Cardio Parenting
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This might be another provocative post. So if you are not in the mood to be provoked, you may be excused from my table of truth. But if your proverbial feathers aren’t easily ruffled, or you don’t really care if they are ruffled, or you are featherless, welcome. At least I am not talking about sex today.
I used to live at the gym. I treated it as a temple of sorts. If there were answers, I figured they would be found somewhere between the elliptical machine and the shoulder press. For many years, I had an incomparable personal trainer who not only led me around gym equipment like a puppy dog, but became (and predictably) a good friend and confidante. For years, I trained with him 3-4X a week. (Remember, friends, this was pre-recession!) I was addicted.
In retrospect, I’m not sure what I was addicted to. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I spent so many hours of my young life lifting in the gym instead of living in the world. Was it the athletic experience? (In high school, I played three sports and these were some of the best highs of my life). Was it the challenge? Was it the honest conversation with my trainer about life and law and love? Was it the setting? (The gym scene is ripe material for a budding writer). Was it the rabid hunger for control? The notion that if I controlled my body and made it strong, then my psyche would thicken too? Was it the fallacious belief that if I whittled myself down to a tiny size happiness would follow? Or, maybe it was just a place to go when I felt a little lost. Who knows.
What I do know is that in all those years of being a gym rat, I stayed approximately the same size. A size which I was fine with, but not thrilled about. The point is that there I was hour after hour, seeking something, some kind of inscrutable transformation that never occurred. And yet I went back again and again, persistently chasing something I couldn’t identify. Treading water. Spinning wheels. Standing still.
One day, I stopped. Stopped training. Stopped torturing myself about my body. It was the day Toddler was born. Suddenly, everything was different. I had a life to sustain, a creature to nourish, a new life to build. I told myself I would go back to training once the time was right, once I had regained my physical and emotional strength. But I never did. And then something odd happened. Time inched by, and as Toddler grew, I shrank. Breastfeeding helped, it seems. As did the incessant lifting and rocking and bouncing and pushing. As did the fact that focusing on my little girl and her well-being meant not focusing on calorie and carbohydrate counts, on fad celebrity diets, on jean size.
I was still obsessed. But with something new. With something priceless.
With Baby, it happened again. Out she came and after a few weeks of cursing the scale, I surrendered a bit. I went on with my new life. A life of two beautiful girls with the same genes, but different needs. An existence of constant motion. An exquisite and impossible juggling act. A relentless race. And though I have full-time help, between my babies and my book and my blog, there is little time for me to obsess about what I am ingesting and what I am not ingesting. Yes, loyal ILI readers know I am a deeply insecure creature and I have my telltale obsessive moments where I put insane restrictions on myself — (My 29-Hour Raw Food Diet, My Bread Boycott) but then, because of weakness or sanity, I usually come to my senses quickly and quit (Quitting is Delicious).
Today, I am fifteen pounds lighter than I was before Toddler was born when I used to spend upwards of 20 hours a week at the gym. Go figure. I am smaller, happier, full of good coffee-enhanced energy, ready to tackle whatever tantrum comes my way.
The point here? Not that I popped two babies out and BAM am suddenly the third Olsen twin (because then we’d be triplets. Hmmm.) The point is not that I am a size 0 and worry-free. Because I am neither. Patently, there must be some genuine body insecurity at the surface if I am devoting a blog post to this topic. The point is not that everyone should cancel their gym membership or fire that trainer. No. Of course not.
The point is that parenting is the most rewarding and effective cardiovascular exercise I’ve ever encountered. But more so, the point here is that maybe, just maybe, if we stop obsessing about certain things (the scale, the ticker, our happiness quotient), these things will perhaps work themselves out. Sometimes, if we fixate too fiercely on solving the puzzle, the pieces get lost and scattered. But if we step away for a bit, shift our focus to other things, good things, we might come back and find the puzzle has solved itself.
Parents: are you in better or worse shape than before you had kids? Have you guys found that when you fixate on a particular result or goal, it often eludes you and that good things tend to happen when you are not obsessively trying to make them happen? How are your pretty feathers holding up?
Everyone struggles and...
I’ve never posted so much to a blog in my whole life but for some reason your topics really seem to hit home. That being said, I am a self proclaimed unhappy gym rat with too little time and too many other responsibilities to ever make me a happy gym rat. I love the gym and like you described, it is my sanctuary; a place for me and only me. No wife, no mother, no boss, no friends…just me and the machines. But since our son was born (10.5 months ago) things have gone down hill and not in an “oh this is an easy run downhill” kind of way. It’s a slippery slope when the tugs of your family pull you away from being able to concentrate on yourself. Not that I don’t love my family intensely and want to spend every free moment I have with them, but I find that I am a far less happy person when I don’t get my “me time” and that makes me a much less happy mother and wife. The crazy thing is that it’s not just about my physical wellness but more about my mental wellness. It’s a time for my feathers to molt and re-generate. Perhaps this need to escape to the gym is because in all other avenues of life I hate being alone but at the gym it’s the one space where being alone is what I crave and what I need to work things out and clear my mind. And while carrying my large child around and making multiple trips up and down stairs helps, it’s just not the intensity I need to feel whole. I guess in my case I need to be a little obsessed to achieve my goal; it just doesn’t come easily when I’m not looking, at least not in this particular area of my life. But perhaps I need to rethink this approach seeing that the results I’m getting are not fulfilling and my life is clearly different than it was one year ago.
Marina – Thank you for another very thoughtful post. I do think that once we become parents, society tells us to focus inward on our families, in many ways to put the “me” part of our identity on hold. And I think that this is a shame because we are indeed far better parents (and people) when we are happy, when we feel like we have our own space in this world, however small, however infrequently visited. We need to remind ourselves that when we become parents, we do not cease being people. People with interests and hobbies and hopes and dreams that are sometimes independent of our parental existence. The million dollar question, it seems, is how do we carve out this space of selfhood without feeling predictable pangs of guilt and insecurity. Like you, like every other parent out there, I’m still trying to figure that out.
I am in the same or better shape now than before kids though unfortunately not because of the same reasons you cite. I did not lose weight quickly after having my daughter. Quite the opposite, I retained 15 extra pounds, essentially by insisting on eating whatever I wanted and not exercising. I figured I was only going to have another kid, why bother with the effort. After having my son 3 years later, I retained another 15 pounds, so now I was 30 lbs overweight. I told myself it didn’t matter if I were dumpy, my kids were cute, I was somebody’s mom, what my body looked like didn’t matter. I lied to myself in that way until my son turned 2 and I wanted to adjust my life insurance. I was quoted a higher rate because I was overweight. It was that moment, that I kicked myself into gear. I started walking to work (50 blocks) and dieting on WW and lost 25 lbs in a few months. I plateaued and after my son turned 3, I started running. That was two years ago, I have lost an additional 10-15 lbs through running and I discovered I did my best thinking when I was running. I thought of ways to present my cases and birthday party themes. I dreamed up family vacations and plausible excuses to get out of having 3 week long houseguests in our small study/guest room. In short, for me running is good for my body and my mind. I am far from perfect and would love to lose 10 more pounds but even if I never lose another ounce, running has saved me. I had given up on myself in the attractiveness arena for no good reason. Not that I wouldn’t quit tomorrow if a magic skinny pill came out… but my thinking would most definitely suffer.