motherhood

Jillian Michaels is not My Fitness Guru


Fitness gurina Jillian Michaels’ rejection of biological motherhood is hardly an assault on the institution of pregnancy though one wouldn’t know it judging by the reaction of the mom-o-sphere. Blog posts extolling the wonders of birthing with your own vagina and the multitude benefits it bestows litter Facebook and choke Twitter feeds. The choices of mothers should not be so lightly dismissed in the digital age.

For the record, Ms. Michaels did not exhort women everywhere to shun conception but stated that for herself, it wasn’t something she wished to do. Her history with weight issues and her career built upon superior physical fitness means she will personally take a pass*.

How her choice – valid by the way – affects mine, or any other woman’s, is a mystery. Women, I have discovered during my tenure as one, are big on choice only up to the point where one of our own exercises her right in a way the rest of us don’t agree with.

Michaels, correctly, points out that pregnancy changes a woman’s body permanently. That she views this as a negative is her prerogative. Frankly, she isn’t really wrong. Even moms who visually seem unaltered by their pregnancies will tell you that there are things that simply aren’t as tight or cooperative or “virgin” as they were prior to motherhood.

It’s disingenuous to say that pregnancy isn’t going to leave a mark. Any time you stretch the lower half of your body to accommodate a small person and then squeeze it out of an opening that normally only just manages to accommodate a … tampon … for example, it’s going to change things. The fact that we are designed to stretch doesn’t take into account that some of our parts only stretch one way.

Ligaments for example are not rubber bands. Once over-stretched, they don’t snap back. Muscle can be trained to compensate for loose ligaments, but the ligaments themselves will never be the same. Skin also has limited amounts of elasticity that diminishes with age and sun damage.

Weight gain seems to be predetermined genetically as is the ability to lose it quickly or not so much at all.

And pregnancy is only the beginning. The first months of motherhood are a blur of sleeplessness and near constant tending of a small person whose sense of time is non-existent and who believes without benefit of reinforcement that the sun revolves around him/her. When sleep is in short supply even things like eating and bathing are haphazard events, so it is the rare new mommy who is getting back to regular work outs or even has the energy to contemplate it.

If I were a single woman whose body was my livelihood, and had a history of weight maintenance problems, I might think long and hard about the colder, harder truths about giving birth and decide not to go there too.

It’s amazing to me how quickly Michaels was called out and her concerns and her decision reduced to selfishness that bordered on a personal affront to women who feel differently from her.

I applaud Michaels for even weighing the issue practically to begin with. Most people don’t give it any thought at all. Baby fever ignites them from within and sets them on a path that sometimes consumes years and vast resources only to deposit them on the other end of the maternal rainbow with a baby but very little idea about what they have done to themselves or their lives in the pursuit of parenthood.

As for her confusion about adoption being some sort of noble undertaking wherein a child is “rescued”, I chalk that up to general misconceptions about adoption in general. Being a “celebrity” doesn’t mean she is immune from misinformation about a process that few people who haven’t been involved in it know anything about anyway.

If people were required to actually apply for the position of mommy, most of us wouldn’t get the job if our motives were put to close scrutiny. For the most part, I doubt that the majority of us could (before we became parents) have come up with anything more profound, less corny or even remotely coherent rationale for wanting to be mothers. Michaels’ “rescue” fantasy isn’t any more or less awful a reason for adopting than a lot of others I have heard.

In the end, this is just another example of why women do not rule the world. We are too easily induced to turn on each other over nothing.

*I wouldn’t be in any hurry to give up a body like that either.

Stepping Out on My Blog


So when I wasn’t here, I was here and there and there.

First piece I am lamenting my ability to hold the line with the daughter on proper school footwear. As I wrote this for the mommy blog, it reminded me of a middle school friend whose mother made her wear winter boots until May every year.

While the rest of us were splashing about in the April showers in our Adidas (the height of cool in 1977) runners and track jackets, she was shod in grandma boots with the zipper up the front and a mid-calf ringed with fake furry fabric that pilled and her winter jacket from Sears.

“Was she scarred for life?” Rob asked as I related the woeful tale of my old buddy.

“Well,” I said, “the last I heard of her she was a teacher at a community college somewhere in Florida and working on her third husband.”

True. By the time we were thirty, she’d run through two husbands and her potential third was about eight years younger than we were. I don’t know for sure  he was a student, but the evidence was damning.

However, in case you missed Rob’s point – I didn’t – the boots were not the likely cause. She had the misfortune of being the catalyst behind her parents marriage, and her mother felt that her great potential had been cut down before it could bloom by my friend’s untimely arrival. Seriously. Even though we were all very young, it was evident to us that she was flogging her daughter with her thwarted ambitions rather than asking herself why she simply hadn’t used a more reliable method of birth control – like abstinence perhaps? Jae was the family go-to in a Cinderella way while her younger brother, an obnoxious cry baby, was the second coming.

