Dalai Mama Blog

It's not just that, halfway out the door to my first yoga class, I run back inside to pee, and end up spotting a little blemish on my chin, and by spotting I mean, of course, picking and squeezing, until my whole face is swollen and blotchy, like I have the mumps crossed with the measles. And it's not just that I'm sweating too much to wear my glasses but have become so nearsighted that I can only alternate between squinting at the yoga teacher with myopic desperation and smiling abstractly at the various people-shaped blurs. It's not that I say, when asked if I've ever done yoga before, "Yeah, but not since two babies fell out of me and I gained a hundred pounds!" and then laugh, by myself, a surprisingly bitter-sounding snort of a laugh out my nose, like I'm going to return home and maybe say a little something to my family with a hatchet (I restore this moment by saying, still laughing, "We used to do Bikram yoga, then go straight out for beers and get hammered," thus meticulously establishing my frat boy credentials). It's not that while I'm hunched into my strained approximation of downward dog, I happen to notice the special inner thigh place, that place exposes by one's shorts when one is in downward dog, where one's bikini wax would hopefully extend, if one had ever gotten a bikini wax, if you know what I'm saying. And it's not that after class I say to one lovely woman, "Oh, hey, I think you're one of my husband's clients!" And she says, "No I don't think so." And I persist, "Aren't you the tri-athlete my husband massages?" And she says, "No," and skitters away to call in a restraining order. Nor is it that, after class, the teacher puts a hand on my arm, laughs, and says sympathetically, "Oh, Catherine!" What? So my body is less like an undulating something and more like a packing crate full of bacon. So my seventy-year-old mother is a more agile yoga student than I am. So what.

I am turning forty in a week. I have never been happier, and that's the truth. But some days, I pull on a little skirt, zip into my knee-high brown boots, and feel fabulously like myself. And then other days I pull on a linty fleece sweatshirt, zip into my large-bottomed jeans, and feel like a sitcom mom from the 80s. "Mama, you look like a mermaid!" Birdy cries, tucking the covers tight around me in bed. "Except for your butt!" Indeed.

The leaves are bright outside our windows, and the sunlight filters through them, illuminating our walls in glowing orange and gold. It's always the signal to haul out the bins, pull all the children's clothes out of their drawers, and figure out the changing season of their wardrobes. I love this. Not just giving huge bags of stuff away to the Salvation Army - although I love that too. But this opportunity to mark the children's growth. Ben pulls on a pair of pants that expose a solid foot of shin and ankle, parades around in his comical-runway fashion. He's like a piece of taffy that just stretches and stretches, longer and thinner, all his clothes too big and too small at the same time. "No good?" he says, and Birdy and I shake our heads. Birdy, meanwhile, our chubby baby, has also stretched out into a sleep and skinny kindergartner, and pants that were too tight in April now gap around her waist. It is similar to - and yet so completely different from - the fact that I have not been the same pants size two seasons in a row since before I got pregnant with Ben. I have birthed babies and nursed and weaned and run and not run and felt sad or happy and eaten a lot, felt sad or happy and eaten next to nothing. I can never predict what will fit or why. While the kids fold up their warm clothes, I try on a pair of jeans that don't snap, and Birdy says, admiringly, "Wow, Mama! You've really grown!" But you know what? Those twenty-year-olds in yoga class had great strength and endurance, defined muscles and shiny hair. But what I had, and I loved this about myself, was balance.