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Peaceful Mama, aka Carolyn Wallace, has the flu this week.  So here is a post for you to enjoy that I wrote last summer.  FYI, I am writing to you from our lovely new home that we were able to move into on August 27 of last year.

This past month has been an opportunity for our whole family to practice gratitude.  My husband, son and I have been living in a one-room apartment since the end of June, when we sold our house to a lovely couple.  We weren’t able to close on our new house until the beginning of August, so we had to find housing for the month of July. “It will be all right,” we told ourselves.  “We can live together in one room, with a one-burner hot-plate as our only source of cooking, for a month.  It might even be fun.”  So we moved into an efficiency apartment, full of enthusiasm, ready to endure a little discomfort while we waited out the time-lapse between moving out of our old house and moving into the new house.

About a week before our August 2 closing, I called our realtor to make sure we could do a final walk through on the first.  What I got back was, “Um, the current tenant, a single woman, hasn’t been organized about getting herself ready to move.  Are you able to give her a couple of extra days?”  Immediately I started to worry.  What do you mean she hasn’t been organized about moving?  She’s been living with a “For Sale” sign on her front lawn for the past 8 months.  She knew the house was been shown to prospective buyers.  She was given a full 5 weeks to notice to relocate.  She knew this was coming.  Why does disorganization on her part have to mean a crisis on our part?

Not wanting to be disrespectful of the difficulties of what might be going on with her, I told the realtor to tell her that we had to keep the closing date firm because I took the week off of work to move and to organize our new home.  Because I work fee-for-service, I don’t have paid vacation days.  I hadn’t scheduled any clients for four out of five days that week, and I couldn’t simply take them all back on again–it would be logistically impossible.  But I told him that I didn’t want to see a single woman be homeless, so she was welcome to stay with us in our guest bedroom for another week if she needed to, but she had to have all of her stuff out and put in storage so that we could move in.  A good compromise, I thought.

Apparently, she didn’t agree.  She dug in her heels and refused to pack anything.  Refused to move into the spare bedroom.  Refused to move, period.  The realtor for the people selling the house told us she had the opportunity to move in with her boyfriend temporarily, but she didn’t feel like moving twice.  This really made me angry.  Like we didn’t have to move twice?  Like we really ENJOY living in a one-room apartment with a hot plate and with all of our stuff in storage, including most of our son’s toys?

I could hardly believe the rage and negative thoughts I had about this woman I’d never met.  Who the heck was she to invade our lives and plans in this way?  Closing date was pushed back to August 15, as she apparently had several other rental homes she wanted to explore.  The question of why she hadn’t explored them during the 5 weeks she was given to relocate didn’t seem to occur to anyone but us.  We were lucky that we could stay in our apartment for the month of August, as that wasn’t part of the original plan.  We paid an extra month’s rent, both on our apartment and the storage unit.  We dug out some of our son’s old toys, and bought him some new ones.  I cobbled together what clients I could for the week I had taken off.  I was lucky that some were able to come, but most didn’t.  I definitely lost money that week.  We checked with our lawyer.  We hunkered down for a few more weeks.

A week before our new closing date on August 15th, my husband got a call letting us know that the troublesome tenant wouldn’t be out of our new house until the 24th, as she wasn’t interested in any of the places that were available by the 15th. We were told that this time she had actually signed a lease on a new rental property, so that this new date would definitely stick.  Once again, my husband and I became enraged, then demoralized.  Gee, we’re so glad she wasn’t allowing herself to be inconvenienced or anything.  And then, what happens if she refuses to move again, and the third closing date falls through, too?  As of September 1, our apartment was being rented to someone else.  We’d be homeless if she continues to play these games.  Maybe she really has no intention of moving at all, and will just wait to be evicted, a process that could take 6 months or more.

We spent a few days looking on line at other houses to buy in our area.  This move  might not work out for us after all. We coudn’t get our downpayment back until 60 days after the original closing date, so we were feeling stuck in limbo, without rights, and victimized.  Just because she didn’t want to move twice?  Come on, this is real life, honey, try living with a three year old in one room for two months.

