The mama asana

November 9, 2008 at 1:36 pm (Uncategorized)
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When it became clear that a) I wasn’t going to be able to go back to martial arts during my pregnancy, b) I wasn’t as comfortable taking long walks after dark while pregnant as I did last year, and c) I was going to need to keep my body in good shape for labor and birth, I started pondering the previously unthinkable: prenatal yoga.

I come at yoga with a variety of (possibly unfair) preconceptions. There are two “yoga types” in San Francisco. The first is people who are really devoted and go to classes more often than they go to work, who talk about it constantly and end every conversation with “namaste,” and who resemble people who think they’ve seen the face of the Virgin Mary in their pancake when the conversation strays into yoga-land. The second is people who wear really expensive yoga pants and tops, who maybe have a mat and bolster stashed away somewhere, but who never actually do any yoga.

On top of that, I have a strong aversion to fitness clubs, or anywhere people are performing some kind of exercise en masse. I’m not that quick to learn physical things, I don’t like people looking at me to begin with, and I especially don’t like them looking at me when I’m sweaty and confused and trying to follow along. I imagined that yoga classes would be pretty much me (with no formal yoga training) thrust into a roomful of beaming mamas-to-be, all of whom fell into category #1 described above.

The other thing is, I sometimes still forget that I’ve lost 75 lbs., so when I looked at pictures of women actually doing the asanas, my first thought was, “They’re all thinner than I am!” It took about 10 seconds of staring to remember that a) I am thin now, b) it doesn’t matter, and c) we’re all going to look like we’re smuggling soccer balls in our yoga tops anyway.

Once I set aside all that mental noise, I discovered with some delight that the birth teacher I’m looking forward to taking classes from in January also teaches yoga three times a week in the Mission, so I figured checking out her Friday class would be a good way to scope her out and also see if I could actually pull off a full yoga routine. She’s really upbeat (but not in a perky annoying way), non-judgmental, and the class is designed for people who don’t know what they’re doing. To my surprise, once I got there and started following along, I found that I actually DID know some of what I was doing, so that was Confidence Booster Number One. She only corrected me on two poses — one of which was laying down at the end, so I don’t think that one counts.

Class kicks off with going around the room, saying your name, how many weeks along you are, and how you’re feeling. Both Fridays so far, we’ve had women there on their due dates, and last week we had a woman who was somewhere in her 41st week of pregnancy. (Admittedly, there is a certain envy that arises when you realize a woman that pregnant can still get into downward dog better than you can. Maybe by then I’ll be that flexible.) I have to say, the prospect of your neighbor going into labor or having her water break while you’re sorting out how to get your arms into eagle pose makes everything a little more lively.

There are several poses in the class that are obviously specifically designed to get your hips/legs/back ready for pushing a large baby out of your pelvis at some point in the near future. Because we’re pregnant and hence can’t lay on our stomachs or our backs, nor can we do any of that inverted stuff, the majority of the class is done either seated or on hands-and-knees. The poses are full of sticking your butt in the air, or squatting, or rolling your hips around a lot, not only to get your muscles limber but I suppose to get you over the possible embarrassment factor of having to do this naked in front of your doctor/midwife while they reach in and help fish the baby out. At one point in last week’s class, the teacher made us do this tiring arm thing, and said, “OK, when you get tired, don’t stop — just breathe into the discomfort and stay with it.” It felt a little like a mental prank, but an important one nonetheless. At the same time, my brain knows the difference between pain it can’t avoid (contraction) and pain it can (ow, my arms), and was a little cranky.

The final “exercise” is laying still and centering. Theoretically, after all that rocking around our babies should be fast asleep, but I find that as soon as I lay down the baby is squirming and wrestling around in there, perhaps doing a little workout of his/her own.

Of course, by the end of the 90-minute class I am feeling both deliciously wrung-out and calm, and energized and ready to do it again in a few days. I’m not someone who can meditate or relax just by thinking about it; it takes some measure of hard physical work that consumes all my brainpower just to stay upright — like tree pose — to silence the mental static. One of the thing I’ve missed most about kenjitsu is the fact that it’s tough to focus on day-to-day stressors when someone’s swinging a wooden weapon at you and either you react in time, and with proper form, or you get smacked. So this seems a good substitute.

Another high point is the fact that my class is immediately followed by a mom-and-baby yoga class, so we get to see where we’ll be somewhere in the next 4 to 6 months (and ponder how to do all these poses while the little one is squirming next to us in a carrier).

The only problem is, the instructor’s other classes are at times when I can’t make it, so within two weeks I was already considering a second studio with another class that’s compatible with my schedule. I’ll be checking it out on Wednesday night. This feels a little like two-timing, but I can’t help but look forward to having that calm, energized feeling more often.

I’m just trying to figure out how to go to more classes without becoming one of those fanatical types. Eeep.

– Beth

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Shopping for stuff

November 9, 2008 at 2:29 am (Uncategorized)
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Even if our child grows up to be a backwoods introvert, a sociopathic killer, a lobbyist or the inventor of a time machine who then uses it to go back to 1997 and invent the PalmOS SSL certificate handling abstraction interface, in the short run I think I might consider myself a success if I can get through the whole experience without buying anything with cup holders.

Beth and I spent the afternoon in a children’s department store on Clement St. We went in with a tape measure and a long list of things to examine. It didn’t begin well, probably because we’d written down “car seat” first and so went to look at those.

