Chapter 5
Mountain Pose

When Adia was pregnant, she read a magazine profile about a writer who worked with her infant in a stroller next to her desk. When the baby started to stir, the writer would just jiggle the stroller with one hand and type with the other. “I’ve never been more productive,” the writer said, “because now I don’t have any time to procrastinate. When the baby is quiet, I’m working. No excuses.”

That will be me, thought Adia. When my baby is quiet, I’ll be working. No excuses. Of course, Adia had never really wanted an excuse to not work. She loved her job, and she had no intention of giving it up when the baby was born. She also loved the idea of being with her baby. And she knew she could do both. If that writer could do it, so could she.

“So you’re a graphic designer,” Adia’s midwife said during one of her second trimester visits.

“Yes,” Adia replied, “and I own my own company, which means I’ll be able to work from home, with the baby.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t count on that,” the midwife said, with a kind smile that struck Adia as a little smug. “There’s not much time for work with a new baby.”

“Well, I guess I’ll see,” Adia said, taking the midwife’s doubt as a challenge. “I’ll just see how it goes.”

In the first three months of her baby’s life, Adia thought of that midwife every time she sat down to work. You were so wrong, she thought as the baby slept next to her desk in a bassinet. In fact, Adia began working a few hours every day when her baby was only a month old. She was deeply proud of what she’d managed to do—to maintain her clients, do good work for them, and take care of her baby.

Until the day she couldn’t.

“Sleepy, sleepy, little bunny,” Adia sang as she bounced on a yoga ball, the baby strapped to her chest. She kept looking at the time on her phone. 10:05 a.m. 10:17. 10:31. The baby’s naptime came and went, and still the baby showed no sign of going to sleep. She chortled, blew spit bubbles, grabbed onto Adia’s hair and pulled, hard. All the while, Adia was trying to work. Trying and failing. “Time for sleep! All the sweet little baby bunnies are asleep!” Adia sang in a high-pitched, not-at-all-calming voice as she tried to reach around the baby and type a long-overdue email to a client. She was having trouble remembering what she wanted to say because she was so queasy from all the bouncing.

Finally, Adia gave up. She took the baby out of the sling, put her in the stroller, and headed out the door, hoping that a walk around the block might do the trick. As she walked, she called her boyfriend. “Can you come home for a few hours so I can finish this project?” she asked. “It’s due at five.”

“Sorry, hon, I can’t. I’m short two staff today.”

“Well, I’m short on staff today too,” Adia said curtly.

“You know,” her boyfriend said. “I think it’s probably time.”

“For what?” Adia asked, feeling defensive.

“For some childcare,” her boyfriend said. “We need to do our jobs, and this bring-your-work-to-baby thing isn’t working anymore.”

“But we said six months!” Adia said.

“Or whenever we needed it,” her boyfriend reminded her. “And I think we need it.”

“I can’t leave her. What if I hired a babysitter to come here and be with her while I work?”

“Where would you work?”

“I could convert the laundry closet into an office,” she suggested.

“Look, hon, maybe we should just interview some people.”

“But I don’t want to be away from her!” Adia cried.

“Well, then maybe we should think about you cutting back.”

“I don’t want to cut back! And we can’t afford to,” Adia cried.

“I don’t know what to say,” Adia’s boyfriend said, “but I think something’s gotta give.”

When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them.

—Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work

We often hear women say that they are feeling ambivalent about returning to work after having a baby. Ambivalent is a word we often associate with mixed feelings, hesitation, or even disinterest. But ambivalent means more than just mixed feelings. It means a love for two things, a love divided. It means a love that moves in directions, that acts on us in different ways, that brings us different kinds of joy.

As you find your feet and begin to stand tall in mountain pose, it’s a good time to expand your ideas about ambivalence. It’s love pulling you in two different directions, love that makes you wobble, love that moves you in and out of balance. Love is on both sides.

