Month: February 2016

Day Four: What’s With “One Month, One Post a Day”?

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So far, I’ve shared this blog with only three people, and they have to be nice to me: my seventeen year-old daughter Mia, who greatly values her driving privileges; my twenty-three year-old son Nate, who lives in Texas, but this week is back home, laid up in his boyhood room after ACL surgery (ever seen the movie “Misery”? He doesn’t want to be the James Caan to my Kathy Bates); and my husband, because I put up with his obsessions all the time — lawn care, his swollen knees, Keira Knightley . So what’s a little blog post?

One post a day for a month is me throwing down the gauntlet to my dormant inner writer. My daughter’s friend Ingrid challenged herself to do a handstand a day for a year (that’s her, above, in our hallway on day 360). Seen in that context, a post a day is small change. And hey, February is a short month.

I am always saying I am going to write. But then I don’t.  I’ve been paid to write for ages: covering horse shows and high school plays for the local small town paper; penning marketing materials, admissions brochures, web content, newsletters, and press releases as communications director for a school; ghostwriting correspondence for executives and board members; teaching writing to high school kids – my own three, and a bunch of other people’s, too. Give me an assignment and a deadline and I am a thoroughbred: fast out of the gate and running for the roses. But faced with complete freedom—no sense of urgency, no prescribed goals, just me and my imagination with all the time in the world—I become a mangy pony in a petting zoo, wandering around aimlessly, glassy-eyed, hoping for snacks.

My dad once said to me: “You don’t do well without structure.” As much as it irritated me at the time, he was right. So here I am at 55, giving myself an assignment and a deadline. It’s not Tolstoy. It’s not going to rock your world. The unfinished manuscripts or teleplays buried in the archives of my hard drive still may never see the light of the desktop. This is just me trying to create some scaffolding.  Maybe there will never be a building.  But at least I might get my fingers onto the keyboard to do this activity that is so much a part of me, that vexes and thrills, that terrifies me.

Day Three: It’s About the Hair

By way of introduction, that’s me dancing in the photo above. I’m not a trained dancer. I just love to move to music. True confession: the picture was taken last summer, right after an uncharacteristically self-disciplined dietary cleanse and just before I decided to stop coloring my hair. I was about seven pounds lighter and ten shades darker. I don’t think I’ll go back on the hair color decision – it’s been unexpectedly empowering to embrace my silver side, although at the moment it’s a curious ombre of white/silver/faded-caramel, tossed haphazardly through the original very dark brown. My fantastic and sweet hair stylist for the last several years (Katie Astone at Salon Astante in Waltham, if you must know) is concerned for me. Whenever I come in these days for a simple cut and blow dry, she asks me nervously: “How are we doing with the color?” She picks warily through the grizzle, as if some explanation for my defection lurks there. To her credit, she is unstintingly supportive and gives me a beautiful cut without fail. I wonder if she worries that I’ll go postal in the salon chair, shredding the Us magazines and knocking product off the display shelves – who knows what may be going on with me?

People, especially women, compliment me on going gray all the time. Their expressions range from sympathetic to mystified to awestruck. Many tell me: “You are so brave,” as if I am trekking solo up Kilamanjaro. I also get a lot of “I wish I had your self-confidence,” and “You must be so comfortable in your skin.” The outer Holly nods politely and affirms how great it is to free oneself from the cultural aesthetic that tells women we are not allowed to age, or some other mature and enlightened crap like that. The inner Holly is floored. “Self-confident,” “brave,” and “comfortable in my skin” are not words me and my body have been on easy terms with for most of our life. For years, these words only resonated when I was thinner and glowing. Not until my late forties, when I discovered Nia (check out the links on the blog menu) did I begin to feel truly at home in my body, from within.

Another true confession: I still, and always will, hope to re-lose those seven pounds.

Day Two: oooph

So I don’t know exactly what I did, but yesterday I had something funky going on with the second toe on my right foot. It’s not easy to walk without putting weight on your toes, just try it for a second. But I had to get Westley some exercise (remember him – the dog who ate the dental floss?) or there would be no living with him, so I strapped on my most supportive boots and the two of us headed out – him bounding, and me doing this weird pronated roll that probably looked a little drunk. It was an unseasonable 60 degrees in Boston, and the trails in the wooded dog park where we walk were a patchwork of indistinguishable ice-caked mud and mud-caked ice.

After about forty minutes of slipping, slogging and Marty Feldman-like lurching to protect my sore toe, my back was starting to feel weird. My entire skeleton was tipped to the left with a countering torque to the right like some kind of teetering Tinkertoy contraption. But what me, worry? I am a Fitness Professional, after all, so I was fairly confident that my body could handle this tweaked gait for as long as it would take my toe pain to ease. Or at least until I got home for a cup of tea. In a moment of true calendar serendipity, I just happened to have both my monthly massage and weekly chiropractic visit scheduled for that afternoon. So I wasn’t too concerned, for someone with a toe thing, a back whatever, and a dog marinated in mud.

Indeed, things seemed better after Beth worked her magic on my traps and Nina gave me a good crack. (They are both master practitioners. Send me an email if you live in Metrowest Boston and want their contact info.)

And then Westley ate the dental floss, and the vet nervously asked over the phone “Can you bring him in NOW?”, and he didn’t want to get in the car because it was 5:30 and dark outside and he is no dummy: he knows we are not going for a walk. So I had to give him a kind of a one-footed-half-shove-half-lift into the backseat of my fucking Volkswagen TDI that spews nitrous oxide when it was supposed to be good for the environment, and something in my lower back went twang. Or maybe more like twaaaang. And then we got to the vet and Westley lunged out of the car and dragged me across the parking lot to the door because he LOVES the vet and he LOVES the vet techs Holly, Lauren, and Brooke who give him treats and pat him and there are other dogs there and he just couldn’t wait to get inside, and my back went TWAAAANNNG.

