After a few months of sleeping at midnight and getting only 5 or 6 (constantly interrupted) hours a night, I morphed into a different person.  More than the grogginess and irritation, I hated the sleep headaches and the mental chatter that accompanied them.  The chatter was always negative and combative, and endlessly repeated itself.  A typical dialogue sounded like this:

“You wouldn’t have this headache if you had gone to bed earlier,” my Left Brain would scold. 

“But I can’t fall asleep at 9 p.m. anymore,” my Right Brain would answer. 

“Just look at you—you’re a mess.  You’re not going to get anything done today,” Left Brain would snicker. 

“But I’ll drink coffee,” Right Brain would plead.

Left brain would persist, always wanting to have the last word. “Drink a whole pot and you’ll still feel like crap.  Good luck parenting a newborn today!”

And with those words, my right brain would cower, and back down, knowing that I would struggle to think straight and that at some point, I would lose my cool.  I would go through the day alternately wishing I had gone to bed earlier and counting down the minutes until I could go to sleep again.  And that night, Ayla would wake up 9 times instead of 5, and the next day I would feel even worse.

I reached my breaking point around the ten-month mark and called in for reinforcement. I didn’t recognize myself anymore.  I needed to sleep “properly” again. Some friends of mine called Dr. Sleep or Nurse Sleepytime who promised children would sleep through the night and parents would achieve “pre-child” sleep quality.  Others visited places like Whisper Cottage and 40 Winks.   I called my dad.  During a family trip to Florida, he night-weaned Ayla without forcing her to cry herself to sleep or to face the struggle alone.  A week later, Ayla was sleeping through the night in her own room, and I was sleeping in long stretches again, feeling invincible in the mornings and forgoing coffee altogether.  Sleep was heaven.  And I was grateful that I had been given back my wings.

For three weeks, I slept soundly, feebly clinging to the belief that it would stay like this forever.  But one night, I found myself unable to fall asleep, and later, to stay asleep.  I didn’t know what was happening or why everything had changed.  As the clock ticked on and on, I recalled a persistent memory of my father. 

As a teenager, every time I took the car and went out for the night, I would return home to the same sounds—my father’s footsteps plodding to the bathroom, the toilet flushing and then the sound of him getting into bed.  We didn’t talk about it but it was clear that my father couldn’t sleep until he knew that I had safely returned from my outing.  This pattern continued for decades, and finally, when I was in my early thirties and visiting from New York for the weekend, I said, “You can go to sleep now.  I’m not going to drink too much or drive too fast.  I care about my life as much as you do.”  And my dad’s response was to pat my shoulder, lovingly and knowingly, as if to say, when you’re a parent you’ll understand.

After Ayla began sleeping through the night and I found myself unable to sleep through the night, I finally understood. In contrast to the promises of the Dr. Sleeps of the world, I am drawn to my father’s ways, whom I lovingly call “Dr. No-Sleep.”  Now that I’m a parent, I too sleep with one eye open and when I hear or sense Ayla’s discomfort, I am instantly awake—my blood coursing with adrenaline—racing out of my room to be at Ayla’s side.  I don’t want to achieve “pre-child sleep patterns” because what I want more than sleep is to be available to my child.  And now that I no longer crave the way things were, I am pleasantly surprised that Sleepus Interuptus doesn’t bother me anymore. 

Two years ago, I would have thought that I’d be Dr. Sleep’s top client.  Today, I couldn’t be less interested in turning back the hands of time.  Last night, Ayla woke up at 1:40 a.m. shouting “Shovel! Shovel!”—and I wasn’t sure if it was a nightmare or a play-mare.  I patted her back to sleep and then went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet and lay awake for another hour, listening to the wind.  My Left Brain and Right Brain were quiet.  I wasn’t angry to be awake or desperately counting minutes of lost sleep.  Eventually, I fell asleep and when I woke up, Ayla was at my bedside scrambling to get into my bed to nurse.  And that’s when I realized that my love of sleep wasn't a constant in my life.  Now I value a good wake-up call more than a good night’s rest…

Let the Breast Milk Flow and Flow (or why I nurse my toddler)

It has been eighteen months since I painstakingly helped Ayla latch on for the first time.  In those first days and weeks, I was certain that I wouldn’t last past three months.  But I made it to three, and implored the gods to help me make it to six. Then six months passed.  And I set a new goal: Twelve months.  After that, I swore I would be done. 

But some things changed along the way.  To begin, I reached a point where I forgot I was doing it.  Pulling up my shirt and guiding Ayla to my breast became second nature.  It’s the same thing that happens when I’m driving on an open road for long stretches of time.  At some point, I realize that I’ve been driving (for minutes, or hours) without the help of my conscious mind.  My mind would have been watching the vast sky or reliving a special moment in my life and all the while another part of me had been driving carefully, changing lanes and shifting gears. I can’t recall exactly when I stopped keeping track of which side Ayla was drinking from or whether it was time to switch from the Cradle Hold to the Football Hold.  But when I could let go of the mechanics of nursing, it became a deeply meditative interlude in my day.  And in those moments, I felt more spiritual than I have while sitting in meditation or praying or practicing yoga under the stars.

Another change was gradual disappearance of my enormous (bourgeois) guilt about nursing.  I had read enough progressive parenting books to know that there wasn’t a bottle in the world that could compare to my breast milk.  Ounce for ounce, my milk outpaced formula in every category.  But while knowledge can liberate us, it can also erect tall fences around us.  And in those early painful months, I felt confined by my decision to breastfeed.  On the one hand, it was convenient not to have get out of bed in the middle of the night or rush home from the park to make a bottle.  But once you start nursing, you can’t stop.  I wanted to so desperately not to be needed all the time.  I wished for a few days off now and again, to gain some perspective before returning to the job.  

But once Ayla was eating solid food, need, so to speak, dried up.  And so, nursing became a choice that we each had to make.  At some point after the six-month mark, we both enthusiastically said, “Yes!” to nursing.  This time around, I found many and varied reasons to want to nurse.  Some days, when I felt enveloped by darkness, I knew that nursing would help me see light again.  Nothing grounds me more than feeling Ayla’s tiny body in my arms and listening to the soft puffs of her breath.  No matter what storms are passing through my life, I am reminded that they will pass when I’m nursing Ayla.

Similarly, I noticed Ayla seeking out my bosom when she wanted to reconnect or play with me (or my nipples), rather than when she was thirsty.  Nursing is a means for us to reacquaint ourselves if I’ve been out for the day or away on a trip.  I’ve grown to love all the gestures and movements that make up our breastfeeding body language.  I can tell when Ayla wants to nurse by the way in which she reaches out to me.  We have little rituals about how we curl up in each other’s limbs—how her head rests on my upper arm and how her toes seek out the warm crevice behind my knees.  We both heave a silent sigh once the milk starts to flow.

What I like most about breastfeeding my toddler is that the dynamic has shifted.  My breasts are no longer the great providers and cosmic soothers that they were in the early days.  Nowadays, breastfeeding feels more like an exchange amongst equals—it is something we both choose day after day, because it enables us to share and reaffirm our love for each other.  

Eighteen months ago, I thought breast milk was all about providing nutrition and immunity to my child.  But I've since learned that "milk" is another a four-letter word for love.