The Not-So-Great News about Childcare in the United States (Which You Probably Already Know)

Remember in the introduction when we cautioned you to stay away from any baby-rearing manual that refers to another country in its title? One of the main reasons for our insistence that these books harm more than they help has to do with childcare in the United States as it compares to childcare around the world. We think the single most constraining, complicating, and downright infuriating aspect of being a mother in the United States today is our country’s refusal to create and sustainably fund parental leaves and universally affordable childcare. We believe it is the factor that makes motherhood in France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, and a host of other places a fundamentally different experience, one that simply can’t be compared with American motherhood. American women’s limited access to childcare is yet another example of our country’s insistence that women should find a personal solution to what is, essentially, a societal need.

We mention all this only because, as we move forward in our discussion of how to make decisions that work for you and your baby at this stage, we simply want to acknowledge the fact that you are in a tough situation, one that is challenging for emotional and logistical reasons, reasons that you can’t control. So as we offer ways to help you navigate those decisions, it’s always with the knowledge that mothers who seek childcare for their babies are up against struggles that mindfulness, yoga, and self-compassion might be able to ease, but can’t resolve.

Finding and paying for childcare—infant care in particular—is the central struggle of this time with a baby for so many women. A maternity leave, if you even had one, is most likely coming to an end, and there are so many decisions to be made. Nanny or out-of-home care? Childcare center or home-based childcare? Parents or in-laws? Part-time or full?

Love Is on Both Sides, and So Is Desire

Even if you’re not on your way back to a paying job right now, you are, most likely, feeling the need (either emotionally or logistically) to spend more time away from your baby. As we think about motherhood as a relationship, this is a good time to remember that in a close relationship we simultaneously want intimacy and autonomy. This phase of development as a mother is often marked by your increasing tolerance for small separations from your baby, in sleeping arrangements, time at work for you, and time at childcare for your baby. This increased tolerance, of course, doesn’t mean that the transition to work or time away from your baby is easy. Quite the opposite. It might actually create a whole new set of tensions. You may want desperately to focus on your career again, while at the same time find it excruciatingly hard to be apart from your baby for even a few hours at a time. Or you may have decided to stay home with your baby for a while longer, then find yourself resenting the constant demands, isolation, and boredom inherent in life with a baby.

Trying to reconcile these desires is futile and exhausting. Instead, as Bruce Tift suggests in his book Already Free, you might need to adopt this mantra: “I give myself permission to feel torn, off and on for the rest of my life without any hope of resolution.”

We know it sounds a bit drastic, especially the “without any hope” part, but we think there’s something freeing about the absoluteness of Tift’s idea. No way, nope, not a chance. So you can stop striving and straining and expecting something of yourself that no mother is capable of. And once we start allowing for the simultaneous desire for closeness and separateness with our baby, without trying to fix it, it will be easier to deal with the fact that when you are at work, you long to be home with your baby, and when you are home with your baby, you long to be anywhere else, without him. You will be able to stand securely, like a mountain, in ambivalence. It may be the most liberating stance you can adopt and carry throughout your life as a mother and a partner.

We just can’t love our babies the way we do and expect to resolve our desires for closeness and space, to hit a sweet spot. Of course, there will be moments, days, even weeks, where we feel that balance, but then something will change, and we’ll feel torn again. Something always changes. What remains constant is our love for our children, our desire to be close to them, and our desire for autonomy. Love is on both sides.

Feelings Are Messengers, but Values Are Companions

Let’s return to the specific challenge of finding childcare. Many women wanting (or needing, or both wanting and needing) to return to work quickly become angry at the lack of options and support available to them. They may not have enough, or any, paid maternity leave. They may feel anxious that no one can take care of their baby as safely and capably as they can themselves. Or, conversely, they might be excited to get back to work, thrilled with the childcare option they managed to secure, and still be deeply sad to be away from their baby.

Every one of these emotions are messengers, some fleeting, some more enduring, but all, ultimately, are temporary. Additionally, as we mentioned in the last chapter, it isn’t unusual to have two competing and compelling feelings simultaneously. We often feel ambivalent about closeness and separateness with our baby. If we want to honor our emotions but not have our choices be dictated by them, how do we make the difficult decisions like childcare arrangements?

