Don't let the winter weather (or your children's aversion to it!) disrupt your morning yoga practice. A healthy mama is a happy mama! Time in the great outdoors has lasting benefits on you and your kids. Look how much the Tank likes cuddling his brother in the brisk morning air!
By Layah
Don't let the winter weather (or your children's aversion to it!) disrupt your morning yoga practice. A healthy mama is a happy mama! Time in the great outdoors has lasting benefits on you and your kids. Look how much the Tank likes cuddling his brother in the brisk morning air!
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By Annie I could place a pin at the dead center of my migraine. It’s behind my left eyeball, tight and fierce and shimmering. I am curled into the open mouth of a tunnel slide, and in seconds, Henry will sail down it and crush the back of my head. Eagerly, and with vigor. I watch the drunken treetops waver. My neck is tender. I imagine someone pulping my eye sockets on a metal cheese grater.
BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY! This is our game. I pretend to sleep in the base of the slide, and he crashes me awake. Again and again, world without end. Midge sleeps in her stroller a few feet away, swaddled in a soiled blanket, where milk and pee have dampened and dried. Iris, bored of sick Mommy, plays on swings with a girl at the very edge of her boundary. She makes small talk with the kid’s grandfather. I peek my head out, force a smile and wave so he knows I am present and that Iris is not one of those abandoned kids at playgrounds who makes loving caretakers uncomfortable with her absent guardian and desperate appetite for attention. I tuck my head back into the crook of the slide. BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY! Oh, how we laugh. I swoon, not with love for my curly-haired boy, but with gripping nausea, yellow spots dancing in front of my eyes. My peripheral vision reverberates, wavy like air in front of a space heater. I strain to focus, to glance at the stroller and listen for Midge. I hear only Henry’s feet clanging up the metal stairs, his breath heavy with laughter. Tree branches sway through my circle of sky. The air is wet and warm. BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY! We four stay locked in this for some time. The rhythm of it – the anticipation of pain, the pain, the release, the rushing nausea – reminds me oddly of childbirth. We’ve been here before. Sometimes I count in between Henry’s crash landings. Sometimes I let my head loll with the trees. Sometimes I memorize the grain of the plastic. These generous moments between. BAM! Sneakers to skull. Mad giggles. WAKE UP, MOMMY! This should be torture, but it is unexpectedly perfect. My babies and I locked in the tawny gauze of a migraine, its arresting ability to contort time. In this moment that is an hour that is a decade that is prayer, I know what they each need. I am here. I am enough. I know who each of them is, and I can reach them all. I wrap my arms around this. The lip of hard plastic cools my cheek. In seconds, tiny sneakers will slam into my skull, joyfully. All I have to do is wait. "Parenting is a bitch. It turns mad, passionate, intense love into this barely burning flame that ignited in anger."
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MOTY Mamas
We love our kids. They drive us crazy. We write about it instead of going insane. Archives
September 2017
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