Even as I was having all of my anger and negative thoughts toward this unnamed, unmoving woman, I was aware I was having them.  And I knew they weren’t helping me or the situation.  All we could do was wait.  If she wasn’t out by October 1, we’d get our money back and move on.  If she did, great, we’d move in.  Being angry and spending my time and energy feeling victimized seemed useless.  I began to do the metta meditation for her that Dani Shapiro, in her book Devotion, turned me on to.  With the cadence of my early-morning jogs around the lake, I offered her the prayer, “May you be safe. May you be happy.  May you be strong.  May you live with ease.”  I didn’t always like it.  I wish I could say that I can got into blissful zones where I was filled with love and compassion for her, but truthfully, sometimes I couldn’t even bring myself to continue my prayer, out of my own smallness and insecurities.  At those times I tried harder to validate my own feelings AND continue my metta prayers for her.  I kept going, and took my anger and smallness right along with me.

We’ll see what happens on August 24th.  I hope she moves out.  But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that my biggest value in life is to become more peaceful.   I’m using both the metta prayer and daily gratitude to help myself manage this situation well.  I read the headlines about starvation in Somalia, and I am immediately humbled.  There are tens of thousands of people suffering, watching their day loved ones, including their children, die of hunger and thirst, and I’m feeling self-righteous about living with a hot plate?  Really?  Is that really the best I can do?  What if I got on my knees and thanked God for being able to feed my child every? What if I were grateful for the shelter we have, and even more grateful we could extend our stay here for an extra month?  What if I felt joyful about all of us being perfectly healthy, which is no small thing.  We are fine.  We are fed.  We are safe.  We have the resources to find another apartment if we need to.  Thank you.

Image by LifeSupercharger

In my last post, I wrote about my experience of being yoga teacher at Kripalu, which I loved with all my heart.  It was easy to feel loved then, because I was connected to what I was supposed to be doing with my life, being useful to others, and I got (mostly) positive feedback about my work.  Even though I love my husband and my son and the choir I sing in each week, somehow, that raw, body-sense of sacredness those early Kripalu mornings provided me are very difficult for me to re-create in my current life.  Not that I haven’t tried.  Sometimes I get up early and light a candle and have a yoga or meditation practice.  But my heart isn’t quite connected in the same way it use to be.  Somehow, this stage of my life, being a wife and mother (and housekeeper and cook) and full time employee in the work world is different now, even though my longing for the sacred is still very much intact.

So how do I manage this tension?  Do I try harder to create early morning sacredness the way I used to know it, do I look for sacredness in other places, or do I live my current life with unresolved longing?  (All the while reminding myself that while I was teaching yoga at Kripalu, I often longed to have a partner and children.) I could try harder to re-create what I once had.  My Deva Premal CDs are now buried under Kids in Action and Frog and Toad CDs.  My CD player (we’re low tech in this house) is somewhere in my son’s room.  My living room floor is usually strewn with blocks, magna tiles and dog hair, and any altar I create will be dismantled within 20 seconds by my curious 4 year old.

Even if I took care of these details, however, there is something to be said about not having quite enough energy for creating sacred space the way I used to, after mom/wife/housekeeper/cook/employee duties have kept me hopping from morning till night, and sometimes throughout the night, for the past four years.  Then there’s the fact that I might only get 5 or 10 minutes into my yoga practice before my son calls “Mommmmmyyyy!” from an upstairs bedroom, which requires me to leave my sacred space and enter another sacred space.  A space where my little boy still wants me to hold him in the early mornings.  A space where I can get back under the warm covers and hold him close and kiss his cheeks and the top of his sleepy head and simply breathe in his lovely early-morning smell and appreciate his willingness to snuggle, and have the opportunity to be mindful of the gratitude for this abundant gift of love that wells up in my heart and stings my eyes with tears.

Then I realize there’s far less tension than I thought there was.  Yes, there’s the trying to re-create a part of my life that existed once, which I might choose to do on some days.  But then here’s the embracing the very real sacredness my life has to offer now, as a wife and mother, which might look and feel different to me than teaching a yoga class, but is really just the same sacredness, after all.  And then there’s the grieving I have to do because the time for teaching early morning yoga is over, at least for now, and trying to re-create it is about as fruitless as trying to save the melting snow from slipping into the pond in our backyard.  Like trying to hold onto the dandelion seeds as they blow in the wind. Like trying to believe that if I hold my son close enough for one minute longer, I’ll be able to keep him safe forever.

