Yoga helps young moms cope.
For-credit courses help young moms cope with hectic lives
Taylor Bridges wakes up at 5:30 a.m. on school days, feeds and dresses her baby girl and rushes out the door pushing six-month-old Destry in a stroller to catch three buses to class.
The 17-year-old student walks 10 minutes from the bus stop to Braemar, a school in the Ottewell neighbourhood that caters to junior and senior high moms, where she drops Destry at the school’s child care centre at 8:45 a.m.
When Bridges steps into her first class, the morning madness melts away.
The teen is among the first group of Edmonton Public Schools students to enrol in for-credit yoga classes, introduced this semester after school trustees and Alberta Education approved the threecredit halftime block as an option. Bridges hadn’t tried yoga before she started the Braemar class this spring to get back in shape after her daughter was born, but yoga is yielding some surprise benefits.
“When you wake up with a baby in the morning, your day can be stressful and difficult,” Bridges said, sitting crosslegged on her purple yoga mat. “But when you come to yoga, you can get rid of all that and find calmness.
“It’s very beneficial to us emotionally. Some of us have jobs, and having a job, school, a baby, a house to clean and bills to pay as a teenager — plus worrying about what you’re going to do for post-secondary — it can get very stressful and overwhelming. I think yoga is very beneficial to that emotional part.”
Teacher Michelle Martel, who runs Braemar’s independent learning class, found out in December public schools would be able to offer Yoga 15 and Yoga 25 classes in 2013. She immediately signed up for yogateacher training. Martel spent every weekend in an intensive 200-hour power flow training course. She cleaned out an unused classroom at Braemar, spending her own money and enlisting help from two friends to transform the clutter-filled space into a yoga room. Moksha Yoga in Sherwood Park donated equipment such as bolsters, straps and mats, and is running a “karma” class to raise money to support the Braemar course.
Martel was determined to create a room “that feels like a real yoga studio.” Most students can’t afford to go to a gym or spend $20 on a yoga class, she said. “Plus they need child care, plus they don’t drive so they have to take the bus.”
Martel turns off the fluorescent lights and uses candles to infuse the room with tranquillity during the class that runs from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. daily. Fabrics in soothing grassy green, Dijon yellow and maroon cover the classroom’s hard-featured walls. Shelves are decorated with potted plants and grasses. Tall branches rise in rows out of a tiered bookshelf.