Chapter 9
Bridge Pose

Jessie was doing the dishes when her phone lit up with a text. “Missed you at playgroup. Where were u?”

Jessie wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Molly napping,” she wrote back. “Didn’t want to wake her.”

The reply was a thumbs-up emoji. And then, “Playground later?” with a cartwheel emoji.

Jessie hesitated before writing back. “I wish! In-laws for dinner. Have to cook.”

A horrified-face emoji was the response, and then nothing.

Jessie put down her phone and turned to her baby, who was not, in fact, napping, but eating Cheerios in her high chair. Or, more accurately, throwing Cheerios onto the floor for the dog to eat. Jessie poured more cheerios onto the tray, then sat down at the kitchen table and cried a little. She hated lying to her friend about why she wasn’t at playgroup, hated lying to all her other new mom friends when they asked her to go places with them or to come over for the morning and let the babies squabble over toys on the rug while they drank coffee on the couch and talked. Jessie hadn’t actually gone anywhere with Molly in nearly a month.

A month before, Molly had gotten the flu. The real flu. The terrible, serious, dangerous-for-children-and-the-elderly flu. And this year’s flu was particularly scary. There were stories about it on the radio and in the local paper. Jessie’s pediatrician and the childcare center had sent emails urging parents to wash their hands and limit young children’s exposure to crowds. Jessie followed all the precautions: she took Molly in for a flu shot, she washed her little hands after playgroup, she wiped down her toys.

But then, in early November, when Jessie’s husband was away for work, the baby came down with a fever. It’s just a fever, Jessie told herself. By then she’d gotten pretty good at fevers: give the baby a medicine dropper of Tylenol, put her in a cool bath, and give her a Popsicle, which, in itself, was pretty entertaining for both the baby and Jessie. But this fever was different. The baby was so fussy and was hotter than she’d been before. Jessie gave her Tylenol and called her sister.

“Try a Popsicle,” her sister said. “And maybe put her in the bathtub?”

After what felt like an eternity, the baby finally fell asleep, on Jessie’s chest. When Jessie woke the next morning, at six, it wasn’t because the baby was crying; it was because the baby was so hot. Jessie reached for her phone. She called the pediatrician.

“Hold, please,” the receptionist said when she answered.

“Hold, please,” the nurse said when the receptionist transferred her to the nurse.

Jessie held.

“Kids First Pediatrics,” the nurse said when she finally picked up after what felt like forever. “Child’s date of birth?”

Jessie whispered her baby’s birth date, not wanting to wake her.

“Excuse me?” the nurse said.

Jessie said it louder, the baby started to whimper. Jessie hated the nurse.

“How can I help?” the nurse asked.

“My daughter has a fever,” Jessie said. “She’s had it for two days.”

“What’s her temperature?”

“102,” Jessie said. She hadn’t actually taken the baby’s temperature since she first got the fever, but she knew it hadn’t gone down.

“And how long has she had it?”

“Two days,” Jessie said.

The nurse asked her a few other questions, each one of them making Jessie more worried. Yes, she was coughing a little; yes, she was lethargic.

“Sounds like she has the flu,” the nurse said.

“The actual flu?” Jessie said.

“Yes,” the nurse said. “The actual flu.”

“I’ll bring her right in,” Jessie said, starting to get up off the bed.

“Actually,” the nurse said. “We ask that parents not bring children infected with the flu virus into the office. For the safety of our other patients.”

The safety of other patients? Her baby was a danger to other kids? “Doesn’t the doctor need to see her?” Jessie asked. “What about Tamiflu?”

“If she’s had the fever for two days, then it’s too late for Tamiflu to be effective,” the nurse said. “There’s nothing to do except push fluids and Tylenol, and let her rest. You can go right to the ER if she gets worse.”

Jessie felt herself go cold. “What do you mean worse?”

“A temp of 103 or higher, trouble breathing, or a blue tinge to her lips or fingernails. That would mean she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.”

Jessie suddenly felt like she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. “Can you tell me what comes before the blue lips?” Jessie asked. “I really don’t want it to get that far.”

“I think your daughter will be fine,” the nurse said. “Just watch her carefully.”

After she hung up with the nurse, Jessie started to cry. “I will never, ever take my eyes off you again,” she said to her sleeping baby and to anyone or anything that was listening.

The nurse had been right. Molly was fine. Her fever broke; her lethargy ended. She healed. But Jessie was still suffering. She was terrified to take Molly out of the house, terrified that she would get another illness, something even more serious this time, and that she wouldn’t be so lucky again. Jessie canceled her regular babysitter, stopped taking Molly to childcare at the gym, dropped out of music class, avoided playgroup. She didn’t even take Molly to the grocery store. The whole world seemed so threatening, so entirely filled with danger. She didn’t know how anyone—how any mother—could endure it.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.

