Feb
8
I pulled a weird, bad-form deadlift on Tuesday and my lower back has been lowkey complaining ever since, enough that I have to walk around with that overly-cautious pinching-a-turd posture to keep everything in exactly the right position and sit with a decorative pillow tucked behind me otherwise ow.
I do cat-cows and stretches nearly every damn day now, not because I am a limber sun-saluting earth goddess but because somewhere along the line that just became a Thing I Have to Do Because My Back is Kind of Permanently Grumpy.
My right elbow has this semi recent development where it hurts and doesn’t work right when I do weight-bearing exercises like pushups until it freakily pops into position. You can hear it: a sort of unpleasant click, and then it operates as intended. Like a car you have to jump start each time.
My knees bug me sometimes, like when I’m hiking downhill. Or uphill. Or sometimes just because. I switched to the elliptical at the gym because it feels like the least aggravating repetitive-cardio option, which sucks because 1) god, the elliptical is boring, and 2) those machines are positioned right in front of a bank of televisions playing daytime talk shows (including Dr. Oz, which is the hottest garbage that ever garbaged) and one that scrolls an endless series of “motivational” messages which includes, I am not making this up, a graphic that reads THE MORE YOU WORK OUT THE WEAKER HIS KNEES GET.
Oh, and a while ago I was standing in the kitchen — not slacklining or balancing precariously on a stool on top of a ball on top of a unicycle or gearing up to perform a crowd-pleasing triple axel: just STANDING THERE — and my left ankle suddenly collapsed outwards for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, which gave me a limp for three days.
In this scenario, I am both the tragically clumsy dudebro and the treadmill.
This is all to say that exercise is harder than it used to be, here in my mid-forties, and what’s really delightful is that the results are totally NOT as good. As in, would you like some batwing with that biceps? How about strong glutes that refuse to look like anything other than Squarepants Mom Butt? Remember when you could do a 20-minute workout video and cut out that extra daily box of Triscuits and you’d lose weight, well, now you have to take HIIT boot camp classes and live on cod smoothies to drop half a pound and if you even look at a carb out of the corner of your eye you go up two entire dress sizes.
On the plus side, I guess the main alternative to aging ungracefully is … death. So, there’s that.
Feb
5
Dylan on his birth day in 2008:
And on Sunday:
Boy, nothing painfully crumples the concept of time into your forehead like having a kid. And even when faced with irrefutable proof that exactly a decade has gone by since he made his arrival, I can’t quite grab ahold of it: it feels like a thousand years, like endless tectonic shifts have taken place, like I’m an entirely different person! … it feels like yesterday.
It is above all else impossible to imagine a world before there was a Dylan. He is such an integral part of our lives, the critical ingredient that makes up our family dynamic. He’s the silliest one, the scatterbrain, the youngest who loves being babied — and also the most inscrutable, the eerie total recall marvel, the child who not only notices but compliments your new shirt.
I love that birthdays provide this opportunity to remember what was, while celebrating what is. I love that we’ve had ten years with this kid. I love the boundless possibilities of what his future will bring, and the adventure of seeing it all unfold.
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