We all Fall

Tags

essay, health and fitness, sports injury, walking

As you know if you’ve been following thepauser, I’ve been on the dog’s path since the middle of October, trying to get myself to a healthy weight and level of fitness. I’ve been losing weight and getting much stronger.  My endurance is much better, but this journey has had its hiccups as well.

Two Fridays ago, I woke up feeling fantastic.  Really. I felt like those ladies in the commercial where everyone wears yellow and sings, “It’s a great big beautiful day to be alive.”

I drove to the park to take my walk, participating heavily in congratulatory self-talk. Look how far you’ve come.  You can go so much faster and so much farther now. You are one bad babe!  It was one of those days when the sun combined with the cool temperature to create fizzy atmosphere, the kind that cleanses you and leaves you feeling all Mary Poppins-ish.  I felt demonstrably happy.  I felt bulletproof.

I was churning along as fast as I could go, just starting to get my rhythm, when a text came

by the reflection you shall know the shore

 

through.  I considered stopping to answer it, but I had some hubris in me that morning. I know the trail.  I’ll send the text and keep on walking. I’m one bad mamajama.

When my foot met the hole, I felt the same sort of shock and disbelief the guys who built the Titanic must have felt when they learned their unsinkable boat lay on the ocean floor in a bunch of matchstick sized pieces.

It hurt.  My ankle went out from under me and twisted at a sick angle, and the weight of my entire body landed on the opposite knee.  Sitting there, stunned and humiliated, I wondered if I’d be able to get up on my own.  I thought about how embarrassing it would be to have to call an ambulance.  I felt every one of my fifty six years.

Then, I remembered the man.  He was on the path somewhere nearby.  I’d just passed him a few minutes ago going the opposite direction.  He’ll help me, I thought.  He’ll help me get up and then I can limp to my car and die at home, in private. Saved by the stranger.

As I looked up the trail to see where he was, I saw him exiting the restroom.  When he saw I was still sitting down, he turned around and went the other way.   I managed to crawl to a nearby bench and pull myself into a standing position, where I then hobbled my way to my car.

I’m not mad at the guy who went the other way.  We’ve all witnessed the calamities of strangers and gone careening in the opposite direction.  He had his reasons, so he avoided helping me.  But here’s one thing I do know.

I am a stopper.  If he would have gone down on the trail that day, I would have gotten there as fast as I could.  I would have asked if he was okay, and I would have stayed until I was sure he was okay, even if he was embarrassed, even if he didn’t want me there, even if he said, “Go away,” in a stern, unfriendly voice.  I would have done it, because underneath our yellow clothing and bluster, people are as fragile as those paper streamers we hang on the edges of tables at a birthday party.  We tear.  We fade.  We need one another.   In exigent circumstances, territories don’t count.

People must sense I’m a stopper.  Folks I have never met before tell me the most remarkable things about themselves.  The other day I was in line at the grocery store when the woman behind me said, “He has Alzheimer’s.  Isn’t that sad?” She pointed to a picture of an actor on the Star magazine.

I agreed, because Alzheimer’s is, indeed, sad.  She continued. “My brother’s wife has Alzheimer’s, and she can’t even take care of her own restroom needs, can you imagine?”

I replied.  No, I couldn’t imagine. She went on to describe her sister-in-law’s restroom problems, and how her brother promised he would always take care of his wife, and how putting her in a nursing home would feel like a divorce.

“I told my husband that if he gets bad like that, I’m not keeping him home like my brother has,” she said. “I couldn’t do it by myself. He’s already showing some signs, you know.” When she said “some signs,” she whispered, as if the words themselves held malevolent magic and could speak themselves into existence.

“Some signs,” was the part she needed someone to hear.  Maybe she woke up that morning with the fear in her mind.  Her husband, the man she had loved and taken care of for years, may not recognize her in days to come.  Standing in line at the grocery store, she felt herself fading and she stepped into my territory uninvited.  I really don’t remember what I said to end the conversation.  It was probably something like, “I’m sorry this is happening to you.”

Stopping, in this case, cost me next to nothing. I finished my transaction and limped on home.  But whatever it costs to stop, for me, not stopping costs more.

Sometimes, compelled by forces we cannot understand, we lay ourselves bare before strangers.  And when I need to unburden myself, when the sadness, or the pain, or the joy is about to make my brain explode, someone usually appears.  Sometimes, I’m the one to appear.  Reap. Sow.

