The Offline Mind

Lately I’ve started back with my yoga practice, four months postpartum, and have begun meditating before and after I attempt my asanas. Before I became pregnant with Naima I considered myself to be in the best shape of my life, mentally, physically, and spiritually, because I had become deeply dedicated to committing of myself and my time to increase my mobility and sense of well-being (of which, before then, I had very little) through yoga primarily, but also meditation and cycling. But here I am, back where I once started, fifteen pounds heavier than I’d prefer, softer than I ever remember being, bones more brittle than a wishbone dried and forgotten on a windowsill and each time I sneeze a little jet of hot pee leaves my body like it’s aiming for space.

We had been trying to conceive for about 6 months and I had started to believe that perhaps my fertility had changed in the last ten years, and that was a reasonable enough thought. Slowly slowly I began to toy with the idea that we would not become pregnant and I would in fact enter the life of a different sort of me, a me without small children, only older more independent children. I began to believe the hard part was over, and I secretly envisioned a life for myself that was more indulgence than self-sacrifice. Maybe I would open a speakeasy, a jazz bar– maybe I would self-publish and force a book tour on unwitting readers– maybe I would start to wear only one colour, decorate my home and my life all that colour and someone would make a kooky Youtube video about me– or I would become a docent at an art gallery wearing a bolero, or a chef doing farm to table, or a marathon runner going very slowly but smiling the whole time, or a midwife catching wet new babies and savouring that first contact of velvet skin which is almost plant-like, maybe I’d ride horses…

And then one day, the day of my eldest daughter’s performance of High School Musical the Musical, I admitted that something wasn’t right. It was a week past when I would’ve bled, and I was a little too comfortable wearing white pants. I knew I was pregnant, I just hadn’t admitted it to myself. I wore all white to the performance and on the walk there I told my sister. “I think I’m pregnant” I said quietly, with my children walking a few paces ahead of us. She nodded, struggling to swallow her thrill.

Once it was confirmed by a little white stick and I had a good cry, as you do, I realized that the high I was on of feeling light in my body and my soul would be intercepted by “gravitas” a word I’ve seen too much associated with pregnancy in writing. It actually means solemnity, dignity, and seriousness, but in my mind when I read it I envision the revolving planetary bodies of women with child, heavy, bearing down on gravity, sinking through the heart of the world. Gravitas.

And so it all came to a pause and all the lovely clothes I’d bought for myself that spring were filed away in my rolodex of a closet never to see the light again (or so I felt). And I allowed my body to take over her serious work. Her gravitas.

But now! And I’m being long-winded, I know, so thanks for sticking with me whoever you are, now I’m back! Time did what time always does and passed and now there is a beautiful baby sleeping beside my beautiful partner in my bed and further down the hall sleep my two beautiful children from a previous marriage and in the bathtub my beautiful cat sleeps with wet paws from last nights baths and I am the only thing in my life that I feel is less beautiful.

So at 5AM I roll out my yoga mat because it has a good track record and I trust it. But first I meditate. And the interesting thing about meditation is its power to recall to your mind all sorts of lost memories. They walk across the stage of your thoughts and you’re told to acknowledge them and then go on in stillness but I’m not a very good student so I always indulge these memories and sometimes even stop to write them down.

This morning I remembered that my mother used to take me with her to go to the post office. There was a step or two up onto a platform in an old drug mart and a desk for the postmaster and racks of old greeting cards. I would read the greeting cards. Over and over. The terrible little poems, like lace-edged Valentines, bleeding hearts of the world unite. I would read them and think of who I would give them to. I especially loved the Deepest Sympathies cards. I wondered who I could give one to? And now I wonder whether that was my start as a sentimentalist?

I also remembered being small and having neighbours and all of us deciding to style a dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We each painted a tombstone to emerge from at the start of the dance, and would turn off the basement lights for the intro. I remember a funny feeling as I painted my cardboard tombstone. Here lies Simone. Here she lies. I peeled myself back in that basement. I didn’t want to dance anymore.

Sometimes I remember things I have long tried to forget. And the practice there is to allow yourself to sit with the feeling the memory brings you but DON’T GET SWEPT IN! These things called memories, they’re just like cardboard tombstones. They’re of your own making. Here lies YOUR SHAME. Here lies YOUR MISTAKE. Here lies YOUR FAILURE. They want to be ominous, like cartoon shadows do, but they’re not real. They don’t exist here with you and I. If Looney Toons has taught us anything, it’s that what looks like a lurching beast cast across the alley wall is really just a mouse with a hunk of cheese. And so I pull myself back into my chest, taking a deep sip of air. I hear the mourning dove calling sorrowfully to me through my kitchen door. I smell the warmth of the oatmeal that is sitting on a low boil. There’s a Japanese yam roasting in the oven for my baby, poked all over with a fork, filling the air with a mellow sweetness. And if I try very hard to become very quiet I can hear past my memories, past my home, past my self and into the future like a thrum, thrum, drumming in my pulse. And that too doesn’t exist. And so I let go of the cord that holds my ribs together tightly and I unravel into Warrior Pose because in this moment that is the only thing I require of myself and secretly I think it is befitting of me.