Hunting for Wisdom

As a mother of two babies in January, I find myself looking, searching, pawing my hands across the cold earth, hunting for wisdom.

I’m restless, impatient, bored, lonely, and often cold.  And my back aches.  A constant throbbing in the middle of my spine as if I am carrying around a brick with my back muscles that I can’t ever put down.  I want to put it down.  I’m sick of carrying it.  But alas, I have a twenty-three-pound one-year-old who hasn’t yet learned to walk, and a thirty-pound three-year-old who needs to be scooped up into his carseat.  My job is physical.  And my job is contstant.

I find myself biting my tongue.  A lot.  Literally, not figuratively.  Biting my tongue while I’m on my hands and knees wiping peas and bread crumbs and milk puddles off the floor, biting my tongue when I’m picking refrigerator magnets up of the floor for the fifth time that day, biting my tongue while I’m trying to change a diaper on a squirming baby, biting my tongue while I’m trying to wipe the bottom of a squirming three-year-old, biting my tongue when I hear a crash and a cry and a “MOMMMMYYY!!!”  It’s a miracle it is still whole, in my mouth, bracing itself for the next dumped toy bucket.

So, I do yoga.  What a Godsend.  For one hour I get to lay on a mat, listening to soft music, while I stretch my aching back as someone tells me to “love my spirit.”  Twenty-three hours a day I am privileged to take care of my family, to cook them meals, to give them medicine, to kiss their owies, to wipe their bottoms.  But in yoga, for one hour, it feels like somebody else is taking care of me, asking me where it hurts, telling me to relax.  On Monday, at the end of class, I started to cry, a full release of all the tension I was carrying around with me.  And today, at the end of class, as we were doing our “Savasana,” which is the yoga term for “I’m pooped and I’m going to lay down now,” the sun appeared in the room and it lay across my face.  It felt so warm and soothing, I couldn’t move from that spot, even when she told us to.  It was like medicine.  For my spirit.

Yoga doesn’t fix it.  It doesn’t make January or refrigerator magnets go away (the garbage can is so close and so tempting).  It doesn’t make the ache in my back go away either.  But it helps.  Yoga and Goldie Hawn. 

Goldie Hawn was on Oprah’s Master Class this week imparting some of her life’s wisdom.  Yes, Goldie Hawn has some wisdom tucked away in her blonde hair and her big, toothy grin.  She said when she was eleven, she was so afraid of the atom bomb that she started to read the Psalms.  And it helped.  She said her religion brings her joy.

So, I tried it.  I got up early, before the boys today, 5:45 a.m. early, and I hurried downstairs to pour myself a cup of coffee and read a Psalm, quickly, before anyone could cry for me.  I read Psalm 2.  Psalm 2:12 says:  Blessed are those who take refuge in Him.  I wrote it down and decided that today, maybe instead of biting my tongue in half, maybe I would say this line to myself instead.  Maybe it would remind me that someone else is taking care of me, asking me where it hurts, telling me to relax, like a blanket of sunshine across my face.  Medicine.  For my spirit.