Merging Mama & Me
One of my favorite parts of the morning is pulling open the curtains to my favorite room in the house and letting the light in. This room is my baby’s nursery, which doubles as my yoga room. Although this may sound sweet at first, it’s not because that’s how I wake up with baby. That sounds gentle and calm and inspiring and beautiful. But, in fact, I typically wake up in the pitch blackness to my baby crying and/or screaming at 5am…which is not, in fact, my favorite part of the morning. (Let’s hope this is a side-effect of teething and a phase that will pass). But, a couple hours later, her “dadda” takes her out for a morning walk and I come back into her nursery and transform it into my yoga room…..
Towards the end of my first pregnancy in 2018, so many people used to ask me, with excitement in their eyes, about our nursery. At first, I was confused. I didn’t realize this was such a big thing and I didn’t understand why it was a big thing, if so. I mean, I knew we had to have a place for baby to sleep, but she was just a baby. I didn’t know why she needed such a beautiful room full of lots of things. After perhaps the fifth time being asked, my confusion began to turn to anxiety. After all, I was more than 8 months pregnant and we didn’t have a nursery!! We didn’t have a beautiful room and we didn’t have all of the things!!
Spoiler alert: You don’t need a beautiful nursery and you don’t need all the things…
Unless of course you want that and that brings you joy.
For me, it didn’t. I just wanted a little baby to snuggle up next to me, and, ideally, sleep.
For that reason, I couldn’t visualize the nursery. And for the type of person I am, if I can’t visualize it, if it doesn’t feel right or exciting, I can’t create it.
So, when Ellie was born, she co-slept with us in bed (following safe co-sleeping techniques) for months. Eventually, we put a bassinette in our room. And then a few months after that we dragged the basinette into a separate, nearby room. And then, eventually, we ended up with a crib in my yoga room.
At first, this was a difficult experience for me to swallow. After all, she was my first, only and very codependent baby and she was sleeping in a separate room than me! I could reach out and touch her or check to make sure she was breathing 15x an hour at my fingertips. And, to make matters worse, the room she now claimed happened to be MY room. For anyone who is a religious Friends watcher, this is the equivalent of “Ross’s sandwich”. It was MY room.
My yoga room was sacred to me. It was a space I would walk into and immediately get to be ME. I felt like I would transform in there, as the sage scents settled around me, my yoga mat called my name, and my journal and favorite pens sat nestled in the corner, cozy with creation. It was carefully, albeit minimally, designed with a few of my favorite things and an epic view of the Hudson River- the place we celebrated the life of my father just a few years before. So, turning it over to Ellie was pretty metaphorical for how Ellie quickly took over my life in general…(ha!/not always that funny).
Everything that was mine became hers, including all of my time and my sense of who I was outside of being her Mom.
Long story short, it took me almost 1.5 years to rediscover myself as this new-old ME, while also being Ellie’s Mom. And it took me equally as long to re-fall in love with my yoga room/Ellie’s nursery.
Today, I love that these two spaces co-exist.
I love that I can open the heavy, blackout curtains (that I begrudgingly bought for Ellie’s sleep sake, but to my sacred-space-dismay) in the morning and shine light on her sweet little crib and pillow, side-by-side to my yoga altar. I love that I can roll out my yoga mat besides her rocker, still scattered with bedtime books that we read together snuggled up the night before. I love that I can see myself practicing in the mirror with ultrasound and pregnancy pics plastered on the wall behind me.