That first week of daycare saw magically intense asana practice, because work hadn't really begun, and vacation, since May, had never happened. In a way, that was my first week of vacation all year since LAST SUMMER.
Our pregnancy was a vile, life-killing curse. We asked for it, of course, but we had no idea how thoroughly it would negate and kill the happy people we'd been. So from September to May, there was no vacation and no happiness.
From May on, of course, you have my record. Insomnia, bottomless pain, someone screaming all the time. It was like living in hell for six weeks, before it got better. I taught both summer sessions, and class times were the only times of the day when I forgot about my newly acquired seventh series. I taught pretty much solid until August 5th, when classes ended, and then it took me an additional week to get my grades in.
So suddenly, there was this post-hell, pre-semester blip of fair happiness, with blazing summer sunshine to boot. The kid went to daycare, J went to work, and I was totally by myself for at least six hours a day. So I did a week of Intermediate and then did it again on the Monday night following, with a crowd of nine people in the yoga room (9 is of course unheard of numbers here).
And it was marvelous. It was like a slice of someone else's life, stuck into my filmstrip. Someone got creative in God's editing room.
And that's the week that I stood up, for the first time. Figures.
Then, this week, school suddenly appeared out of nowhere, like a black obsidian tower built with impossible time-lapse speed. I will be teaching two auditorium-sized sections of a 100-level course, six days from now. So I began hurriedly putting syllabi together, trying to clean my office, trying to get my act together. Stress radically increased. This isn't a life I want, and I have to quickly force myself into a tiny little box again, directly after a week of nice oceanic expansion. EVERYTHING in me resists this.
Predictably, my hips tighten up. They've been sore and achy all day, every day this week, either from the backbending or from the stress, or from the combination. Wednesday I did Primary and a Pasasana that I thought would rip me open in the outer hips, they resisted it so. Monday night, they barely resisted. Today, I just did up to Parivrtta Parsvakonasana and got so much agony in the outer hips that I called it a practice right there, 20 minutes in.
This always happens when the life I want vanishes into the life I have. It happens every November when weather chases me inside. It happens at the start of every semester. It happens for a week when I get bad financial news. It chased me around at the start of seventh series.
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So let the syllabi and householding and seventh series, begin. The kid had a bout of diarrhea/vomiting yesterday afternoon, but was fine both last night and this morning, so he's back in daycare for about another 90 minutes. He and I went on a sling walk (he's in a sling around my shoulder) four times this morning, in the backyard. We got along ok. Usually if J leaves us alone, he cries for hours and I try not to go insane. Today he cried on demand, and I could answer those demands (in order: I'm wet, feed me, I'm wet, feed me, I'm tired and need a nap, feed me).
We get along much better when he does what I call "make sense" and when I am more receptive to reading his pre-linguistic signals (hand in mouth...aha! that means feed me!). I'm stil not certain that I'm glad we did this, but glad or not, it makes no fucking difference.
One week of inspiring vacation. That'll have to do me until, probably, summertime next year. Thanksgiving and/or December break will be family tours. I don't think I'm going to like those. Take a six month old on an airplane? For three hours? Have everyone "understand" me as father, when I barely understand myself as "masculine" to begin with? Have no one speak my language, have J continue to be too busy with kid and with householding, to reprioritize us, to put us (and I don't care how shameless this sounds) where we BELONG in the order of priorities?
Only once, one time, have I been in a relationship where personal contentment outranked house cleaning. We cleaned--sure--but we made certain that our routine house maintenance never outranked our personal satisfaction with the relationship. That, to me, is right thinking. The HUMANS come first and the DOMICILE comes second. My ex-wife used to use householding as an excuse to avoid an uncomfortable conversation about our anti-relationship. J and I used to hold a fair balance between time with ourselves and time with the house, but as with all things, that balance has been completely destroyed by seventh series. I said in a phone conversation earlier that I had done and was doing some householding and she said that over the weekend we'd do a whole lot of it anyway, no matter what I did, because that's how householding is, you never finish it.
We used to do OTHER things on weekends.
James Joyce famously said, a long time ago, that one must deploy "silence, exile and cunning." I can and do work hard; I've handled this whole fucking place in four hours before. I know what the life I want has in it. I had many of those elements a year ago. Our exile from the easy days is on and will be until we die, because that is how seventh series works, but we will not ALWAYS be dead to each other from this. Not always. We shall return.
But for now, I have householding to do. Checklists to eliminate. Free time to create. Suggestions to make. The older you get, seventh series, the less time you take, the less dominant you become. I WILL SEE DAYLIGHT AROUND YOU.
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