—Cheryl Strayed

The stakes have never felt higher than when we become mothers caring for our babies. Sometimes we can put their terrible vulnerability out of our minds, but sooner or later, something happens. Life happens. An illness, an accident, a friend-of-a-friend’s baby with a frightening diagnosis. Then we realize how little control we actually have. As mothers, we struggle with the fact of uncertainty. It’s important to remember that you are not alone in this struggle. You share it with all mothers, throughout time, and across the world.

If you choose the path of resistance, like Jessie, you may have occasional and small wins, times when you manage to avoid an illness or accident. But for the most part, you will lose the war for safety in the face of the unknown. The more you try to prevent all the things that could go wrong, the less safe you will feel. This is because when you try to fight the dangerous unknown of the future, you are actually practicing worry. As your mind focuses on the details of potential tragic scenarios, you trigger and strengthen the stress response in your nervous system—fight, flight, or freeze. Jessie can’t even take her baby to the playground for fear of the germs that might be lurking there.

Resistance to uncertainty and change can take many forms: perfectionism, over-involvement, and prevention rituals. Underlying uncertainty is the principle of impermanence. Everything is changing. Having a baby teaches us many things, and one is the constancy of change. Since you became pregnant, change has accelerated like never before, and this new rate can feel unsettling. The Buddha is said to have named impermanence—and our resistance to it—as one of the marks of existence that causes suffering. Of course, mothers don’t need the Buddha to teach them about impermanence, they have a little Buddha in their arms every day. So how do we make peace with all this change and uncertainty about the future?

Baby-Proof Your Mind …

The first step, before you do anything else or make any plans for the future, is to decide what you can do to keep your child safe in this very moment, at this very stage. There are many practical things a mother can do to make her nine-month-old safe. These tasks and precautions are essential to your confidence and well-being, and your baby’s safety, and we wholeheartedly encourage you to do them. But once you’ve bought the baby gates, installed the cabinet latches and electric-outlet covers, and put the glass coffee table in the attic, well, we encourage you to call it good.

So we say, do everything you can, by all means. And then stop and rest. Stop, rest, and, with some loving curiosity, take a look at your worry. Ask yourself, is all well right now?

The writer Courtney Martin explores the particular kind of anxiety that plagues mothers. She writes, “I am learning that to be a mother is to know that you can’t know everything will be okay and still operate as if you could. The alternative is to have your entire body—heart, mind, and soul—be held hostage by fear. So I’m riding the waves of the oceanic anxiety that is motherhood—at least for me.”

Oceanic anxiety. We love that image. Because it’s so true: our anxiety is vast—so vast as to seem borderless—and highly responsive to the prevailing winds of internet stories, the changing tides of complex recommendations, of troubling new research. We also love it because, like children at the beach just learning how a boogie board works, we can learn to ride those waves. We can stay above the depths. We can recognize our own triggering riptides and move into other, calmer currents.

We can also move in the currents of our own life, not our baby’s. Often, when mothers worry endlessly about their children, they aren’t giving themselves—and their own feelings—the space they need. When Erin’s first daughter was nine months old, she took her to Florida to meet Erin’s grandmother. There were so many things to worry about: baby-proofing her grandmother’s house, wiping down the rental car seat with antibacterial wipes, applying the right kind of sunscreen, getting the right kind of water wings. So many things, in fact, that Erin didn’t have the mental space she needed to be present with her grandmother. Her anxiety over what might happen kept her from noticing and engaging with what was actually happening.

… But Don’t Worry about Your Worrying!

The kind of fear or anxiety that Courtney Martin alludes to has, throughout history, been viewed as a pathology or psychological disorder of the individual rather than an existential truth of parenting. The truth is that, as mothers, we love our babies more passionately and more deeply than we could ever have imagined. We also can’t, with any certainty, know our babies’ futures. We can’t know if they will be safe and healthy for the rest of their lives. And yet we keep loving them, keep investing in their health and safety.

This deep, ferocious love and the truth of uncertainty and mortality is the origin of mother fear, the kind of fear only a mother feels when she perceives danger for her child. Resisting the truth of uncertainty and the accompanying anxiety is the source of pain. If we can normalize and contextualize this truth, our vulnerability can become a badge of honor. Our courage can be our sign of belonging in the community of all mothers. We love in spite of the uncertainty; we invest completely, not knowing how it will turn out.

That is true courage.

As Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” And as the Buddhist poet Alan Watts wrote, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

But how can we “join the dance” and stop resisting?

