mi cumpleanos

I turn 36 tomorrow. And it's totally okay. While I'm not in as much of a whoop whoop way as I usually am on my birthday, there's a peace about it all that I'm grooving on.

I took myself to yoga tonight. Now that I don't teach in the evenings, I actually have time to take class. I went on Saturday morning and had an awesome time. Tonight I was a bit more ambivalent, feeling drowsy after the day, wanting to hang on the floor with H.S. and play tea party. But I knew I would thank myself, so I hauled myself off the hard wood and headed out.

And about halfway through class I had this awesome this-is-your-life moment. I remembered when I was 24, when I first began my yoga practice. I was a first grade teacher. I was busy and stressed out. I had no commitments other than my job. My boyfriend at the time lived in Seattle, so what would have occupied my evenings was far away. My girlfriend and I got really into this yoga studio across town. We'd pile in my Honda (I think she was still a before her time L.A. biker...) and head to Sunset. The studio was tiny and urban. The peeps who hung there beautiful in that earthy, tattooed way. We were not so cool like that, but we both had a solid, strong practice and we could hang.

I wasn't at peace with myself at 24. I noticed all the other bodies in the room, the other outfits, wondered how I measured up. I hit the poses hard and wanted to look a certain way. It was a struggle to settle my mind during savasana. I was a million places, wondering how bad traffic would be on the way home, what drama awaited me at school the next day, would my boyfriend be home when I called that night? But that was how it was for me then. That's just how it had to be.

Tonight I had this awesome moment memory. I was in the front of the room. All god knows how many pounds of me. The studio has lots of natural light and windows that look out onto the funky building tops of Main Street. The sky was gray with a gentle, almost spring rain. As I made my own way through each pose, I felt absolutely in my body. Totally at peace with my unique place in my body, my unique place in the room. I realized that I was doing something absolutely, blissfully selfish.

Tonight's class had nothing to do with anyone else. It wasn't a class at my studio where I know everyone, in fact, for once in Missoula, I didn't recognize a soul in the class. I wasn't in a pre-natal class bonding with a bunch of other prego mamas, itching for connection. I wasn't in my basement with my girlfriends, leading them as we did for years, their presence encouraging me to keep up my practice. I wasn't in some regimented ashtanga class with all the hard cores up the road, wondering what it is about my personality that keeps me from waking at dawn to practice, why I never wanted to give up red meat.

I was just my self. My self in this body. Today.

I felt totally connected to my boy. Like I was giving him such a gift. A part of my whole self. A time when he didn't have to share me with Elie or Jeff or 33 second and third graders. I was so in tune with where he was as I moved through each pose. I'd feel him shift position with me, feel him weigh in one direction or the other.

I lay there in savasana, mind totally fixed on an image. A sunny day. A green field. Then after a few moments of sunlight and calm, Jeff and Eliana come into the picture. We're laughing in the grass. It's a perfect moment. Made even more so because our boy was there too. All of us giggling, totally at peace.


I felt affirmed again. This pregnancy, this birth, this baby -- it's all a new journey. It doesn't resemble the first experience because it can't. And maybe someday I'll have that moment where the parallels can be drawn. Like tonight in yoga when I could have been at Ahimsa in Silverlake. Totally selfish, but in a totally different self. It was like the grown up me looking down on the kiddo me thinking, hey, you came out alright. You just keep getting better.