Ever since I first went to Kripalu some years earlier, and first went to a 6 a.m. yoga class, I knew that one day I would also be teaching those classes.  I wanted to create and be in that ambiance of sacredness.  Back home in Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, I would light a candle and put on my “Eternal Om” or other chanting music just before 6 a.m. and have my own yoga practice so that I could be in sync with what was going on at Kripalu, hundreds of miles away.  It was a process, but overall it didn’t take me long to figure out how to let go of my beloved life in DC so that I could pursue a heart-felt, body-felt sense of sacredness at Kripalu.

Writing about my experience of teaching 6 a.m. yoga at Kripalu was not my intention when I sat down to write this blog post.  Linking that experience ito how I’m showing up as mother and a woman today was supposed to be the point.  So, that that will have wait for my next post.  Someone remind me, please.

Image by FlyingSinger

I had a child about 10 years later in life than most mothers did.  In fact, I didn’t think I’d be able to have a child at all.  So when we found out I was pregnant with our son, I was over the moon.  I had recently suffered a devastating miscarriage, and the fact that I had been gifted with yet another pregnancy filled me gratitude, hope and fear that I might lose this one, too.

I have spent most of the past 4 1/2 years looking at my beautiful son with awe, wonder and disbelief.  How is it that someone this sweet and wonderful (with all of the cranky, low-blood sugar attributes, too) came into my life to allow me to raise, cherish and nourish him?  How did I ever get so lucky?  I look at my beautiful child sitting in his chair at breakfast time, eating his oatmeal and making silly faces to make me laugh, and I can hardly get over the wonder of the moment.  The sweetness.  And the reality that life is so very precarious.

Some months ago there was an article in the Huffington post about the on-going devastation of our oceans, which, if not curtailed, will cause a mass extinction of sea life in the upcoming years.  Ecology being what it is, a mass extinction of sea life equals the eventual mass extinction of human life on the planet.  How can I love my son with all of my heart, hope for his future, and hold the truth about the declining state of our life-giving planet at the same time? 

How do we hold the duality of these things?  How do we keep loving and hoping in the face of terrible environmental news?  How can we mothers (and fathers, and anyone who loves children) go on in the face of this reality? How do we keep our spirits up in spite of everything, and teach our children a better way of living that might really make a real difference for their future?

How do you do it?  Do you believe we can make a difference?

I ended the last segment of this 3-part blog post by saying that I still lack the connection of wise women friends in my life.  Let me clarify that by saying that I am slowly building a new and and exciting women’s community in my new area of the country, and yes, my women friends from my past, especially my soul-mates in Washington, D.C. still exist, and they are still as wonderful as they have always been.  The difference now is that I am not physically present with those particular women anymore to have those hours-long conversations on hikes, bike rides, cafés, and living rooms, although, admittedly, I am gaining that back with new friendships now.  So I have to ask myself, okay, then, my friends from my past still exist, and I have some deepening relationships now that hold promise, but still I need to find a way to continue to be connected in an on-going way that really inspires me.  What can I create that will provide this for myself and other women in my area?  And if I have such a need for on-going support, connection and inspiration from other women, are there other mothers out there who might need the same thing?  We need soul food for our soul work.  This was the birth of Peaceful Mama.  I definitely still do not have all the answers, but I now have a better idea of where to start.

The name Peaceful Mama might be misleading.  When I asked for feedback about the name of the business I wanted to create, a few of the mothers said “no way” to Peaceful Mama.  It’s too idealistic, they said.  Mothers aren’t peaceful, they’re usually trying not to lose their minds.  And I agree with this, wholeheartedly.  Am I a Peaceful Mama?  In some moments I can be.  In some moments I’m really proud of the way I create and allow connection with my son. Am I a Peaceful Mama most of the time?  Hardly.  I get stressed out by juggling work and day care routines, a cluttered house and a child who won’t go to bed just like anyone. The reason the name Peaceful Mama resonated with me is because it reminded me of my yoga days, filled with the loving support of good friends.  I was peaceful and happy in those days, much of the time.  To be peaceful in myself and in my relationships with others is a value I hold very dearly.  To be reminded of this value in my every day life is vitally important to me, because, if I’m lucky, it reminds me to take a deep breath and make good choices in situations where I’m likely to become unglued.  And as we all know, an unglued mama is not a pretty picture. Peaceful Mama is a way for me to remember to come back to myself, and to help other mamas out there come back to themselves.  It helps me, when I’m experiencing the middle-of-the-night anxiety I know all too well, to remember that I can make a difference for my son’s future.  I can.  We all can.  It’s all about how we choose to acknowledge, validate and use our gifts, and having friends support us in doing it.