It’s been two weeks since the fall now, and every morning I wake up expecting all of the pain to be gone.  Every morning, I’m surprised when I put my foot on the ground and feel the twinge. I’m surprised when I notice the yellow and purple bruising around my knee.  Surprised, but also grateful for the lessons. Don’t walk and text at the same time. When someone needs you, just stay.

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If you get an Outfit, You can Go to Zumba, too.

Tags

essay, humor, Zumba

I’ve had the desire to try Zumba ever since I saw the founder, Beto Perez, on television.  At two o’clock in the morning, my sleep dyslexia in high gear, Beto and the other Zumba dancers filled the screen with their optimism and can-do brand of exuberance.  Super skinny folks mingled with the real people; chunky and smooth peanut butter in one room, all of them dancing to salsa music.

Now that I’m on the dog’s path, I know it’s necessary to change up my fitness routine if I want to be successful—boredom is my enemy.  Therefore, now is a great time to do some Zumba.  Friday before last, I went to one of two local gyms to give it a try.  I thought it would be fun, and it was.  Me and five other women all shaking our booties to the type of upbeat music I don’t have on my i-pod, sweating like field hands, and laughing together.  They all seemed friendly and welcoming, and they didn’t laugh at my lack of Zumba-bility.

I was okay at the part where you kicked one leg and then the other.  When the shimmy appeared, I kept up.  However, Beto designed the Zumba as a work out for your booty, and the genre features a lot of gyrating of said.  This Baptist girl’s hips did not know which way to turn.  By the time the instructor had done the entire rolling sequence of the hips, mine were just getting the “rotate,” message.  And forget about the footwork.

 

Whatever. I had fun, and I want to do it again.  But before I go again, I need an outfit. All the other women were in tight pants (I think you call them leggings), and they were capris, and they were tight no matter how big the gals were.  My pants went all the way to the ground, and they were loose, and my t-shirt was one of my husband’s old ones and it went almost to my knees.  The extra material flapped almost as much as I did, and it made it hard to see what my body was doing. At least that’s my excuse for not keeping up with the buttock action and the footwork.  I also did not have a headband.  I think you call those sweat bands or something.

Needing an outfit for Zumba has occupied too much of the room in my brain.  The Smothers Brothers’ rendition of The Streets of Laredo morphed into my theme song, the line “If you get an outfit, you can go to Zumba, too,” glommed onto my brain stem like glue.  I looked on line at the famous site created by Kate Hudson.  She says in the commercial, “The girls will like these cute clothes.” I think the clothes are cute. But are they really supposed to touch your skin, all of it? And if you ask the site to show you short sleeved t-shirts, you are treated to a plethora of camisoles, sleeveless with spaghetti straps in the front and with intricate banding in the back that kind of reminds me of the netting you see on a turkey breast.

Wrap your turkey in it, and then use it to hold your camisole together.

In the first place, this girl isn’t walking out of the house without covering up the girls. Those camisoles would definitely show your bra straps, and that ain’t happening.  In the second place, when Kate Hudson refers to girls, I think she means actual girls, as in not women yet.  The fitness models on the site have a decidedly androgynous/adolescent look.  I talk about being a girl, but I only mean it in the figurative sense.  Where are the fitness clothes for the grown up women?

I wanted to go in the Lululemon and find some workout clothes.  My husband and I worked hard for the last thirty years and I think the budget could take whatever Lulu dishes, but I just couldn’t make myself go in there.  I had this preconceived notion that the sizes went from double zero to six. I pictured the salesmen as knowledgeable and perky. Perky people just make me nervous. Sorry if you happen to be perky.

So, I went to the mall and looked through rack after rack of athletic clothes.  Some of the pants are labeled, “Yoga.” Well, that just threw me off.  They looked just like all the other pants, but would a Zumba connoisseur be able to tell I was, in fact, donning yoga pants in a Zumba atmosphere?  I feel pretty sure they’d keep their mouths shut at my Zumba spot in the country,  but what if I went with my daughter to the gym in California and somebody made fun of her mother for wearing the wrong work out duds?  I wouldn’t want that. And nowhere, in that barren tundra that is the mall, was a friendly, emotionally accessible salesperson who would respond to my to yoga pant /or not to yoga pant query with generosity and without condescension.

