Namaste the Hard Way by Sasha Brown-Worsham

Author:Sasha Brown-Worsham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications Inc
Published: 2018-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Yoga as a Young Mom

“I miss you Mommy,” Samara says, crawling on my back.

I think, Missed me? But why? She’s been home all day, sick. We think she has the Coxsackie virus. She claims her feet and hands tingle, and I have obsessively checked her temperature all day: 99.4, 100.3, 101. Damn it. She will be home again tomorrow, and I will spend another day trying to plan class, read, and write while she watches My Little Pony on the flat screen.

“Mommy,” she cries when I go the bathroom.

“Mommy,” she cries when I go get the laundry.

“Mommy,” she cries when I walk into the hall to let the dog into the backyard.

“Mommy,” she cries when I sat on the chaise in the dining room for ten minutes.

I am sure she’s not lying. I’m sure she misses me. How well I know that feeling — to miss. By definition it means to lack, to be without. I am without a mother. I miss her. But it can mean other things: literally, to fail to hit a ball — a swing and a miss; figuratively, to miss a promotion at work. It means to try and to fail. As a noun it means the failure to hit or make contact with something. What a word.

How does my baby mean it? Did she try to touch me, and she failed? Does she just miss me because I went into another room? The kind of longing I feel for my mother isn’t adequately covered by miss. Not if my three-year-old can “miss” me in the next room. I long, I pine, I search for my mother in every face. I have seen her in a million celebrities: in Michelle Pfeiffer’s high cheekbones and in Cher’s long legs, in Madonna’s sinewy arms and Carly Simon’s huge smile. All these women have grown and changed, and in my mind, that’s how she would have changed, too. She tried to age, to let her hair become gray before she was forty, to dump the contact lenses and wear glasses. But a forty-five-year-old has no idea what it is to be old, not really. A swing and a miss.

“Mommy go to yoga?” Samara asks, as I head out the door, mat in hand.

I left Baptiste years ago. Now I go to O2 Yoga, and it’s the first studio where I feel truly at home. The practice isn’t heated. It lives somewhere between the slow flow at Kripalu and the crazy pace of Baptiste. We do arm balances, twists, and binds. I buy a monthly pass and go every day. I write my name on my mat with a Sharpie so people know who I am.

Yoga is trendy now. Everyone I know does it. Blond women with tall lattes show up to class, towels in tow. They have the $100 mats and the pricey yoga tops with their built-in shelf bras and fabulous designs. “It’s so relaxing,” they say. And it is.

I still run every day. I’ve run two marathons and many half marathons, and I think yoga will never take over in my life.

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