Through Peaceful Mama, I hope to support others via some sort of combination of coaching, spiritual direction and the hope of communal and global transformation to help mothers everywhere with their soul retrievals.  We need each other.  Children, families and communities thrive when mothers are supported, connected and inspired.  Let’s create a peaceful and transformative world, one mama at a time.

Baby Love

Our son arrived on his due date, and I was immediately in love with him.  My husband loved him too, but the distance between us as a couple continued, which, unfortunately, we wouldn’t really begin to repair until some time later.  To make matters even more stressful, our son developed Marshall’s Syndrome, or PAFPA, at five months old.  Marshall’s Syndrome is a rare periodic fever syndrome.  Our son would get very high fevers, lasting six or seven days at a time, every four to six weeks.  These weeks would be miserable for him, and for me.  He would cry incessantly, feeling oh-so-sick, and only stop crying to breastfeed, which he wanted to do constantly, including all night long.  These weeks traumatized me, to a degree that I wouldn’t realize until the fever week was over, and it would take me another few days for the shaking in my body to stop, and to recover from the week of lost sleep.  Truthfully, I have never known such exhaustion or stress.  During our son’s fever-free weeks, however, he was completely fine. Lovely and charming and delightful, even.  Then after a few weeks it would start all over again.

Marshall’s Syndrome is a big mystery, and our pediatrician told us that the only thing anyone could do about it was to simply endure it until the child reaches adolescence and grows out of it.  I read on the internet that sometimes kids wouldn’t grow out of it until they were 18 years old.  Eighteen years of fevers?  No thank you!  I started exploring alternative healing modalities and finally found a homeopathic doctor who specialized in children, who treated our son.  About a month after our son turned two, the fevers stopped.  Thank God.  Thank you, Mr. Homeopathic Doctor.  You have our undying gratitude forever.

A few months after the fevers stopped (or maybe it was because of the homeopathic treatments?  We’ll never know…) our son developed a potent salicylate sensitivity, where he would react extremely unfavorably anytime he ingested anything with salicylic acid in it, which includes almost all fruits and vegetables. (Salicylates are also found in food with artificial colors and flavors, but we weren’t giving our son those kinds of foods.)  Unfavorable reactions included stuttering, and out-of-this-world, totally unmanageable tantrums, that would last for days.  He would wake up every 30 to 40 minutes all night long to continue his tantrums.  This was total craziness, and completely unbearable.  More soul exhaustion.  This time I didn’t even bother consulting with our pediatrician.  I did my own research, figured out it was probably a salicylate sensitivity (thanks to the internet), and dramatically altered his diet.  The alteration of his diet combined with a few more homeopathic treatments over the next few months made a world of difference.  It wasn’t until our son turned three years old that I felt his tantrums were under control, and even now, if he’s out somewhere and someone gives him broccoli or an orange by mistake, (or, God forbid, an oreo) we pay for it for two to three days with tantrums, interrupted sleep and frustrating stuttering.

I share this story of the early years of our marriage and our son’s babyhood because somewhere between my getting pregnant and my son’s third birthday, I lost touch with most of the confident, connected and yoga-minded person I had been previously.  While I never, ever stopped loving my son even for one minute of all of those fevers and tantrums, I did stop loving and caring for myself.  I just didn’t have the time.  I was too tired.  I didn’t have any support.  I was too busy managing crises and trying not to go insane.  And I didn’t have the reflection of loving friends to use as a mirror anymore.  “Make sure you take a few minutes for yourself every day,” the parenting magazines said.  What?  Are you kidding?  While my son is screaming, hitting and biting kids in his day care?  They must be out of their minds.  All of this lost self-care, which many, many mothers know intimately well, took a grand toll on my sense of self.

