First, get centered

In Mojo Mom I have a chapter on Centering, Silence, and Reclaiming Your Mind Space, and this week it feels like all I have to do is take my own advice. It's easier said than done!

It is finally sinking in that I need to get centered before I can anything else. Even though I might imagine "centering" as a luxurious break, in reality my mind would just as soon charge straight ahead. But as I grapple with post-publication burnout (a common experience, but one authors rarely talk about), I have to slow down, to take things off my to-do list, to let other people down and even let myself down--I am bummed that I still don't have all my Mojo Mom chapter summaries posted yet as I had planned!


This Monday, when we had a day of family time for Memorial Day, my husband, daughter and I went to an artist friend's house for a pottery lesson. I loved getting my hands dirty, playing with the clay, and seeing what emerged. Pinch pots and coil pots took form. Then Sasha gave us a lesson on the pottery wheel. You literally cannot do anything until the clay is centered, because off-center clay is just a wobbly blob of goo that pushes you around! Centering the clay is an art all in itself, but with Sasha's help to get us going, we could each experience the wheel for ourselves. When the clay is centered, you have the fun of shaping it, growing a project up and out. The clay still feels like it is in charge to some extent (especially as a newbie) but it was really cool to coax it into a new, elegant form. Sort of like life, wouldn't you agree?

Check out our friend Sasha's ceramic gallery to see what an inspired artist can create.

So as Zen teacher Cheri Huber reminds us, "If you're too busy to mediate, you're too busy." This summer you may see me blogging a bit less--when the spirit moves me, but not every day. Not that I always manage to post every day now, but this summer I am giving myself permission to spend time on some of the restorative work I need to do in my own life.

I might be meditating, playing tennis, or watching my daughter swim, but I am just as likely to be doing the dishes. I need to clear out my mind, my schedule, and my garage so that I can make space to invite in the next phase of my life.

Mojo Mom and the Zen of Tennis

Last week I wrote about the difficult time I am going through, and the facts have not changed, but today I finally found the true release I was looking for. I played the first tennis match of the season with my new team and I won a hard-fought singles battle, which helped contribute to a team win.

I used to feel rather sheepish about waxing rhapsodic abut my love for tennis, as it can sound like a "ladies who lunch" indulgence. I realize it's a privilege to be able to plan my work day to include a long tennis match, but tennis has become really meaningful in my life and I am letting that flag fly.

First of all, it's the best meditation I have found. Instead of observing my breath, I observe the ball (and run around and breathe hard in the process). I get feedback with every stroke that tells me whether my mind is really on the ball. I never find time to sit still and meditate, so I take my focused concentration wherever I can find it!

The mental game of tennis just keeps getting more interesting as I get older. Today I won by reminding myself to just be me, that if I could settle into my center I would do fine. That's a refreshing change from earlier years when I'd try to anxiously psych myself up or get mad at myself if I wasn't doing well. Believe me, some days I still go there in my mind, and ebb and flow mentally within a match, but today I stayed really focused. I am so tired of self-improvement messages and it felt great to think, "Just be myself, that's good enough." I found the acceptance that has eluded me so much lately--now I am hoping that feeling will spill over into other areas of my life.

So, getting my mental mojo back, untethering myself from my computer to get outside to exercise, and hanging out with some excellent friends on a beautiful spring day--that's what I need more in my life right now. But there's one more really important thing.

Tennis is something my Mom and I love to do together, as doubles partners or singles opponents. I've played with her since I was 16. It took me until I was 34 and she was 60 to be able to beat her on a regular basis, and at age 67 she's still a force to be reckoned with. She's a singles specialist, which is rare for someone who could be playing in a Senior league.

And she's continued to play through rounds of cancer treatments. She's the kind of woman who will play in a weekend Breast-cancer-research fundraiser tournament and never tell anyone she's been through that, too.

Last fall, she and I played a couple of times on a doubles team together, right up until the evening before I got my appendix out (we won, go figure, that's how suddenly the appendix trouble materialized the next day). At our first practice for that team, Mom wasn't there, but when my new teammates learned that I was "Ann's daughter," they told so many stories about how Mom had helped them improve their games. She'd take each of them out to hit as she developed her team. I had not realized what an awesome mentor she'd been to so many different players. It was a spontaneous tribute to her that I'll always remember.

So if you ever see us out there, burning up the courts, you'll know you are getting a glimpse of Mojo Mom and Mojo Grannie together in our element.

Little Princesses and Disillusioned Moms

I've been writing about the need to bridge the "gap between expectation and reality" for a few years now. For me the reality of motherhood was a challenge, but the most difficult thing was actually saying goodbye to my fantasies of what being a Mom would be like. A sleeping baby, an easily balanced life?--oops, it turned out that life wasn't that simple. For a while I beat myself up, wondering where I got my unrealistic ideas. Then I realized they were being marketed to me from every angle. The love, marriage, baby carriage fantasies start young. I'd pin Cinderella as my earliest culprit. We are taught to think that we'll go from servant girl to princess when the opposite process is closer to reality!

There's a good piece on Alternet today that focuses on the marketing angle. In The Big Corporate Motherhood Conspiracy, Janina Stajic says:

"And now, in a bid to repeat this success, a new industry has been born: the motherhood industry. Set up solely to sell women a new myth, the myth of the problem- and pain-free motherhood, it focuses only on the very best experiences that motherhood offers: the wonder of being pregnant, the experience of nursing a child, of watching them sleeping in their crib, of reading them classics such as Goodnight Moon and of course, of taking glorious walks with your partner and your perfect little bundle of joy tucked inside that SUV-sized stroller....Indeed, the relentless, challenging, overwhelming, sometimes downright depressing parts of motherhood are entirely disregarded."

Ack, as I was writing this, The Right Start sent me a marketing email touting their new Think Pink Shop, selling pink strollers, care seats, and training potties! 70 pink products, "gifts to pamper your littlest princess."

Make it stop!!!!! I started writing about one kind of conspiracy and it's morphed into another. Okay, take a deep breath. Time to reread the 1972 story X: A Fabulous Child's Story, by Lois Gould, about a child who is raised without anyone knowing its gender.

I wrote Mojo Mom to provide a realistic and hopeful alternative to the marketing machine/fairy tale myths of motherhood. Understanding and accepting the realities of our current lives is a good place to start. My favorite book that explores this topic in a thorough and accessible way is When You're Falling, Dive: Accepance, Freedom and Possibility by Zen teacher Cheri Huber. This is a reassuring, blessedly simple and wise book--an oasis in our complicated and sometimes insane world.