Car seats should not be one’s introduction to parenthood. I suppose that’s easily avoided, since in one sense the traditional introduction to parenthood is copulation, which exceeds the fun of car seat shopping by a fair margin. But copulation only covers the first few minutes or hours of the whole affair, and somewhat later on you might find yourself staring at an entire wall of car seats. They stare back at you like a menagerie of plush, injection-molded beasts. The words “danger” and “warning” in peer out in 24-point yellow or red capitals from the stickers that lurk in every crevice. They foretell the many horrors awaiting the slightest misapplication of their various injection-molded features. Most of these use careful line diagrams depicting the hapless offspring of careless parents who attach the wrong strap to the right buckle or vice versa. The children are fine, of course. Their misguided caregivers have only just stepped back from their misdeed for the benefit of the artist. They haven’t yet applied key to ignition, foot to accelerator, cellphone to ear, and evidently most importantly, enormous latte to cup holder.

I don’t understand this cup holder thing. Okay, I grant that on some level American culture is defined by the amount of ingenuity, pluck, determination and can-do spirit we apply to installing cupholders on most every object we design or (until recently) manufacture. Few things say more about us as a society than the convenience and ubiquity of having our beverages always within reach, snug in insulated paper cups proffered by the obsequious mechanical hand of the nearest cup holder. There seem to be entire micro-industries devoted to the things — my former employer will happily sell you over ten thousand of them. But we’re not talking about a pocket to stick the baby’s bottle in or an indentation on a high chair’s tray. Most of these cup holders are there for use by adults. Maybe I’m poorly prepared to understand the need for all this beverage holding because I skipped out on the whole personal water bottle thing. Also I mostly stayed away when coffee shops abruptly surged from sparsely-distributed places where you tended to drink coffee along with your eggs, bacon and toast to a teeming pestilence found on every blasted street corner. Not that I don’t like coffee, or enjoy a coffee shop well enough. It’s just that I’m okay if that isn’t part of the experience of putting my beloved child into a car and then hopefully not maiming them due to inadherence to some DANGER or WARNING or other. The back of a car seat does not need to be a nest of cafe culture. Honestly, I’m fine with it mostly being plastic and probably some dust bunnies.

Some of our audience might remember a post about not owning a car, or at least not buying a bigger one to fit all three of us. This whole thing about looking at car seats doesn’t mean anything changed on that front. We’re still thinking we’ll be fine as-is. However, car shares are part of how we plan to deal with cases where we do all three need to go somewhere, and being cars, if you’re going to put a kid in one they need a car seat. Being a shared car, you’re also going to need to install the car seat, go someplace, come back, remove the car seat, and leave the car the way you found it. Most car seats aren’t designed with that form of portability in mind. The current state of the art in portable convenience seems to be the detachable base, a hulk of plastic and metal latches which you strap semi-permanently to the car, whilst removing the seat portion at will to carry your sleeping child into the house (or coffee shop) without disturbing them. Some of these can also be latched to a stroller, which I have to concede is a decent idea, albeit one whose implementations are all huge and heavy, and not entirely due to all the cup holders. Eventually we found a couple of fairly ordinary seats that looked like they mostly held babies and didn’t transform into strollers or separate into pieces or brew espresso. That seemed like accomplishment enough, so we fled to look at much more restful cribs and rocking chairs for a while.

The high point of the excursion was definitely the baby-carrying device section. We spent quite a while trying on slings, wraps, carriers, etc., aided by the services of a ~10lb fake baby lent to us by a shopkeeper who’d noticed me gathering up heavy objects to stuff in a sling to achieve the same simulation. The fake baby in question was capable of holding its head up unaided, and by way of being a largish doll stuffed partway with ball bearings, its weight was concentrated unrealistically (if forebodingly) in its butt, which was swathed mainly in duct tape and the lower portion of an I <heart> SF jumper. It turns out to be hard to check the fit of most slings when you’re 23 weeks pregnant, so I did a bit more of the sampling — Beth and I are close to the same size anyway under normal circumstances. Much laughter was also had trying to work out ways to fit the fake baby around or atop the real one. A shopkeeper demonstrated how to put on a Moby Wrap (fiddly to put on and undignified, but with good weight distribution) and also how to undo it in a way that makes the baby abruptly fall out the bottom and plummet four feet to the floor. They also had a stock of external-frame backpacks for toddlers, which promise a whole new range of opportunities for smacking the kid’s head into the overhead rails on Muni — to say nothing of how gloriously you could obstruct up a three-foot radius on a 22 Fillmore or 38 Geary with one.

Before they chased us out into the cold and rain and abundant supply of tasty Vietnamese food of Clement St., we played with strollers for a while. Finding small, simple and foldable ones turned out to be hard, not because they don’t exist or the shop didn’t sell them, but because they can be so effectively hidden behind an SUV stroller, of which the shop stocked plenty. Also for some reason strollers all have hollow injection-molded plastic wheels now, which seems like an exercise in planned obsolescence unless sidewalks in other parts of the world are made of something far softer than the concrete I’ve been accustomed to. Eventually I found one that amounted to some canvas and a bit of foam slung between a minimalist aluminum frame, deep enough a child probably wouldn’t flop out of it, and narrow enough to fit easily through a BART fare gate. I wheeled it happily around the aisle for a few minutes, making easy, effortless turns, tilting it backwards to show off hypothetical stars, fireworks or sunsets, and imagining myself the proud, capable parent who knows what’s important and how to avoid saddling my child’s upbringing with pointless and unrewarding extravagances.

“It’s got a cup holder on it,” Beth said, pointing.

- Devin

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