A word to those who would be gym-wise: putting the treadmill on the highest incline setting, then holding on to the back of the display and pulling yourself along, your ass pointed straight out behind you, does not give the results displayed on the digital screen. You fucking idiot.
Also, setting the stairmaster on high and then draping your entire upper body over the armrests, holding yourself up, also gives nearly ZERO FUCKING RESULTS.
The idea, you complete fucking morons, is to simulate a real walk or run up a real hill, or a real trip up the stairs. Would you walk up the stairs at a ninety degree angle?
Look, I know you're all at the water cooler at the office, bragging to yawning co-workers about how many calories you burn on the machines. These co-workers are wondering, silently, why you're still such a fatass. The ones stupider than you tell themselves, "Well, that guy works his ass off and it does nothing for him; I may as well have another Snickers and put off that gym membership."
I cannot tell you how annoying this is to me. Why should I give a shit how these people use the machines? Because I have to have a stellar view of their ass while I'm behind them? Because I know they're checking out my display and thinking I'm a weakling? Or because it's just wrong, wrong, wrong!? Could be any of the above.
The weight room is kind of a scary place for me. Before pregnancy, I went there all the time, but I didn't make eye contact, didn't look at anyone else, tried to stay out of the way, just did my thing. This is because weight rooms are notoriously way too goddamn small. I couldn't do a squat without sexually harassing someone. Plus, guys in the weight room are tripling their testosterone with every rep, and they feel like they get to comment on you. Your routine, your progress, your ass, whatever. They're sure you're doing it wrong, that they can help you, you poor princess. I didn't have much trouble with this, due to the aforementioned lack of eye contact, but my trainer had to deal with this shit from guys all the time. She's this certified trainer with years of experience and research on her and every eighteen-year old with a Men's Fitness subscription felt like they could give her a pointer or two.
Mr. Aran tells me the idiots in the weight room are even worse. You see them, with dumbbells three times heavier than they can carry, doing bicep curls with their backs bowed all the way forward, dropping the weight maybe three degrees because if they ever took it down anywhere near perpendicular, their arm would tear off. These are the same assholes who drop the weights on the floor or crash the plates down on the weight machines.
When I went to a gym with a heavy bag, it was pure entertainment to watch people try to punch and kick that thing. When I walked into the room, their intensity would rise to silly levels, flailing their arms and legs in an attempt to show the girl what a badass they were. It was fun as hell to sit calmly aside, wrap up my hands, and ask if I could work in a round. Once they got a load of a girl hitting the thing - not like I'm Rocky or anything but in comparison to them, I was Bruce Fucking Lee - they didn't come back for another round.
Hey people - you're not fooling anyone but the other morons. Plus, you're setting yourself up for minimal results and injury. We're all laughing at you. That is all.
I'm having a hard time lately with problems that have come up again and again. Nothing new, no new approach and no way, really, of fixing it. I've been able to squelch it before by keeping busy and just not dwelling on those things, but now I'm a housewife and I find myself with too much time to think.
When I was a holy-roller, I would have called this a test of faith. Back then, though, I thought a test of faith had everything to do with Jesus, with believing in his existence. I was a kid, and that was the biggest faith in my life, even though it was super easy, because I'd been raised with the notion of Jesus and it had never occurred to me that he may not have existed or died or been the son of god.
At sixteen, that faith was tested. By my holy-roller standards, I failed miserably. I went all goddess, all the time. I still believed Jesus existed and I was sure he was a great guy with fabulous ideas who was murdered, but I was very into my womanliness, my breastness, my wombness and, hell why not, my moonness. I was in my late teens. There were aliens involved at one point, and bodices, and many trips to the Renaissance Faire. I'm not proud of these things, but they're part of my history and growth and I'm glad for them, because they took me to the next level.
One thing I've learned in my little life is, as soon as you have it figured out, god pulls your precious rug of reality out from under you. Just when I was really starting to get creepy about the sacredness of my menstruation, the women in my family got really fucking stupid. Here I am with my flowers, spring water, broom, even this awesome cauldron I still have, and I'm up on the hillsides at dawn you know, burning sage and calling the corners and whatnot, and my mother and the Evil Aunt decide to start being fruity alcoholics, cheating on and then divorcing their husbands in pursuit of, I suppose, the fountain of eternal youth. They're out all weekend getting hammered with people half their age, getting tattoos, hooking up online, meeting guys in bars. All the time one grandmother insists on treating her sons, in their forties, like children and the other manipulates everything in these intricate, evil little ways, I mean christ! I'm trying to have a religious experience here, bitches!
A little maturity took me past this ugly stage and, after some years, I converted to Catholicism. I wasn't able to go backward, though, into that trusting place I used to go with Jesus. I put a lot more stock in Jesus, these days, than I did during the goddess phase, and I think I have a deeper understanding of him than I did as a kid. Now he's rather Joseph Campbell, a god like the gods of all cultures. He is a template, a myth for us mortals, moving through this earth the same way people always have, even though we try to be all modern and stuff.
