The best advice I have found that manages to work for both mindfulness and parenting comes not from a Tibetan Buddhist or an enlightened psychologist. It comes from a children’s book written by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees called Giraffes Can’t Dance. I had never heard of this book until LA received it as a gift for having the bravery to be born.

Online sleuthing determined that the authors of this colourful volume are British, it was first published in 1999, and its MRSP was $6.99. The British part is obvious from the text. “Clot” is not a word you hear in the US outside of the hospital setting. God save the queen, because these fine representatives of their land packed a lot into a book that cost less than 7 US dollars.

In brief, this board book narrates the story of a giraffe named Gerald who is embarrassed—bullied by the other jungle animals—because he can’t dance. Apparently every other animal can—and apparently there are no other giraffes to back poor Gerald’s play. Instead, he slinks off, meets a cricket who convinces him that he just has to find the right music, and voila, Gerald dances like no other, earning the admiration of his previous critics.

There’s a lot to be said about this book, about being the gangly, awkward one who doesn’t fit in (Hello! Me!). It has a lovely message about self-acceptance and focusing on what you love instead of what everyone else is doing, encapsulated in Gerald’s final exclamation:

“We all can dance,” he said, “when we find music that we love.”

Because nothing is perfect, it should be noted that Africa is a giant continent, and the animals at this jungle dance are not actually found in every part of the continent. Indeed, giraffes don’t inhabit jungles. They inhabit the woodlands and plains areas. I know this, because I spent a significant chunk of time living in an area of Africa with no lions or giraffes. Snakes, certainly, but they are not invited to Gerald’s jungle dance.

The particularities of geography and zoology notwithstanding, what keeps me loving this book despite endless readings is how tuned into the concept of mindfulness it seems to be. When the cricket tells Gerald to listen to the wind in the trees for inspiration, he utters these brilliant words:

“everything makes music if you really want it to…”

That, in a nutshell, encapsulates so much of mindfulness practice. You stand where you are. You notice all the tiny details that you blithely ignore at any other point in time. The blades of grass suddenly seem greener. The snow is more textured. The brick on the building is lighter. And the multiple layers of sound that surround you fill your entire being with the present just as it is. Every second becomes relevant, filled with meaning, because you choose to pay attention.

In the moments when I manage to become mindful, I experience something similar to what Gerald experiences: I get in touch with myself. Sometimes, I even manage to accept myself. And there is generally a great deal of joy in that brief pause.

Similarly, Gerald also has a lot to say about parenting in a similar vein. There is actually a concept Pamela Druckerman calls “Le Pause” in her book Bringing Up Bebe. Le Pause is what Druckerman describes as the French sleep method, wherein a parent hears a child cry out in the night but does not immediately run to their side. Instead, the parent waits to see if the child is in need or just talking in their sleep.

To be clear, I don’t hold much with sweeping generalizations about entire cultures. Not all French mothers follow one method any more than all Canadian mothers do. Additionally, it could very well be that the mothers Druckerman knew were fortunate to have babies who slept easily. If anyone tries to tell you that there is a singular method to getting a child to sleep, especially if they are selling you something, run away. As the mommy of a child who did not sleep through the night for the entirety of his first year, I can affirm in retrospect that, despite my endless guilt and self-flagellation, it wasn’t about me at all. LA just wasn’t that sort of baby.

Sleep training aside, the pausing has been crucial in dealing with the anxiety that I feel about caring for a child. Are you a parent if you haven’t worried that you will make some devastating mistake and ruin his entire life? My need to soothe his anxiety would compel me to rush to his side too quickly; I probably even woke him up by accident at times. My response wasn’t about his needs; it was about mine. It was about the triggers that a crying child produced inside of me. It was me projecting my fears onto him: fears of abandoning him, of depriving him of connection, of failing as a parent.

Now that he’s a bit older, I’ve come to realise that this pause is also important in other areas of parenting. He struggles with a toy. Do I swoop in and make it work or do I take a moment, pause, and let him see he could figure it out for himself? He attempts something questionable, like climbing onto the sofa. My instinct might be to quickly stop his climb, take him to the safety of the floor. But that isn’t going to teach him anything in the long term. Instead, I have to pause, move to a position where I can catch him if he falls but allow him to try it on his own. If this methodology sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s emphasized in educational philosophies like Montessori and RIE. It’s also key to childhood development, since as William Stixrud points out in The Self Driven Child, kids who have healthy control over their lives are more successful as adults. They are capable of making wiser decisions based on knowing themselves and not needing the voice of someone else to guide them all the time.

This makes me wonder, as I tend to do, if Gerald may have been a baby giraffe whose mother was not particularly mindful. Did she swoop in to help him instead of encouraging him to trust himself, to listen to his own instincts? Did she steal his ability to hear his own music?

One of my deepest hopes is that LA will always be able to hear his own music and smile his delighted smile even if no one else is listening.

The post Giraffe-Like Mindfulness first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

A few months ago, I took my first solo trip with LA to visit some friends. Armed with the knowledge that my own mother had done many trips of longer duration with two children, not just one, I was confident I would overcome any potential challenges with ease. In retrospect, I realise my mother and I never had an actual conversation about any of those trips. She had a particularly intense hatred for the Detroit Metro Airport, which I knew was based on flying through there, going through customs and being left with two small children, ripped open luggage and no one to help. Beyond that, she was the personification of strength and control when travelling. My mother was the type of person to micromanage a trip down the last detail, although my guess now is she learned to be the micromanager from that early experience in the Detroit airport.