So go back and read yesterday’s post if you’re worried about the dog, but the bottom line is that when we got home, he was all sunshine and good times and I was doubled over in discomfort.   Neither Advil nor Arnica nor white wine brought much relief. I Igor-ed up to bed with my heating pad, bracing for one of those nights when you strategize for five minutes about how you are going to roll over without gasping. Still, I was hopeful that a good’s night sleep would sort me out.

The night’s rest wasn’t so good, apparently. This morning, the twang had bored deeper into my lower back and a sharp pain shot through my core when I stood up. Oy. I messaged an SOS to some of my teaching colleagues seeing if someone could sub my 9 a.m. class. Thank goodness Amy saluted. Otherwise, we’d have all been treated to a class of rolling around on our backs while groaning.

I curled up gingerly in my favorite armchair to do some writing instead. I hate to miss teaching a class (or taking a class) because dancing has become the central joy of my body’s life, and because no matter how logey or achy I might feel beforehand, I always, always feel better afterwards, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But my common sense mind was telling me to rest.

It took only about 40 minutes of sitting in the chair for my body to overturn this decision. I was worse after resting overnight and stiffer still after resting this morning. Earlier, I had noticed feeling better coming down the stairs when I really paid attention to the sensation of pushing down with my feet, instead of moving from my hips. Likewise, I squatted Sumo-style to feed Westley, and the leg action of sinking down to rise up almost entirely relieved the pain.

I mean, I felt a little silly, squatting like a weightlifter to put down the dog bowl. But: Huh.

So let’s test this:

I shuffled creakily over to my laptop and pulled up the playlist for a new Nia routine I’ve been meaning to learn. The very first thing the teacher does in this particular body of work is to have you take a gentle inventory of your joints, waking up first ankles, then knees, hips, wrists, and so on. My initial intent was simply to bob around a little, like a buoy on a pond. That’s about all I could manage in my disabled state this morning, I thought. But just a little gentle movement unlocked a myriad of tight spaces where I was dug-in against discomfort, irritation, and the anxiety of not knowing when I would feel better.

Forty minutes of dancing is all it took. At the end of the routine, I felt loose and juicy enough that a triangle pose felt like a good idea. Reaching out to the right, I heard a tell-tale “pop” – my femur clicking back into alignment with my right hip, restored after yesterday’s sailor’s gait. When I shifted my triangle over to the left, I sensed a ripple of little clicks as my Tinkertoy spine realigned itself. And just like that: no pain. I mean none. Seriously.

Thank you, body.

Day One: Liftoff, sort of

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Westley, unflossed

My Golden Retriever ate a roll of dental floss while I was in the shower this afternoon. So much for my plans to write a witty, insightful first post, the kind that makes you shake your head in recognition and thank the fates for writers who can put our common humanity into words. This afternoon of freshly-showered writing was to be accompanied by a cup of herbal “detox” tea and perhaps a handful of cherry tomatoes and three or four raw cashews. Look how wholesome I have become in my mid-fifties, I yearn to tell you.

To quote the twitter sphere: “haha.”

I am finally sitting down to write at 7:30 p.m., newly returned from the vet, where for a hundred and fifty bucks, the dog was purged, the incriminating roll of dental floss emerged (note to dog owners: dental floss = bad news for your pet’s digestive tract), and my clean black jeans were liberally slobbered-upon. The swordfish and sautéed greens I had planned to cook around six were passed over for a plate of homemade nachos; the detox tea did not hold nearly the appeal of a substantial slug of Reisling.

Before our voracious pup Westley decided to explore oral hygiene, I was going to write some high falutin’ shit about the duality of human nature: flesh and soul, the challenges of living as a spiritual and sentient being in an animal body, how this business of being incarnate has been a source of conflict and confusion for me, as I suspect it is for most of us. I was going to introduce you to my body now, at almost-56, and the journey she and I have made together, the truce and collaboration we have negotiated after all these years.

But then I look at Westley, asleep at my feet. He is so trusting, always devoted to being with me, even though I (literally) shoved his butt into a cold car, dragged him to the vet, and let them take him into a back room and inject him with a vomit-inducing cocktail that caused him to throw up for 10 minutes straight. (“He gave it everything he had,” said one vet-tech admiringly. The imagination balks.) Afterwards, he hopped back into the car wagging cheerfully, fully trusting in my care despite this bizarre gastro-intestinal outing.

And it dawns on me that in some ways, I have treated “my body” like a faithful dog, expecting it to come when I call it, to leave me alone when I don’t want to deal with it, to be unfailingly loyal and affectionate, whether I am feeding it dental floss or grass fed beef. I am increasingly grateful to my body as I age, but I still often conceive of her as somehow separate from “me,” as if the choices “I” make have few consequences for “her.” Who am I, and who is she; in what ways are we still in a process of becoming integrated? Maybe at some point she’ll decide she’s had it with my inconsistency and kick my ass to the curb. I’m grateful she’s been so patient with me.

Before closing this, my first post of twenty-nine (in this Leap Year February), let me just say “thank you, body” for bringing me this far. Thank you for tolerating my bad habits with such generosity, and for enthusiastically rewarding my good ones. Thank you for creating and delivering into the world three astonishing babies — you did all the heavy lifting, growing eyebrows and lymph nodes and a central nervous system, while all I did was take pre-natal vitamins and swap out Riesling for milk shakes. Thank you for dancing with me every day, for laughing and singing, for healing and playing, for teaching me to relax into the pleasures of sleep and sex, good food, warm hugs, and the soft sensation of Westley’s golden fur beneath my bare foot as I write.