We can begin by shifting our attention away from our feelings for a moment, and think instead about our values. Values are different from feelings. Feelings come and go, alter, transform. Values only clarify over time, become more solid and smooth, like a stone in your pocket. If emotions are like clouds in the sky, values are the trees below, trees whose roots will deepen and whose branches will transform with the seasons, but whose trunk will remain, unmoving.

Values aren’t goals, in that we never accomplish a value. Instead, values are like a compass—they help us make choices based on the directions we want our life to go. Values are especially helpful in making decisions in challenging or difficult times. Values are highly individual; they are not rooted in what we think we should do but in what we believe to be important in our lives.

Frightened Is a Feeling; Courage Is a Value

So then, what are your values now? This is not an easy question, but it is an essential one. Because when you can identify your values, you can acknowledge and respect your emotions, all the while knowing that you need to make big decisions from a different place. The emotions of motherhood are wildly strong, deeply felt, and both enduring and ever changing. They are intoxicating, beautiful, maddening, enlivening, and sometimes debilitating. In other words, they are a rollercoaster. And they can give us so much information about ourselves, provide so many opportunities for self-compassion. What they can’t do is help us make decisions.

But values are different. Values do help you make decisions, by orienting you toward the life you want to live. In order to determine your values, you must discover and clarify what matters to you. There are many traditions that can guide you toward an understanding of what you value in life as a new mother. The yogic tradition relies heavily on three values: non-harming, compassion, and kindness. Interestingly, in yoga, there is equal emphasis on non-harming, compassion, and kindness toward the self as there is toward others. So if you value compassion and kindness, it means you value compassion and kindness toward yourself just as much as you value it toward others. We think this emphasis on mutuality is essential. Anything that you value for your baby, you must value for yourself too. Any decision you make needs to work for both of you. If co-sleeping allows your baby to sleep peacefully but leaves you sleep deprived, undernourished, and tense, well, according to the mutuality requirement for any decision, co-sleeping isn’t the right decision. Motherhood is a relationship, and in this relationship your well-being is just as important as your baby’s.

Here are some other values new mothers can consider as guideposts: courage, reliability, generosity, curiosity, optimism, and flexibility. In thinking about your own values, we encourage you to reflect on each of these on the list, add any that might be missing for you, and then pick your top three. Write them on sticky notes, put them up around your home. Alison likes to write them on index cards and slip them under her yoga mat; they are then literally the ground she stands and moves on.

Once you have selected your three most important values, you can start using them to guide your decisions.

Let’s go back now and revisit Adia. She had expectations when she was pregnant about how she would combine motherhood and work. And then she was lucky for a few months and was recovered enough to be able to get work done while her baby slept. She naturally didn’t want to have to decide between work and being with her baby. But now she wants both, and her baby isn’t cooperating. Emotionally, Adia is torn between wanting to be with her baby and doing the work she loves and having the salary she needs. If she allows her emotions be her only guide, Aida will continue to feel stuck or will seesaw between contradictory feelings. It’s hard to think clearly and make good decisions this way.

So the first thing Adia will need to do is to take some time to ask herself, How am I feeling right now? off and on throughout the day, and to ask that question with generosity, kindness, and compassion. She can take a few minutes to feel the sensations in her body that accompany those emotions. The next thing Adia will need to do is to give herself permission, now that she is a mother, to feel torn, off and on, for the rest of her life, with no hope of resolution. Deep sigh. There is no escaping the ambivalence. There is only the knowledge that there will be some solutions that are better than others, but no perfect one. At least not perfect for more than an hour or a day or maybe, if lucky, a week here and there.

