For many years, my halloween costume was a headband with fox ears and a tail. Prior to that, I was a bee, and from the first year we opened Enso Prenatal, the prenatal yoga & childbirth education space, my business partner and I invested loads of gleeful effort into our annual halloween party. She would go all out in a curated and specific costume, and I’d clip on my ears and tail, and we welcomed all of our littles and graduates back for a mid-morning soire that was wild and loud and incredible. A significant number came dressed as ducks.
Kill me.
I haven’t participated in a single reunion from my academic institutions - the private elementary school that somehow abhors alumni engagement, high school, nor college. It’s fine that my fellows are doctors or married or still living at home, and I have no interest in communing with them as an aggregate. But my babies?
That’s different.
Owning a yoga studio was never a goal or a dream of mine (neither was being a yoga teacher), so it is odd that in 2013 I found myself in a 50% ownership place generally recognized as such. There are great and terrible studios already out there, and I’ve helped plenty of studios open, pivot, migrate, and evolve through tumultuous times and markets. None of that appealed to me, nor did feeling attached to a particular set of coordinates. Travel was too important for me to tie myself down with the obligation of a physical studio.
But in 2012, when Bea and I were each teaching a prenatal class once a week a few blocks down the street from one another, our students asked us to coordinate and collaborate, a request that coincided with the store who hosted me adding more retail racks into the space where we often practiced yoga. The very thin sliver of ‘yes’ in my life regarding owning a yoga studio was uncanny. Co-ownership gave me some freedoms to continue traveling, and the purpose of our space felt meaningful to me. Rather than simply being a space where people could gather to practice and learn about yoga, we were a place that supported motherhood.
Motherhood is messy and rife with paradox. As a broader culture, we don’t agree on what qualities constitute a good mother. We expect an impossible caricature of a person who is benevolent yet firm, devoted yet independent, intuitive yet classically educated. Somehow we expect motherhood to transform our imperfect selves into greater and more perfect icons while juggling the needs of tiny humans?
Seems suspect.
Motherhood unhinges the most stable relationships, the healthiest bodies, the soundest minds, especially in the early days, and then holds within it the capacity to transmute and blossom into the cornerstone of one’s legacy. We aimed to be a soft place - a centralized place - for motherbound humans to create the social connections necessary to navigate some bumpy spots.
Prenatal yoga - as we taught it - as we were taught to teach it by Katie Wise and Kirsten Warner - is fundamentally a place to create a community of folks a bit ahead or a bit behind you. A place to normalize what was normal and resource what wasn’t, and a place to prepare not only physically, mentally, and emotionally for what comes next, but prepare communally. In all of my years and all of my experience, I have not yet encountered someone who asked for or received sufficient support through this process (although I’ve seen a handful come close). Enso was there to create connections between clients, between resources, and inside of whatever unfolded on the bumpy road to and through.
You’d have to ask her opinion on the matter, but I always thought Bea’s side of the business was more ceremonial and reverential and mine was more contingency and liminal (and hilarious), and that is part of what made us balanced and beautiful. She can throw a Blessing Way and paint a belly cast, and I can make war-hardened soldiers laugh with tears in a breastfeeding class. We have both walked beside some harrowing experiences, sometimes together, and neither one of us earned the sort of money we deserved from the work we invested.
But my god. Our legacy?
I see it when I scroll through Instagram while soaking my weary body in an epsom salt bath. I see my baby ducks with adult teeth, the mamas whose eyes held mine as they bled out and circled the proverbial drain. Reunions of cohorts of mamas who bonded and outlasted the Terrors of Twos and are into the wilds of uncharted preadolescence, with the added complexity of global pandemics and the pivot dance. I see my mamas flourish in academia or graduate nursing school, and I see a family of silouettes on the beach, with a little more space than necessary, and automatically fill in the shadow that is missing.
This is my legacy, bestowed to me via this stupid app.
When I feel defeated and deflated at all I have not accomplished, and feel my father’s grief as he holds my cousin’s three year old, knowing that’s as close as he’ll get to playing grandpa? I turn to Instagram. Not because I need eyebrow inspiration or sugar shaming, but because it reminds me every so often that I had a small part to play in the lives of these thousand or so mamas who have crossed paths with me.
There are seasons when I see this most - back to school is somewhat noteworthy, and I’m grateful for all of the sweet December Holiday postcards I get, but Halloween is a sure-fire day for my feed to convert to 90% my babies. It’s my day.
I’m in it for the ducks, you see?
And so this year, when Instagram shut down thousands of accounts (including mine) because of a glitch in the matrix, I nearly lost it. Any other day, and I can make peace with the fallibility of human-made systems of technology, but Halloween is when my ducks come out - now as princesses and spider people showing off their martial arts talents and gap-toothed grins, with pillowcases laden with candy.
Halloween is a highlight reel that echoes the fantastic and terrible, the full spectrum of life and motherhood in the grim and frightening, the celebratory and silly. The sacred moments that remind me that in the end, it is all worth it.
Thanks for reading,
K
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PPS: Want to hear my worlds collide? I sat down with Bea earlier this year and recorded a conversation about Boundaries on her podcast.