After looking (and looking, and looking) I had an epiphany.  I went to Ross Dress for Less. Nobody is gonna judge me in the Ross Dress for Less.  I can walk through the check out with a pair of size 15 women’s underwear (that’s some big underwear- and no, not my size), a baseball bat, a beret, and a jock strap, and no one will bat an eye.  In the dressing room, I squeezed into a variety of athletic pants and shirts, and after I picked the outfit that squeezed my skin the least, the dressing room attendant and I engaged in a brief conversation.  She said, “Are you starting to exercise?”  And I told her about being three months into a healthier lifestyle.  She talked about how she needed to get started, too. I had no problem with this non-perky conversation.   Ross Dress for Less is not a perky type of place.  What a relief.

My almost not too tight gear

Now that I have my outfit, I can return to Zumba with a sense of pride in my financially responsible attire. I hope to make Beto and all the other Zumba high-ups proud with my can-do, chunky peanut butter exuberance.   Maybe I’ll even brave the Lululemon one day soon.   I still need a headband and I’m pretty sure they have one in my size.

 

Palimpsest Girl

Tags

essay, writing

Palimpsest – 

noun

1. a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

 

Here’s the truth. When I was this girl…

Tennis Girl

I wanted to look like this girl…

New Mom girl

And when I was this girl…

 

I wanted to look like this girl…

Pin up girl

Don’t get me wrong.  I did not want to be the earlier version of myself, I just wanted to look like her.

The girl in this picture did dumb stuff, like let the checking account get down to $ 0.23, like run out of gas and leave the useless car sitting in the middle of the road in the middle of the night (Mom, I know what you mean when you say there are some things you just don’t want to know, but I’d never do this now. Aren’t you glad you didn’t know then?), like send packages in the mail and forget to pay the postage.  This girl is not the girl I turned out to be at all.  So I never wanted to revert to her behaviors, only her appearance.

I’ve been the palimpsest girl for my whole life, scrubbing at my real self, attempting to efface reality and create a scripted version of me that the world might find acceptable.  Why?

Let’s not involve culture, okay?  I did this to myself.  Maybe culture had something to do with it, but since I’m a sentient being, I did not  have to drink the kool-aid.  No one is to blame for my own foolishness, not my mother, not my father, not my teachers, not my husband, and not my children.  Somehow I got the idea in my head that the person I saw in the mirror,  that girl, she needed a shove.

In the effort to create a better script, I  erased myself raw, but like the palimpsest writings, my real script remained, pushing, straining toward the light, and I always burgeoned into a plumper, older version of myself.

All that time, all that effort to look like something I am not, has landed me where I am today.  I have to ask myself,  what would have happened if New Mom girl could have accepted that higher BMI, those rounder curves? What if she hadn’t been so busy kicking the goads, frowning into the mirror?  Could my life have been gentler and happier?  What if, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, I’ve a layer I don’t recognize any longer? What if there’s a great treatise in there that I pushed aside in my hunger to look thinner?

Here’s my greatest regret. I did not model the graceful exchange of age and acceptance for my own children.  They’ve been on this unstable ride with me as I deflate and inflate, and deflate again.  In this I have to look them in the eye and say, “Don’t do this to yourself,” and “I am so, so sorry. Had I known better, I would have done better.”

I’m at the point now where I have no choice but to lose weight.  Health issues hover in the background, and my behavior has had an adverse effect on my husband.  But this time, I’m not erasing anything.  I move more. I eat less.  Sometimes I say no to bad food, sometimes I say yes. I accept that the only true constant is change.  Whatever happens, all of who I am stays on the page.

Real Girl

 

Back on the Dog’s Path

Tags

essay, health and fitness, walking, weight loss

The Dog’s Path, worn over time, with reckless ferocity

A family of wild hogs lives in the overgrown field running along the back of our property line. Following some sort of biological imperative, the hogs leave their family home as the sun comes up every day, moving along the fence line and ambling across the road to an undetermined location.  In the evening, they reverse their direction and trudge home heavy snouted, ready for a nice wallow and glass of beer.

Our dogs, Luna and Bailey, have a biological imperative of their own which compels them to pelt down to the fence line twice a day and bark furiously at the hog family.  Luna and Bailey are surprised every time the hogs appear, so they guard the property with the same ferocious, joyous abandon every time.

Their pelting has created a path. This path serves them well when spring grasses give way to summer sticker burrs.  Back in October, the dog’s path was where I started, to keep the sticker burrs at bay.  I set my timer for 15 minutes, and I walked up and down the dog’s way.  Luna and Bailey ran trotted up beside me from time to time, peeling away when the grass became too thick.  I looked back every once in a while, and there the two would be, standing together, looking at me, then looking at each other.  That first fifteen minutes seemed to take forever, and produced a flop sweat heretofore only suffered by those kicking a lifelong heroin habit.

