A Room to Recover
Seeking solitude, silence, solidarity and also the snacks.
Last Saturday I went to yoga and cried in the room before we even began. It was with the kind of unselfconsciousness that recognized there was a person next to me but had no way to hold back for the person next to me. Just a stranger in the same room, going through his own damn stuff. I have to tell you - have you been in these yoga rooms lately? There are so many more men there than there used to be. I don’t know what that means but I’m hoping it’s a good thing.
It was one of those rooms with a low down ceiling and just a few windows which is more intimate than most. It was a simple room with no fancy lighting and the props at the back like they usually are – and a teacher at the front like she usually is. She ushered us into the practice with a familiar invocation to follow as we liked but also to remember that it was our practice and her suggestions were just that. I needed a prop and walked through the mats to the front where there was a sign on the shelf above a basket. These are new things in yoga studios these days - little circle-shape bullets you can place on the corner of your mat if you do not want an adjustment. I’ve never used one of those. I wish there was one that says touch me please! While also acknowledging I’ve had harmful adjustments and unwanted adjustments, probably a whole lot over the years. What I used to love most were the teachers that went around to all their students in savasana (the rest position at the end) and rubbed our temples with good smelling oil and pressed our shoulders down into the ground for a few moments before releasing us into full relaxation mode.
In the early days of quarantine I watched a video my brother sent me of some government officials in New York City standing in front of a bunch of uniformed officers who made a pyramid shape behind him.
“Now is the time to wash your hands,” the man said at the podium and I thought, goodbye N – N was my yoga teacher. I have a darkness inside me and that’s what made me go to goodbye right away. I’m not saying there was a conspiracy against touch but I’m saying the recommendations aligned well with our fears about each other’s bodies and that’s just a fact. Why was it not the time to…fund public education with all necessary resources to keep kids in school, for example? Was the implication that if we, the public, just kept our hands clean, the professionals would get their hands dirty? Is that how it all went down? I’m not going to continue on here because I’m probably wrong about all that or rather there are a whole lot of people who have written about this well and with more expertise. I just know that I knew right away that my beloved yoga space, where I took solace for one hour three times a week beginning six months after Olive was born, would soon disappear.
I was not the one to suggest yoga to myself way back when. It was Gloria. You know sometimes people say the most helpful thing they will ever say to you within the first few times you meet them? This is an example. The gift of going to yoga changed my life and it was the first of many of her suggestions on deservedness but maybe one of the most potent. I went to many many many studios over the years. Plenty in New York, a few in LA, but most often the quiet space of N’s Ashtanga Yoga. Every day I could manage from 6 months postpartum on at 6am-7:30m. Wake up, nurse, run out the door, breath, do the salutations, twist at the waist, lie down, go home. All the while N jumped around the class to people at various points of the yoga series - some much more advanced than the rest.
N’s famous in the yoga community for both training a very famous female celebrity and keeping a low profile. Yeah that’s a humble brag. I was one hundred percent a beginner then and stayed that way for most of three years.”Goodbye N,” I thought, as the beginning days of the pandemic hit and I was right about that. It took a whole year but eventually N’s studio got passed onto other teachers, who were once students, who I’m sure carry the torch but it’s not the same. And sure, maybe it’s not meant to be the same. That’s entirely possible. N was a student, a very very well received student of Pattabhi Jois. Pattabhi Jois was a very very well regarded yoga teacher until some female students said otherwise. I’m thinking about Russel Brand this week and how consent is still an afterthought. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to write down that name.
So that was my artist’s date; crying with strangers; I’m getting back into it I guess. The previous one was just me in my bedroom sleeping. Artist’s need rest, just like everyone else, but I would venture that most forget that we do. But let me just tell you a nap will bring back the muse. A nap and also some movement, although is it restful to put on those tight clothes and lug that mat and go to an unfamiliar space just for one hour? You can see how easy it is for me to talk myself out of it.
There’s a part of me that feels deserving of the kind of warmth and love you can get in a yoga studio from a great teacher. There’s a way that trauma reverts me back to the person who thinks that I’m undeserving of healing spaces and between having a young kid and the pandemic, or rather those two things put together, it’s taken me a long long time to get back into a studio.
An hour was not enough. It was a beautiful day but I could only search for a retreat. The sun was bright and I had the sensation of being overstimulated and people were having a Saturday and I wanted only to crawl back into some dark warm room and lie on the floor and cry.
“What is it that’s distressing you," a friend asked over text.
“School, school, it’s always the school thing,” I said, even though for the first time Olive is in one that works enough for her. But does it work for me? Right now I spend 2 hours a day driving her there and on Friday she said - “I don’t like the learning here. It’s stuff I already know but more of it.”
I responded by saying that’s exactly why I was sending her there since maybe this whole thing about reading was that she was used to things coming easily and oh, here’s something that doesn’t. But also, you know, I tried to force her to brush her teeth that whole week before school before I realized the toothbrush she was using was overwhelming and besides just really preferring not to, as soon as I switched the toothbrush out to a smaller non-electric one with soft bristles everything was fine. Is school a toothbrush? How harmful is the wrong one?
“It’s not just about reading more often,” said my friend with a dyslexic kid, with the kind of exasperation I knew was not about me but about the thousands of hours she’s had to advocate for her kid in a broken system that services some small percentage of actual kids, and not coincidentally those who align to the top of the tier already.
I’m saying I cried in this room and that’s before I even started moving. It was like I was crying just to be in the room, for how long I had been out of the room and whether or not I could stay in the room for long enough to feel good enough to get back to my normal responsibilities. The answer was I couldn’t. I sat in the room longer than most after the class was complete but then as soon as I left I was searching again for another quiet room and booked a massage. I probably have spent more money on massage than anything else in my life besides sushi and a hospital bill for a supervised birth that I never paid. Probably all my personal credit card debt could be attributed to my love for body work and this day was no different. I went, got my massage, and then asked if I could please just stay in the room longer after the massage was done. Quiet still calm rushed into my body. I stayed for a while. I got up and got dressed to make it back to pay the meter. I ate all the snacks: the biscuits, the chocolate candies, the earthy sweet tea.
Back at our apartment I slept on the couch for a good hour while Olive splattered out metallic ink from some new markers. I so remember that feeling - how the silver spills from the tip of the paint onto the page in a shining pool. When I got up I made her a hot dog which she was excited about and then lost interest.
“What are you looking up?” she asked, coming close to my body as I began typing on my phone.
“Seven year old who doesn’t like dinner,” I said,
“Really?” she asked, raising her eyebrows with a little bit of fear before admitting it had been the bun she didn’t like because it was “not pillowy.” Again - picky eater? Force the kid to eat. Obviously not. Skip dinner entirely? How’s that choice? Don’t offer a bedtime snack? As if bedtime wasn’t a challenge enough already.
We are all failing at motherhood in the exact same way, says a new insta / tiktok/ substack platform called “undoing motherhood.” What does that tell you?
If you are actually failing in some way, no matter what you try to change, that is the purpose of a system that is larger than you that is working on you. And it is designed to get this result. The design may not be intentional. It doesn’t matter. It is still the design.