Working Out My Inconvenient Body

1.

Sometimes, I forget I have a body.

Like after sitting at my desk for hours (which I haven’t done in a while) scribbling stories, essays, poems (etc.) my lower back will suddenly shout, joined in by my clamorous shoulders and spine.

“Hello! Hello! Hello there!”

I stand up creaking, rubbing, and stretching.

Sorry. Forgot you were there.

2.

It hasn’t always been this way. As a kid, I’d roll around on my maroon exercise mat, perform jumping jacks in time to Micky’s Mousercise, climb trees, kick red balls and scrape my knee.

My favorite exercise track was when Donald Duck quacked and said over and over, "I love you!"

As a kid, I was much more well-rounded. I’d spend time reading, drawing, and then polish the day off with a good dancing spree, choreographing moves to (for all you X-Sunday school kids out there) bands like DC Talk, Carmen, and yes, even Ray Boltz.

My mother, in her bright leotards twists, lunges and bends in my kid memories. The chipper ladies on the television keep bright time as she leaps up and down from her double layer step; weights splayed out in front of her.

“My mom works out.”

I said it for years.

She jogged, tyboed, nordic tracked and even personal trainer-ed her way through my childhood. At one point in high school my mother could bench press more than most healthy men.

She terrified the boys at my school.

I could probably still dance for you an elaborate number to DC Talk's "Socially Acceptable".

I was rock climbing with a friend. We discovered ourselves one helmet short. With no hesitation, he tossed me the hard hat.

“No, you take it,” I offered, embarrassed by his chivalry.

“To be honest, Elisha, I’m more afraid of your mother than smashing my skull on those rocks down there,” he said, indicating the jagged bottom lining the twenty foot drop we planned to scale.

But I digress. This post isn’t about my mother. This post is about me and my inconvenient body.

3.

I’m not sure when I developed my preference for the mind. I’m imagine it was around the time when I discovered myself to be clumsy on a court and useless in a field.

People are far more tolerant, even enthusiastic over the bumbling interests of children. This tolerance wears off as the cuteness fades, and soon performance becomes the real thing.

I was a middle school bench warmer. I didn’t mind much. I liked the bus rides to and from games best, wearing the uniform and sharing jokes with my teammates, but it didn’t take me long to learn my place. I was not an athlete.

I thought too much (I was told). I got too nervous. Someone passed me the ball and I panicked, over shot, mispassed, fumbled, even tripped.

But I excelled in the classroom. My propensity for books grew until I was officially “bookish”.

My worst injury was reading related, in fact–after leaning on my wrist for too many hours, the joint gave, swelled, throbbed. I wore my brace so proudly, hoping my peers would mistake it for a sports sprain.

4.

After giving up on sports, my physical activity narrowed into the occasional work out. I worked out because I was a girl and that’s what girls did. I worked out to be thin.

Eventually I gave up on the working out part and just stopped eating. Then my body really began to disappear.

5.

In college, I worked out with the best of them. I went ot the gym and ran on the treadmill. I’d sneak glances at the lean, pretty bodies beside me and try not to indulge the rock knot it cause in my always too soft gut.

It was a revolutionary idea to accept my body in the now, as it was, even then. But I knew I had to get there.

As I changed in the gym locker room, I’d over hear the slide and clang of the scale, the bird like conversations.

You should probably eat more than this inside a twenty four hour period.

“I’ve been here working out for two hours. I guess I could take a break. Drink a shake or something.”

“I’ll I ate yesterday was a salad. I’m trying to lose weight before summer.”

The clang of the scale made me wince ever time. Why did it matter what you weighed? Couldn’t you just work out and have that be it? I thought it, but it still mattered–and that’s why I never did it. I never weighted myself. After high school, I did not step on a scale until I got pregnant. That’s almost ten years of unknown weight fluctuations. I don’t feel lesser for it.

6.

I gave up on the gym. The conversations bugged me. I couldn’t shake them.

After college, I began to hang out with a “hipper” crowd. For some reason the “hipper” I got, the more inhibited I became. I actually became too inhibited to work out, period. Working out was for the pretty girls. I was not a pretty girl.

I smoked a lot then and cut my hair short. I wore cut up clothes that hung off my hips. Let people think I was ugly, I thought. I don’t care.

7.

So I guess I’ve come around.

I’d be lying if I said it had nothing to do with the birth of my son. Henry’s life has inexorably culled me to the median of a lot of things.

Josh, my husband, was the first to use the word “exercise.”

“I’m going to exercise.” He stated it nervously. We were still shy with one another then, and I think he felt silly in his matching sweats.

There was something about the word “exercise” that made me look up. The word worked like the aroma of something warm and familiar. It brought back my childhood mat, my mousercize record, my mini trampoline.

“Exercise” The word was at once playful, at once pragmatic. It was elementary and reminiscent of basic health, physical simplicity.

I liked it.

8.

I think I want to buy an exercise mat.

Maybe I place too much importance on words. Maybe I’m onto something.

Either way, I try to no longer “work out,” but I’m enjoying the hell out of some exercising. I stretch and jump and dance and leg lift and do my best to forget the “work” and needless fixing (i.e. “working out”) the potential weight loss.

Sure, I’d be thrilled to lose a couple of pounds, but that’s not the point–not when you exercise.

I can sustain exercise–but I cannot the work out. The work out inevitably exhausts me with its perfect vehemence, its demanding restriction.

I imagine it’s similar to the difference between sex and making love (and that other four letter euphemism)

Don’t get me wrong–I have my vain moments–and those moments can be %100 vain, but I’ve found a way to throw open a window on all that anxious (and at times neurotic) vanity and self-absorbment–who knew it would be something as simple as a vocabulary renovation?

The power of words at times floors me. I suppose that’s why I write.