Strong Back, Soft Front

First, we can acknowledge that our vulnerability is pretty unavoidable. You are already courageous beyond measure to love your baby so deeply in the face of uncertainty and change. Recognizing this fact, and allowing yourself to feel proud of your bravery, can help you to foster kindness toward yourself and to begin opening the door to uncertainty, knowing that you can handle it. You are already doing the hardest part.

Then, take a minute and recognize that every other mother you know is somewhere on the same path to befriending uncertainty and the anxiety that goes with it. You aren’t alone. Why not talk about it? Our hope for Jessie is that she’ll be able to share her worry and fear with her mother friends and that they’ll be able to join her in her uncertainty, because the truth is they’re already there, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

The reality is that the uncertain future doesn’t equal catastrophes, it really only represents the unknown. Thinking about all the catastrophic things that could happen in the future doesn’t stop them from happening; it just feels like it will. The only thing it actually does is make us more anxious. So when you find yourself once again imagining a future filled with danger, it is possible and helpful to gently and kindly shift your attention to the present moment. Mindfulness of the present and anxiety about the future are incompatible. Another powerful antidote is to visualize things working out well. If you are going to have a movie of the future playing in your head, why not pick one that ends well. It’s much more soothing.

The physical practice of yoga can embody (bring to mind through our body) a sense of groundedness, openness, and vulnerability with strength and courage. It brings our attention to the present moment, our breath, and movement, and is therefore soothing. We save bridge pose for the end of practice so our body is warmed up and our muscles are strong enough to support the opening of bridge pose without injury.

There is a saying in Zen—“strong back, soft front”—that refers to the strength of our spine, which is the source of our integrity and our commitment. The soft belly is vulnerability, kindness, and compassion. In bridge pose, you can feel the opening of the front of your body while simultaneously feeling the strength of your back.

Tonglen for Motherfear

The practice we learned earlier in the book to help us cope with persistent crying can also help with moments of deep uncertainty. As an alternative to resisting uncertainty and fear—and all the coping mechanisms we adopt to keep it at bay—we can practice tonglen. When you start to feel the crush of anxiety descend, open your heart, breathe in the uncertainty, and breath out peace in this present moment. Ask yourself, is my baby safe right now? Breathe in the anxiety. Am I safe right now? If the answer is yes, breathe that out. Right now my baby and I are just fine. All is well right now. Breathe in anxiety, breathe out “we are just fine.”

One Minute Yoga 9

GRACE 9

• Gather yourself by lying down on your strong back, knees bent, feet flat on the floor. Feel your back touching the floor. Feel the solid ground as a support. Feel held.
• Rest and soften your back muscles into the floor and follow your breath, without trying to change it.
• Ask “Am I safe right now? Is my baby safe right now?” Allow yourself to absorb the answer. Feel the sense of relief and safety in your body.
• Compassionately allow for any worried thoughts that arise.
• Engage with your day, feeling more secure in this moment. Begin again.

Breathing 9

Trusting your breath. Simply follow the breath with attention. Don’t try to change or control it at all. Notice how, without any effort, your breath is always there, even if you seem to have forgotten about it. Simply bring your attention to your breath, as if coming back to a trusted home.

Asana 9

Bridge Pose

• Lie on your back.
• Bend your knees and bring your heels close to your hips. Arms by your sides, palms pressing into the ground.
• Initiate pelvic tilting by pressing your lower back and navel down to the floor while your tailbone lifts slightly. Bring your tailbone down and let the small of your back hollow. Repeat a few times to warm up your spine. Coordinate your breath and pelvic tilts in a comfortable slow rhythm.
• On the next inhale, slowly raise your hips toward the sky. Press the big toes down into the ground.
• Bring your chest toward your chin, feel the strength in your thighs and lower back and the openness of the front of your body. Strength and vulnerability at the same time.
• Exhale, lower your spine back to the ground while lengthening your spine, hips toward heels.
• Rest for a few breaths. Repeat.

Happy Baby: Just for Fun

Happy baby pose reminds us that, like our baby, we can have moments to be present, undistracted by our anxious thoughts and enjoy the physical sensations of gently opening our hips and rocking back and forth. Feel free to play around.

• Still lying on your back, bring your knees up to your chest.
• Reach your hands toward the arches of your feet, ankles, or calves, and let your hips open
• Rock back and forth on your sacrum, and let your breath follow the rhythm of your movements. Allow yourself to be absorbed in the moment.
• When you feel complete, bring your knees together at your chest, wrap your arms around your shins and give yourself a big hug to prepare for savasana.

Mantra 9: Right Now, All Is Well.