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Losing My Yoga at the Dress Rehearsal


So … premature kudos. Maybe.

I put on my game face. The “fuck off, I’m doing yoga” one. Not exactly all divine light and lotus blossoms, but I was rolling.

Dee’s first two performances were 10 dances apart with the first one, tap, coming at almost an hour into rehearsals.

She wanted to watch and it was only mildly terrible with far less skank ho costumes than last year. Perhaps someone read my blog post about that?

Dee and another little girl from the ballet group were the only two not assigned to the ballet dressing room. This was because they performed with a different tap/jazz group. Both the other mother and myself argued to put all the ballet girls together regardless because the costume had too many pieces and the make up was … um … exotic. We were overruled.

I reiterated to Mare, who owns the studio, that it would not be possible to get Dee ready for ballet if the performance was scheduled too closely to either the tap or jazz. Naturally, she spaced the tap and jazz out and left me a 4 number interval to change Dee from her jazz outfit to her ballet costume.

As we were in another dressing room, no one knew where to look for us or that we weren’t quite ready.

I hustled Dee to the backstage door, glanced up at the monitor. Her group was on stage and nearly done.

And it was zen out the frigging window.

You are not supposed to open the stage door when an act is onstage but I yanked it open and yelled for the teacher.

Dee’s teacher is a kid. Eighteen and though talented, not very good with children. She turned, saw my face and shot a panicked look to her mother, the stage manager whose “fuck” expression told me that they hadn’t bothered to look for Dee at all when she turned up missing.

“It’s not that big of  a deal,” Mama said. “They can run through it again.”

“There is no way I can get her ready for this number on time,” I pointed out needlessly. Dee is stricken now as the realization that she was so easily forgotten starts to sink in.

“She can dress backstage on performance night,” Mama says. “All the older girls do.”

Key word? Older.

“We’ll run through the dance again, okay?” Mama says and looks to her daughter who is ushering the little wizards off the stage.

“We don’t need to go through it again.”

And that was all I needed to hear.

Dee is done with dance.

Rob will send the emails and get the money back we spent on tickets for the performance.  I wouldn’t have been able to watch anyway given the complexity and timing of the outfit changes and make up.

Dee was a check. A warm body in the dance equivalent of a puppy mill.

I watched a few three-year old groups early that evening. Kids in elaborate costumes basically standing  and swaying, if that, on the stage while proud mothers snapped photos of their money and time being sucked down a drain.

Patanjali Said What?


Yesterday during yoga training, we spent a bit of time going over the take home exam and receiving our individual teaching lessons for the in class exam.

It’s doable.

For the teaching portion, I am to instruct Adho Mukha Savasana or Downward Facing Dog. my personal nemesis. Down Dog is one of the most basic of poses and it’s one that I am still finding my self in. Every new teacher, workshop or training session shines light on Down Dog. It’s like “the pose that can do anything” because it is always the same yet different every day.

I am also presenting a sutra. Cat assigns each of us one or a short set of sutras and asks us to present/teach it to the rest of the group. Mine is 2.16 – The pain that has not come is avoidable.

And I thought? Seriously?

Because I am sort of – okay – completely – of the theory that we have destinies. Our life paths are not necessarily carved in stone as we are free to embrace or reject experiences, lessons and universal directions, but for the most part, “pain” is as “life” is. We are mortal and therefore subject to all that entails.

You know “bad things happen to good people (and bad people and people of morally ambiguous natures too).

But as I thought about it last evening – and you know me, that’s about all I thought about because I am as bad as a dog with a new chewie when it comes to things like this – I realized I was looking at pain as though it was a condition of certain experiences rather than a choice, an add-on.

Pain is an “a la carte”.

And suddenly, like the revelation of the widening of my sacrum in down dog, I think I got it. It’s about attachment or non-attachment. I can experience without attaching pain. I can detach my experiences from pain when it tries to add itself to the order.

Most obvious example is death. Losing someone is sad but sad is not painful. It’s just sad. I can experience the sadness without attaching pain to it. It’s simply sadness. I feel it for as long as I need to … and I let it.

Acknowledge. Move on.

That’s what an asana practice is preparing me to do. That’s why we chant, practice pranayama and meditate. To gain the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual strength to let go, detach, life from pain.

The suffering does not make you stronger. Letting go makes you stronger. Feeling the sadness without allowing pain to muscle in, distract and take over is the point. Pain is a choice.

Even on a physical level, a person can detach from pain with the strength of the mind alone.

But pain is still there. It doesn’t go away. It’s just our perception and/or experience of it that makes all the difference.

I think. Maybe.

Gotta get ready for training. Happy Sunday. Namaste.

Sarah Coleman Needs a Reality Check


As in … it’s not all about her. In fact, adoptive parents, in general, can step away from the victimization angle any time now. I am tired of hearing about how marginalized they are by the red-necking DNA loving society that picks on their lack of genetically connected family.

Why? Because from the way I see it, in the adoption triangle, they are the ones that come out the overall winners. They couldn’t, or preferred not to, physically reproduce. They adopted. Problem solved. Birth parents are the ones who relinquish their rights and their baby due to circumstances that are beyond their control to alter. Babies, by the way, have no say, no rights and are somehow expected to deal with a loss they are too young to mentally or emotionally wrap their wee minds around and equally too young to verbalize – and later when we do, we are mollified with fairy stories and ultimately end up feeling guilty for not being more grateful for being saved from the fate of being raised by people who loved us just as much as our adoptive parents do.

Being adopted is an emotional Kobayashi Maru. The no-win scenario that can’t be cheated.

Normally, I can muster up a bit of sympathy when adoptive parents sound off about the annoying media practice of pointing out the genetic status of celebrity children. It’s unnecessary, but I get the curiosity factor that drives it because many folks don’t know anyone who isn’t genetically tied to the family who raised them.

But what irritates me to words is the victim feel to the rants of adoptive parents driven to blog or otherwise express themselves. Sarah Coleman is the latest adoptive mother to cry “foul” when what is considered the “alternative reality” of adoption finds its way into the mainstream.

Official party line is that though there may be bumps and adjustments, the adopted children are all right. And mostly, we are. We aren’t maladjusted. We live and love and don’t seek therapy or take psychotropic medications any more than those of you blessed with “flesh of my flesh” families.

Coleman had her panties in a twist over the new movie, Mother and Child, which tells the story of a birth mother, her daughter and an infertile woman who eventually adopts in a way that portrays – in her opinion – adoption in a negative light. But the reality is that there are birth mothers whose lives stopped in any meaningful way when they gave up their babies. There are adoptees who resent having been adopted for reasons as complex as they are as people. There are adoptive parents who will admit – without guilt – that they would have preferred to have had genetic offspring and that adoption was their second choice.

Oh, wait. That last thing. The second choice? Yeah, I’ve never heard anyone admit that. Even though it’s true.

And maybe that’s Coleman’s real problem. Her inner Queen Gertrude feels guilty? If so, she should get over it. It’s not as if adopted children don’t know the score and – news flash – we still love our parents anyway.

My bottom line is this – as the baby in the whole adoption scenario – I am the only one with a legitimate right to take offense and I’m not. Why?

I know that birth mother. She’s my youngest sister who gave up her daughter at birth. And I know that bitter adult adoptee. My younger brother. I know the woman struggling with infertility who saw adoption as the last resort – she would be me. They are not far-fetched inventions of Hollywood. We are real. Our point of view should get equal play.