Next, whenever Adia is ready, she could take out her three values cards and ask herself how each of the possible solutions stacks up against her values. Let’s say she picks non-harming, compassion, and kindness. She might ask if having her baby in childcare for X number of hours would be non-harming to her and her baby, and would it be a compassionate and kind choice for the two of them. If the answer is yes, she could add that to a list of possible solutions. In this way, Aida will come up with a few solutions to choose from that are aligned with her values and take into account her emotions. She won’t find a perfect solution, but she’ll probably find one that’s good enough for now. No decision with a baby has to be permanent. Most parenting decisions are experiments and should be seen that way. We might need to make modifications in schedules and childcare settings or providers as we tune in to our own development as a mother and that of our baby.

Did You Know …

One reason there are no perfect solutions to the childcare dilemma in the United States is because, as a society, we demand more from workers and offer less family support than any other developed country in the world. It leaves mothers stressed, exhausted, and insecure. And money matters. In the United States, couples spend 25.6 percent of their income on childcare costs, and that number soars to 52.7 percent for single parents, according to the report from the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The average cost of full-time childcare in the U.S. is $10,000 per year. And the costs vary state to state, depending on subsidies.

There are many choices families make for childcare, from informal care with family members to center-based infant care to pooled nannies. The important thing to consider is the conclusion from the American Academy of Pediatricians which states: “All of a child’s early experiences, whether at home, in childcare, or in other preschool settings are educational. The indicators of high quality care have been studied and are available in many formats. When care is consistent, emotionally supportive, and appropriate to the child’s age, development, and temperament, there is a positive effect on children and families.” In other words, it’s not so much the form of childcare but the quality of that care and the fit between the caregiver and infant that matters.

On a lighter note, Harvard University’s Kathleen M. McGinn analyzed the results of international surveys and found that not only did the adult daughters of mothers employed outside the home do better in their own careers, but all adult children of employed mothers were just as happy as the adult children of women who had been stay-at-home mothers. And, interestingly, the adult sons of mothers who worked outside the home were more egalitarian as husbands and fathers. A panel of the young adults in one such survey was convened and asked if they had any advice for mothers who worked outside the home, to which every one of them responded, “just chill—we’re fine.”

So apart from the fact that you would never, for obvious reasons, see a study examining whether children of fathers employed outside the home are as happy as the children of stay-at-home fathers, the message is that the kids will be fine. The authors hope surveys like these will relieve the guilt many women feel as they kiss their child goodbye, so they can go to work. We wish it were so simple—read a survey and relax—but we know it isn’t. But maybe, in some small incremental way, it will help mothers feel a little more comfortable with the decisions they make about their work and their child.

One Minute Yoga 5

GRACE 5

• Gather your attention and strength in toward your center line by standing with legs a few feet apart, hands on hips. Feel strong, like a mountain, as if you can withstand winds and storms.
• Rest with your eyes closed as your shoulders relax down away from your ears.
• Ask “What do I value now.” Feel that as your base of support.
• Compassion this month for the natural ambivalence of motherhood.
• Engage with your day with more confidence, courage, and strength. Begin again.

Breathing 5

Inhale to the count of four. Imagine your breath coming up through your roots, up and out your crown.

Exhale to the count of four. Imagine your breath sinking down through your body into the earth.

Asana 5

Mountain Pose

• Stand with feet hip-width apart, hands by your sides. Bring your attention to your feet.
• Notice how your toes touch the ground; now lift them and then lay them back down. How does that feel?
• Come up onto your tiptoes, then bring your heels back down. Does that feel different? If it does, how?
• Imagine you are squeezing a block or ball between your thighs, lengthen your spine, shoulders relaxed, hands by your side, and the crown of your head reaching up toward the sky. Take three slow breaths. You are in mountain pose, strong and stable.

Crescent Moon Pose

• From mountain pose, with your next inhale, raise your arms up and over your head.
• Relax your shoulders down with an exhale.
• Interlace your fingers over your head and with your hips aligned with the front of your mat, inhale while you lengthen your spine up.
• Exhale, allow your torso and arms to stretch over to the right, feeling the stretch in the left side body.
• Inhale back to center and repeat to the left.
• Come back into mountain pose with your arms by your sides. Notice how you feel.
• Rest in savasana or child’s pose, if you have time.

Mantra 5: Love is on both sides.