Then I saw how men are treated in our society. Divorce laws are ludicrous. Men have no rights to their own children. So many boys are raised by single mothers and never taught to be men. Fathers are underrated. There's no logical reason for a man to get married and have a family these days. I got it down to a nice science: women are emotional and men, sexual. Men's sexual needs have to be met, and if they're not met, they have every right to get them met elsewhere. Where most boys didn't know how to speak up for themselves, I did. I wrote about it, I got angry, and I entered a marriage where my husband was key and now I'm having a boy who will always have his father in his life, every day, if I have a say, and I have worked hard to maintain a good body and keep up the sex life, even when my hormones screeched to a halt.
That comfy rug I've been standing on for all my years of marriage is being whipped out again. It's always been shaky. It's more of a flying carpet. I can feel that there's no floor under me, and that if I stop believing, the carpet will fall. That belief is faith, with a little anger, at myself and women in general, for fuel.
It's really hard to keep the carpet up right now.
Last night, the baby moved around so violently inside me that I couldn't get to sleep. I was crying and that really seemed to tick him off. I tried to picture what he looked like, what position he was in. He has fully formed ears now. He blinks at loud noises. He can grab his feet and suck his thumb. In another week or two, if something awful happened and he had to be born too soon, he could probably breathe on his own. He's growing himself up in there, all on his own, just taking what he needs from me. Life, in that Jurassic Park sense, is pretty goddamn amazing when you think of it. I mean, my mother used to work as an RN in a mom/baby hospital unit in a bad neighborhood, and she'd see all kinds of crackwhore, homeless, alcoholic, anorexic mothers who had babies. She'd see gray placentas. These kids had no nutrition and no chance, and yet they'd survive.
This fight we all undertake every minute, life, that's a miracle. After a car accident, you see potential accidents everywhere. Most days, you just drive and don't think about it, all these different ways you could die. The freeway is such an intricate thing. It takes immense trust and faith to get on it at all. Everyone has to do their part. All it takes is one mom to turn around to smack a kid, or one guy to look down at his phone, or one person to shuffle through the CD case or light a cigarette at the wrong time, and blammo! Death. Same with the human body. Incredible how all our processes work together normally most of the time.
So I guess we can use the word miracle in conjunction with my body right now. I'm not going to get sappy about it. But it's been an itch in my brain these last months, that I'm doing something important right now, but I can't admit it because of women, see? Because I hate women. I don't respect them. I've had nothing but trouble with them. The whole goddess thing is so silly now. I can't think about the goddess without remembering me in a velvet bodice making eyes at jousters. I can't praise the glory of motherhood when my own mother has been more like a child to me for the last decade. The words, "Dogs give birth every day, get over yourself" have come from my mouth several times. How am I supposed to renege now, go back and say, "Never mind! Really this is a pretty incredible thing and I'm quite powerful and Mother Ocean resides in my loins"? That would make me a hypocrite.
So, poor kid in my belly has had to deal with my inner conflict. I really want to love him and myself and this whole process but doing so would force me to be a different person than I've made myself into. I was pretty proud of that person, you know? She got some respect. I don't want to turn into a person who old Samus wouldn't respect.
Too late, in some respects. My body is never going to be the same. My mother specifically said "Baseballs in tube socks" as her professional RN opinion of what my breasts will look like. No matter how much cocoa butter I slather on, I'm prone to stretch marks. My hips will not get any narrower for this venture. So what about all that I used to preach about keeping the body hot for the husband, whose sexual needs must be met or else? If that's true, then I'm royally fucked for life.
Samus of yesterday, the respected girl who has it figured out, is pissed as HELL about all this. She will not leave me alone. How could I get pregnant? Didn't I know it would fuck up my body, make me sick, make me into a slave to another person, erase my sex life? What do you know about babies anyway? Crying, shitting, vomiting creatures whose sole mission in life is to put something dangerous in their mouths? Little brats who you'll coddle and raise and put your lifeblood into, only to hate you in their adolescence and abandon you in their adulthood? Real smooth move, buttercup, she says. Then she, I don't know, sits back and writes all the best-selling novels I'll never write.
This new Mommy Samus isn't the intergalactic bounty hunter she used to be. Dammit, I liked that girl. I wanted to be her, so much. It wasn't hard to let go of Holy-Roller Samus, or RenFaire Samus, but I really liked Bounty Hunter Samus. She was angry and cool and fit into her power suit. I will miss her.
It's best to get over your pride right now.
You are not the type of girl who gets picked up and taken on dates.
You are not the type of girl men really want to fuck.
But you'll do. For the long haul, they'll keep you around to bear
their children, make them laugh once in awhile, drive them to work, do
their bills and make their phone calls and clean their house and take
care of their parents.
So go to bed now. Don't you dare complain. You are not the kind of
girl who gets to complain, bitch.
If you need to, take another look.
