Maternity 33

Interlude: a biographical list of favorite novels

Novels are delicious. I have relishing them since I was a little girl. Here is a brief biographical essay in novels.

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Week 31: an unusual mother figure

When I was pregnant with my first child I went through a brief attempt to watch all movies that had won the Best Picture Oscar. I made it through a few, and Antonia’s Line was among them. In this Dutch movie there is an amazing mothering scene, where a young girl realizes soon after giving birth that she would rather spend her time solving mathematical puzzles than raising her baby. So her mother and grandmother take over. Everyone is happy, including the child. And the mother spends lots of time with her child, just not parenting time.

She’s an unusual mother figure and I have spent a lot of time thinking about this story since becoming a parent. Truth is, I’m not shocked by the young lady’s choice. Parenting is just one piece of me, and the other pieces are just as primal. There’s the cerebral piece of me – the one that likes to solve hard conceptual problems. There’s the explorer piece of me – the one that likes to wander in new places and find something new or unnoticed previously. There’s the quiet piece of me – the one that loves being alone. And there’s the partner piece of me – the one that thrives on companionship with my college sweetheart. These facets coexist, and parenting has enhanced many of them. But I’ve also needed to protect them from my parenting duties and emotions. Here are a few things I do to give wings to all pieces of me:

1)Sacred Monday mornings: funny how the emotional quality of time changes depending on your life circumstances. I used to resent Monday mornings – the shock from having to adopt weekly rituals after the week-end’s amorphous flow. Now I love them. Both kids are out of the house by 9:00 and I work from home –  to relish my quiet adult space. Before I sit at my computer, I do a few stretches, tidy my room and office, and brew a slow cup of tea. I then jump into the most challenging quantitative or conceptual work I have for the week, leveraging my appetite for serious stuff after two days of laughter and funny business with kids.

 2) Piles of novels: to wind down, my husband likes to watch T.V. at night. This does not work for me. I read books, novels preferably. My bedside table is a mountain of books , as my son curls up in bed with me for his bedtime story, and I slip back under the covers a few hours later when it’s time for my dance with words.  My love of novels and short stories dates back to my earliest memories, and I’m amazed at this consistency. I have favorite bookstores in every city I’ve lived in.: I always find the store where the owner writes little hand written notes about recent novels she has enjoyed. Doesn’t have to be a big bookstore, or even particularly intellectual. Just has to be small and personal. Here they are:

• Paris – Dom Tom, 81 rue St Dominique, 75007, Paris
• London – (this is my all time favorite) Daunt Books on Marelybone High Street
• San Francisco – Phoenix Books on Valencia and on 24th street

 3) Walk to work: when I moved to the United States to honor my husband’s desire to live  in the Silicon Valley, I lay down two rules. We visit France twice a year and I will never drive to work. I’m a terrible driver and I hate being in a car. Conversely, I love public transit and walking. San Francisco is a lovely city for this – it’s usually crisp and sunny, and the streets are animated and quite green. It’s not as beautiful as Paris, nor as perfectly landscaped as London (my favorite walking cities) but it’s great for regular day dreaming – which is what I do when I walk (don’t listen to music, don’t talk on phone, don’t rush).

4) Saturday night date night: I have written about this already here.

week 22: yoga

My first yoga class was in 1999 - that’s a long time ago. I’m no acrobat and I don’t do things that will make your jaw drop, but yoga has been a fixture in my life for longer than I can recall. I moved to San Francisco in part to live in a city that was a mecca for yoga and healing arts. I live within walking distance of 10 yoga studios!

I have what is called a “home practice” — i.e. I know how to make the time and space to practice yoga on my own, in a quiet room, on a lawn, or in a little corner of a hotel room. All I need is a mat (which travels with me, everywhere I go).

In my experience, yoga is essential to parenting. If anything, it’s a stress reducing technique, but it’s also a focus enhancing technique. And with all the multi-tasking you must do as a parent, I find that quiet moments spent concentrating on one activity are life savers.

Here are some tips on how to bring yoga to your life, or to the next level…

1) Just do it. Start with 10 minutes a day, or just doing child’s pose straight out of bed, when you stretch in the morning. Commit to one class per month. Do a 45mn routine once in a while, when you have a break from parenting, or life. If you do a little yoga every year, every month, every week, every day, it will, slowly become part of you. And then, there is really no turning back. It’s like swimming, skiing, walking — once learned, never forgotten.