Bailey, Captain of the Guard

After Super Husband came home from the doctor with the “weight,” word on his lips, I resolved to take action. I realized that my habits had a direct effect on him, and I wasn’t going to be a bad example any longer. On the morning of October 12, I got up early and put the batteries in the scale.  When I stepped up, I didn’t know what I’d find.  My weight had become, like the numbers that indicate money in the bank, like the popularity of the Kardashians, a mysterious, distant unknown.  For two years, I ignored the mirror’s message; you’re getting fat, girl.

In the beginning, it’s always innocent enough.  I’m sitting in the emergency room all night and after that trauma, who’s thinking about what goes into their mouths?  Not me.  Then the next day comes, and the day after that, and before I know it, I’ve blown it. Again.

I don’t know much about other people, but I’ve been struggling to maintain a healthy weight for my entire adult life.  Having to take care of other things has always been my go-to excuse for getting fatter: the kids needed me, the school needed me, the church needed me, and so I didn’t have time to tend to myself.  The other myth: when things are settled with (insert crisis here) I will have more time to take care of my health.

This time, I pulled it all around me to get away from the hurt I felt. The fear of losing a loved one.  It swirled and coagulated and landed on my belly, my hips, my thighs, my breasts.  The hurt, it took the shape of Buddha and of the whiskey barrel that someone famously used to dive over Niagara Falls.  It took the shape of a second chin and a measuring tape stretched thin and the shape of bobbing up and down in the water like a fishing cork with all this extra blubber.  While the world moved on without me, I sat in my chair and looked out the window.  I congealed.

I hated having to start over in this quest to stay thinner.  I hated that being fat is not understood, not even by the fat.  I hated my explanations, which sounded as thin as a balding pate, as weak as a thin man’s knees, as lame as weak tea. And so I found myself, again, on the dog’s path, walking in the field on our property because I was too ashamed for people to see me out walking, because I was frightened of the road and the path at the park. And forget about the gym.  People would see me at the gym.

The first time the dogs tore down to the back fence to torment the hogs, there was no path.  They paved one over time.  And that’s what I’m doing.  I graduated from the yard to the neighborhood, and to the park.  In a very short amount of time, I’m now able to go several miles without stopping.  SH and I went to the park and hit tennis balls around for almost an hour last weekend.  I didn’t have a heart attack, and neither did he.  Sometime soon, I’m going to give Zumba a try.  In a gym.  Even if the instructor is five feet tall and does the exercises fast, fast, Chipmunk style, I’m going to lumber along in a good natured way.  I’m just going to try it and see what happens.

Luna Lovegood, support personnel

I like the dog’s path better than the other path, the one where I sit in a chair Jabba-the-Hutting.  That’s a path, too, the one where you repeatedly do the wrong thing.  Excusing untenable behavior, also a path.  I can’t talk about tomorrow, but right now, I’m with the dogs.  Maybe someday, I’ll be fit enough to dash headlong toward the back fence with Bailey and Luna and there, salute the wild hogs with unruly abandon.

 

 

 

The Leap

Tags

blogging, Geronimo, Leap, Life-Changes, writing, Writing life

For the next few weeks I’m writing some posts inspired by the wonderful blog posts I’ve read in the last six weeks. About a year ago, I acted against type and made a huge change.  I’ve been reflecting on this decision a great deal after reading Geronimo: On Falling with Style from Lily at Such Small Hands.

For empty lakes, storms…

I quit my full time job.  Now I work part time at an interesting, fulfilling job and the rest of the time I devote to writing.  I work on my blog, and I’m also writing a novel.   I know that quitting your job to do other things may not sound like much of a leap, but it felt like a nighttime dive into Medina Lake, in which the depth ranged from iffy to barely adequate.  I was ninety percent sure I’d break my blooming neck.

I took a personality test once, and I got an “A.” When I looked at my results, I pumped a mental fist in the air.  I don’t like to get “B’s.”  That’s who I am.  My velocity has always been fifth gear. Until I made the leap, I was a stereotypical overachiever.  I made lists, and lists of lists.  I’d rather have a nasty zit than turn up late.  I bashed my way through parenthood, marriage, teaching, graduate school, and community responsibilities with the headlong purpose of one of those bulls in Pamplona.  I wasn’t always sure of my direction, but I headed somewhere, hard.