Now that my son is happy and thriving in his life (thank you, God),  I have a few minutes, on occasion, to reflect about where I am in life and what I need.  First, I need for my son to be healthy and happy, which, thank goodness, he is.  Second, I need the loving support of my husband, which we, thankfully, have recreated, and to degree that is actually deeper than when we originally started.  Third, I need healing of my deep soul exhaustion, via the support of wise women friends—those deep, heart-felt, soul-filled connections that used to remind me on a daily basis that I am important.  That my life matters.  That I am loveable and worthy and capable of many amazing things.  And this is the part that I find very difficult to maintain on my own without a regular, inspiring women’s community.

Stay tuned for The Birth of Peaceful Mama, part 3.

Second Trimester Belly

When I was single and childless living in Washington, DC, I engaged in “soul work” regularly.   I was very lucky to have stumbled upon, quite by accident, a fabulous faith community called Seekers Church, which became the foundation of my life during the time  I lived in D.C.  Seekers Church is full of people who know how to deeply listen, encourage and support one another.  I felt connected to others, myself and what I was supposed to be doing with my life.  I was inspired every day by the depth, connection and stories of my friends and their abilitiy to discern what was stirring inside of them that was important to pay attention to.  In this little community of committed people, it was common to share the stories of our lives with one other, and it became common for me to share the workings of my inner life with those around me.

The folks at Seekers were actually so good at their ability to support and encourage others, that after 7 years of dedicated particpation there I wound up leaving DC all together and moved to Western Massachusetts to become a yoga teacher at Kripalu Center.  Once at Kripalu, I found more support and friends who spoke the same language I was used to speaking, and my soul work continued.  Eventually, I met and married my husband, and moved away from Kripalu to start my new life as a wife and clinical social worker.

Little did I know that the very same day I became a wife, I became a mother as well.  Surprise!  About six weeks after our wedding I started feeling nauseous in the mornings.  The pregnancy test came back positive, and my husband and I were both on the journey to being newlyweds AND parents at the same time.  That was a lot of change at once.   As my pregnancy progressed, my husband and I started having more and more difficultly to connecting with one another and processings the changes that were happening.  Without a strong community to support us through these challenging times, emotional distance eventually enveloped us. I was devastated and overwhelmed, but didn’t know how to change it.  Where was my support system?  Why wasn’t this working out as planned?  And what was I thinking, having a baby so far away from any of my network of loving support in DC?

Stay tuned for part 2 of The Birth of Peaceful Mama.

We moved last week.  We got everything cleared out of our old house, and most of what we own is being held in a storage unit for a month, until we are able to move into our new house.  The things we need for this month, including ourselves, are currently in a one room studio apartment.  For one month, my husband, son and I get to celebrate togetherness in a very literal way.  Actually, the bathroom has a door on it, so maybe this qualifies as a two-room apartment?  Besides the bathroom, there is no privacy anywhere.  When one person needs to go to sleep, we all have to go to sleep, or walk around with head-lamps on, which my husband has done on occasion.

The Tuesday following the long Fourth of July weekend found me feeling drained and grouchy.  I had spent the past three days doing family things, like play-dates, parades and fireworks, without enough quiet or down time.  It was good weekend, but I had let the things I needed to do to rejuvenate myself go too long to continue being a peaceful mama.

My husband was more than willing to take our son out for a bike ride after dinner so I could spend some time meditating, but he had a terrible headache, and couldn’t do it without difficulty.  So I took my son out for his bike ride, and when we came home, I requested that my husband, headache and all, read to my son before bed so that I could get some meditation time in.  He was willing.

In our one-room apartment, we have three twin-size mattresses lined up together along one wall.  I sat on one, cross-legged, closed by eyes, and began to deepen my breath.  In the mattress on the other end of our mattress-chain, my husband and son snuggled up to read a few bed-time stories.  One of them was the delightful book, A Frog Thing.

Have you ever tried to meditate while someone was reading A Frog Thing out loud from about three feet away?  It was more difficult than I anticipated.  Especially when my husband used different voices for all of the different characters.  As exhausted and depleted as I felt, I had to see the humor in the situation.  I snuggled up with the boys and we finished The Frog Thing together.  A  Frog Thing Family Meditation.  This may be the only meditation I get for this month—I may as well enjoy it.