2) Get a book, or read a magazine. Here are my favorites
Ashtanga Yoga For Women - Ashtanga is an intense form of yoga that takes you through a scripted routine 6 days a week, approximately 90mn a day. It’s not suited for parents, because I don’t know anyone who has that kind of time, BUT it’s great for getting a sense of how yoga can bring emotional stability and enhance your focus. Ashtanga was developed by men, for men, and some poses are just hard for girls. So this book bridges the gap between Ashtanga and women. And even if you are a parent, read it, to learn the basic standing poses - a 20mn sequence that is a great warm up for any work-out.

The Woman’s Yoga Book -  this is a much more versatile book which you can use at all stages of your life. It shows a few gentle sequences to deal with everything from mood swings to cramps. If you have 20mn of quiet time in a day, use it as a source of inspiration for the few stretches you will do.

Yoga Journal - I buy this occasionally, to fantasize about the yoga vacation I’ll take 10 years from now! On a more practical side, they have articles on anatomy and yoga sequences that provide immediate use!

3) Teach someone: it is well known that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Teaching takes many forms. It includes introducing someone to yoga. Ten years ago, I introduced my sister to yoga and she’s now a pro - her practice sustains mine because we can talk about it and share our discoveries. I’ve organized yoga classes for my parents, when we are on a family vacation. My husband and I have a new year’s tradition: we take a restorative yoga class on Jan 1st - it’s his only yoga class in the year, and it involves some snoring! Most recently I taught a 35 minute class to a set of executives at our annual board retreat - it was great to prepare the class and walk novices through basic stretches and breathing exercises. It felt as if I had a concrete life skill to share.

week 17: op-ed course

As part of my resolution to expand my creative horizons in the first half of the year, I signed up for a workshop to improve my opinion writing skills. I had taken the day-long introduction course several years ago, and had since attempted several times to get published in the Opinion Page of state and national newspapers. I hadn’t had much luck, only managed to publish a letter to the editor in Harpers Magazine last December.

The non-profit organization that runs this course is phenomenal. Started by a woman who noticed that fewer than 10% of opinion pieces are written by women, the founder decided to tour the country teaching able and ambitious girls the tricks of the op-ed trade. Her pupils have had phenomenal success and her course is now taught to hundreds of women every year. Read the website for more information.

The follow-up course was four 2 hour meetings on a Monday night, for four consecutive weeks. On the first night of the course my daughter was one month old. I was very proud of making it out of the house at such an early stage in my baby’s life - though i was probably over-ambitious, as fell ill a few days later.

I wrote an opinion piece and pitched it to three different newspapers (USA Today, SF Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal): all refused it. 

Read on to see what I wrote and contact me if you have any ideas as to where and how I should pitch it!

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week 16: starting a blog

This blog was a by-product of one of my new year’s resolutions for 2010 - to feed my creative instincts. After several bouts of post-delivery illness and a little too many post-partum hormones I felt a little stuck inside my mind and looked for positive ways of shaking myself out of the shell. On days when I was home bound thinking about and writing my blog entry was a real treat. I particularly relish co-writing posts with a friend, so PLEASE, volunteer to write an entry for this blog.

As it turns out, blogs and parenting go hand in hand. It’s particularly true of mothers and blogs, and I suspect it has something to do with the isolation one can experience when interacting with pre-verbal beings all day long! As you know, I’m particularly interested in parents who try hard to combine parenting and career, so here is my pick of blogs in that category.

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week 15: new year’s resolutions

A decade ago, when we were fresh college graduates, my sister said: “the thing about Stanford grads is that nothing is ever good enough for them”. She was referring to youthful conversations about first jobs, graduate schools and dream careers and she observed that my friends had a tendency to describe their current situation as a stepping stone towards a bigger and brighter future. Since then, I have regularly thought about her astute observation and attempted to change my attitude, focusing on the job at hand and enjoying it for what it is: a piece of my life never to be lived again. It’s not easy and I’ve fallen into the stepping stone mentality more than once since then. As one of my graduate school mentors wittily remarked upon hearing me long for the end of my PhD years: “sooner or later it will be over, just like life”.

New year’s resolutions have been my way to focus on what I have today. Every year I choose three areas of change or growth and I pursue them as earnestly as possible for twelve months. I recently realized that this habit is pretty unusual: having talked about it with several people I found that they don’t do this. Yet I’m convinced that it can make one a happier and calmer person. Perhaps the following illustrations will incite you to try…

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