In the midst of charging toward each destination, I was already contemplating my next pilgrimage. I lived, not in the moment, but in the next moment.  And the moment after that.  For most of my life, I had the impression that being a good person meant working very hard and taking on large amounts of responsibility.  For me, restful equaled stressful, because good people are not supposed to enjoy relaxing.

This is the type of faulty thinking that starts in the tangled webs of childhood and can’t be laid on anyone else’s door but your own.  What I’m saying is don’t blame my mother, because we all generate our own excrement.

I can’t say exactly when the Gospel of the Churning Gut started to lose its appeal.  However, the need for change really became clear when Super Husband was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer.  Cancer was the bull that gored me.  After a lifetime of making my own life hard, something truly nasty had charged through the alley.  My natural ferocity in dealing with life events, I knew, would afford no advantage.  I started to realize that other aspects of my life were equally out of my control.  I worked long hours, and spent a good part of my day with angry people. Those people were often angry with me.  I had trouble sleeping, and found myself sitting in my office with the lights off at least once a week, praying no one would see I was in there, begging for the shit storm to pass me by for just fifteen minutes.

I’d toyed with the idea of changing jobs before, but now I thought about stopping.  In January of 2014, I mentioned my idea to SH.  “I’ve been thinking about quitting my job.  I could work part time for a year, or not work at all.”  He surprised me by saying it was about time, and he’d be perfectly happy if I quit.  The rest of my family was equally supportive. I turned my resignation in two weeks later, effective the end of the school year.

My family was honest, I’m sure, but I don’t know if they understand how grateful I was for their sensitivity. If one of them had said anything to indicate that I was imagining the pressure at work, or dramatizing it, or that my income was critical to the family’s well-being, I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to quit.  I’d worked hard to get that job. I made good money.  People looked to me to get critical, important work done.  My ego was tied up in being a faithful employee.

Leaving after seventeen years was an admission that I had failed, that I could no longer rise above my current circumstances.  The wrenches: telling my boss, “I’m not happy,” writing the resignation letter, the two line response to that resignation, packing up my red and white enameled desk, thinking about how to make my home into a workplace, the child who said I was the only reason he made it to high school.  Parting was hard like an arm is hard when it hits the ground and breaks.

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll have been on my “pause,” for a year.  When I quit last May, I expected to return to the charge in the 2015-16 school year.  I thought if I could just disengage for a while, I’d be ready to return to the frenetic pace of my former life.  Now, I don’t know if I will ever be a charger again.  I haven’t changed a lot, but I’ve changed enough.  Enough to be happy, mostly.

I’ve been too glib about this leap, in my interactions with people, and here on thepauser.  In periods of time when I’m not working, I am home.  I have to sit in the stew that is Joni.  Total freedom is hard.  Instead of setting goals I can seldom reach (pre-Leap Joni), I just don’t set any.  It should feel freeing, but honestly, it feels slothful.  My internal timer, the one that rushed me out the door so I’d never be late, has blinked out on me.  Sometimes I fail to properly hydrate.  Or stop watching Netflix, or wash my hair every day.  I read poorly written literature.  In the car I listen to the Blue Collar Comedy Channel and switch to NPR when someone is riding with me. Occasionally I eat only slices of sharp cheddar cheese for lunch. I don’t jump on the treadmill every day. For an “A,” there are no small sins.

I have to constantly remind myself that I’m good enough, just the way I am. That everything doesn’t have to happen in a hurry.  I’m relearning the art of walking in my own humanity.  In my driven way, I thought it would take less time than it has. But in this pause, I’ve learned that I can only do so much of the driving.  Sometimes you have to let go and trust.

I’ve also learned about this space, here, on the page.  I have always written, but not with the regularity that I have in the last year.  I’m forty pages into a novel, and this is my seventy-fourth post since the inception of my blog on August 28,2014.  Time and space to write is the greatest single gift that anyone has ever given me. I needed this space, here, on this page and all the others, to internalize the quietude my soul so badly needed. I will not relinquish my balance again without a fight, and tapping on the keyboard at two in the morning has afforded me the courage to state so.

I have not made my last Leap.  The next, like all of the others before it, will be as terrifying as the last.  But in my next leap, I’ll have a sharpened number 2 Ticonderoga pencil.  I’ll have my journal. The scratch of lead against paper will be my mitigator, change agent and stabilizer.  I’ll carry spares in my bag for you, my fellow leapers, in case we meet on our next journey into the void.