Not being a micromanager myself, I assumed it would be exponentially easier since I would go with the flow as it were. I set up a 5-day trip. How hard could it be? I was going back to somewhere I used to live to see people I knew who wanted to meet my baby. Only 4 and a half hours of air time total, one stop at Chicago O’Hare, an airport I know like the back of my hand. Easy.

False.

LA is a miracle baby in many ways, from arrival to health to magnetic personality. But it appears he has terrible travel luck. Although I had taken this exact flight many times, never with a delay, we were delayed going and returning. There was plenty of rough air—what they now call turbulence, I assume because “rough air” doesn’t have the scary connotations of “turbulence” yet. Unlike the earlier flights when he was a tiny infant, LA did not feel compelled to nap once in the airplane. He did feel a need to jump incessantly in my lap, bite everything around him despite us being in the middle of a pandemic and, at one particularly excruciating point, he managed to grab the hair of the lovely lady sitting next to us. There was far more to that trip, most of it negative, but I came out of it with some important questions to help next overly optimistic traveller do better than I did. Although I’m not sure there is a way to do better. I think it’s mostly about survival.

First decision: The car seat. Do you gate check it? It’s safer for the car seat, but you have to carry a baby, a backpack and a car seat around an airport. What about sending it to the luggage hold? That could lead to damage. Final answer: repurpose the stroller pram pack and use an entire roll of bubble wrap to protect the seat. It worked. Good decision.

Second decision: Layover time. Do you pick the shorter time so your child spends less time in travel and potentially avoids losing his mind in a small tin can? Or do you pick the longer layover so you have time for a leisurely stroll and change in a family bathroom? Don’t be like me. I picked the shorter time. Of course, for a solo traveller, or even adult travellers, a quick rush from one terminal to another is a piece of cake and saves having to sit around in the airport deciding if you do or do not want an overpriced bag of trail mix. Except LA got us delayed so much that we almost missed that second flight. Quick rushes with babies pump your body full of stress hormones, force your body to perform feats it really should not attempt, and leave you feeling like you just climbed through a garbage can. Bad decision.

More useful tips.

Dress for success, not to impress. Feeding babies on flights is like cleaning out the horse stalls in a barn. By the time the flights were over, I was covered in puffs, fruit and substances I couldn’t even recognize. Similarly, avoid bringing food like fruit on airplanes. Stick with dry options. LA loves fruit, but he also loves throwing it around.

Do not sacrifice your mental hygiene for physical hygiene concerns. Option a: you keep the baby clean, off the floor, away from germs. Consequence: he screams on the flight. Option b: you let the baby risk contagion, crawl on the floor with him and try to head off any attempts to lick the floor. Consequence: he naps on the flight or at least coos quietly. If you value your life, choose option b. Your fellow passengers are not the kind, patient people you would hope they would be.

All considered, LA was a stand-up little guy. He charmed his way through three of four flights despite his noise level and on one flight even garnered compliments on his behaviour. I attribute this partly to him having a personality and smile that compels a more charitable attitude out of the grouchiest individuals.

Still, I would be nowhere without mindfulness, in this case mindful gratitude.

Gratitude has been an ongoing practice for years. It often takes the form of adding a line to my journal about something I am grateful for that day. Sometimes, when life is particularly hard, I will try to speak it out loud, making it more concrete and tangible. I can’t pinpoint when I began this, but it may be one of the more positive results of my childhood: I’m deeply aware of my privilege, and I have little problem admitting it.

In difficult situations, though, there is no time for journaling, so my process works something like this: Feeling stressed? Anxious? Take a breath, look around, note the sounds, the objects around, then try to think of one thing I am grateful for in this moment. It seems simple, but it’s not as easy as it seems when you’re struggling to breathe. If you can manage to do it, however, it does help. Or at least that has been my experience.

On this particularly difficult trip, when LA had had enough of everything after being delayed nearly 2 hours, and we were tossing about in a tin can somewhere over the Great Lakes, I grabbed hold of that mindfulness practice like those yellow life preservers the flight attendants buckle on during the safety demonstrations. As LA shrieked in annoyance and tried to twist his body enough to bang the chair in front of us with his feet, I took a deep breath, focused on the sounds of the engines, the air above my head. My breath slowed, even as my grip on LA continued, and suddenly the haze cleared. I was able to remember the many flights spent watching other mothers struggle with their children and hoping that would one day be my story. Here I was. That longing had become my reality. My entire mood shifted from worrying that he was bothering people to being grateful he existed. An additional bonus was that my mood shifted his mood, and he switched from shrieking to laughing. It was still loud but far more delightful.

Long story short. Mindfulness matters. This does not mean I am eager to do this again any time soon. In fact, LA’s godmother requested I take a trans-atlantic flight to visit her. She has never travelled with a child on an airplane, and it shows. I told her we would have to wait.

The post Mindful Travel first appeared on Mindful Mommying.