The Exercise Routine
Every day I ever woke up in my entire life my Mom was already up and about to exercise, in the middle of exercising, or having just finished an exercise routine. This has been for practically her whole life—when my parents first met, they were both aerobics instructors at Funky Fitness.
I guess that’s not the whole story. They knew each other from before the 80s. Back in grade school my Dad was in the same grade as my Mom’s older brother. She remembers my Dad was filling in as understudy for the role of “The Mechanical Boy” in the school play one year, and she said out loud to her friends “I’m gonna marry that Mechanical Boy.”
My Dad is an actual real to life Mechanical Boy, and my Mom did actually real to life marry him—but I guess she didn’t have any premonitions about the boy being a little…too mechanical.
The past few years we’ve crossed the threshold of the same distance of time having passed; the length of their marriage matching the length of time between The Divorce and present day. Sometimes I worry about how to raise a family without a divorce—since the experience of it was one of the hardest, most honest parts of our lives. I’m not sure how to introduce small people to the world without showing them something so sad and true—something that can’t help but show them their parents’ real humanhood; all flaws and complicated natures. It’s not a present-day-problem but maybe Dan would be down to stage a divorce for the learning and growing of it all; on behalf of the family of course.
Recently I caught up with John over a long phone call, as we do, and have always loved to. After a winding whats-happening-in-your-day-to-day catch-up, for a moment, he touched on how the grief of losing a family member might be parallel to the grief of divorce. He offered me a great gift by this sentiment—a new and beautiful way to acknowledge gravity. The grief of mourning something that once was filled with breath but had no name or physical being. The life, that is love.
The being together that just—was.
There were no questions within it, not when you’re brand new to the earth like Erica and Derek and I were at the time. Maybe the questions don’t come until the threat of polarity shows itself—or maybe they were there all along but we weren’t asking about what would happen if we all weren’t together at some point, someday. It’s not something I remember thinking about, despite being scared and stressed about general inevitability. I used to have dreams where we were all tied together with rope, our backs to each other, we were about to be engulfed by a fire. In my head, there was no not being all together, always—even at the very end.
Now when I dream about death there are two fires, one where we’re all tied to Mom and the other where we’re all tied to Dad. We alternate dying with Mom or Dad first, depending on if the dream falls on a General Weekday, Wednesday, or a Weekend.
I did of course, on occasion, have dreams where one of us died without the others, too. Mom would say that was a good sign, that it meant the person who died in the dream would live a long life. I’d run to her when she was up at 5am, sitting directly in the middle of the couch looking out the sliding glass door to the backyard, sipping her coffee. Every morning. Two cups—one regular, one decaf. And as soon as the second cup was finished, she’d be out the door for a run, arriving back home 30-45 minutes later, beet red and dripping sweat looking like she just got splashed by a car driving too fast through a puddle on Caswell Street. From there she’d head up to the loft—their room, or her room, depending on the year—and she’d start floor work and abdominals.
This was when you’d start to hear it.
Scream-singing-Stevie-Nicks.
She’d be chomping on some gum, half-huffing half-puffing half-scream-singing whatever was in her headphones that morning. How do you breathe, chomp, and scream-sing at the same time? I’ll tell you how. By not giving a single shit about whether or not the lyrics are right. By not worrying if you’re in tune at all for one single note—if your neighbors can hear you, if your kids are still asleep, if theres too much to do later in the day, if you have enough clients that week to sustain to the next, or if you’re even singing the same song thats currently playing.
By unabashedly enjoying the moment of your life thats happening at that, one, perfect second. And by relying on your physiology to remember when to chomp and when to sing and when to breathe, so you can die as you’re meant to—tied back to back to back to back to your kids on a General Weekday, instead of by choking on Trident gum while scream-singing-Stevie-Nicks during an abdominal workout.
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