“You are going to cave on the shoes,” Rob told me.

“I told her only as treat,” I conceded.

“You totally caved,” he confirmed.

I have not. Dee only gets to wear the flip flops on the last day of school, which is still months off.

The other posts are about racism in Mississippi schools (hardly worthy of a stop the presses but reprehensible never the less) and bribing kids (in some instances it works beautifully).

Also ran cross this awesome link on Jezebel* that led to a blog post by Paulina Porizkova – the former super model – on the shame not allowing women to age is. Excellent read.

Forgive my lazy blogging. Allergies are kicking me hard.

* A must click. There is a current pic of Paulina that leaves me in awe.

The Hand of God


So the daughter and I are bonding over The Ten Commandments.

Yes, THE Ten Commandments as re-imagined  by the ever so full of his own self Cecil B. de Mille and enacted with too much gravitas by a Charlton Heston to campy effect and scene chewed with relish by Yul Brynner. Who does not love some Yul?

We were in Fargo on Easter Saturday and neither Rob nor I were up for a youth infected dip in the postage stamp pool, so we talked Dee into a “movie night” and she discovered one of my Easter rituals from days of yore – watching The Ten Commandments.

I had forgotten just how bad a film it is. Notable now for the healthy figures of its leading ladies and for the fact that Yul and Charlton were looking mighty fine, Dee was enthralled. It had everything. Princesses. Injustice. Fabulous locales and just enough religious detail to set her near-pagan mind a-tingle with the need to “know more about it”.

As it is an ungodly long flick, she only got to watch up to the part where Moses is banished to the desert. Frankly, the movie goes steadily downhill from this point. Once Seti dies and Rameses are bit players, it sinks under the weight of Heston’s attempts to make Moses a regal authority when in fact, Moses had to be poked, prodded and continually ego-stroked by God to get him to do anything.

And the fact that Brynner and Heston are mostly clothed from here on certainly doesn’t help either.

Moses is a pretty lame hero. Arron, his brother the rabbi, performed most of the plague tricks and Moses whined and doubted – a lot. I think it was the whining rather than the doubting that kept him out of the promised land in spite of what Sister told us in school.

Which brings up a curious point. Why are God’s Old Testament prophets so often cowardly and whingeing? God could have chosen Joshua. Joshua was an Old Testament warrior type. He would have latched onto Pharoah’s ankle and gnawed the guy’s foot off if God commanded it, but Moses was always questioning and moaning, “Why, Lord?”

When we got back home, Dee was still going on and on about the movie, so I stopped at the library after yoga one day and picked it up for her.

It’s three hours and 39 mins long and that is not counting from Judaism sprang the true religion that eventually begat the wonder that is democracy in the United States the greatest place on earth speech that de Mille gives before the film that prompted Dee to say,

“Just go to the menu and pick scene selection, Mom.”

As we watched the first night – and this was after a long day of training – I was reminded of all the times I must have watched this growing up because I easily recognized the bits that had been edited out for commercials when it ran on television. Usually it was Yul who got his lines cut, which is a shame because he is a hoot.

Last night we watched part two which is the boring “let my people go”. Heston is quite impressive with that one line. Unfortunately they gave him a lot of other things to angst about too that really slow the movie down and his Elvira hair distracted.

After boring us with Moses’s time in exile, it surprises me that de Mille skipped most of the plagues, but he’d chewed up over two hours by the time Moses sees the burning bush and returns to Egypt and there was still Passover and a sea to part. The music swells in awesomely in the sea sequence. Still makes me tingle a bit.

Anyway, the last plague is – of course – death to the first-born of Egypt which the Hebrews ride out in their blood stained mud huts – which in retrospect is appropriate because their God is murdering innocents in their name, so smearing them with blood fits.

The superbly cheesy effect of the smoky hand of God, green and wispy, slithering across the moonlight sky before snaking to earth prompted me to think,

“Aw fuck, I forgot about the whole hand of God killing children thing.”

Dee was horrified.

“Why does God want to kill the little boy?”

Pharoah’s son –  if you know the story skip this – is of course smited by the hand of God to teach Pharoah a lesson. A lot of innocent children bite it in the Old Testament because God was, apparently, still working on his personal enlightenment. Perhaps he should have been paying more attention to the Asians because I believe they were busy coming up with what would the be basis for the Sutras and Buddhism. Although, if they had been God’s chosen, the concept of enlightenment might not have ever been discovered by humans at all.

When I was Dee’s age, I knew the story of Moses. The idea that God killed for no other reason than to teach lessons the hard way was not foreign to me and I was Catholic enough to accept this rather bloody-minded view that it was okay because it was God.

Dee has been deliberately distanced from Christianity in general. When Will died, I allowed her to believe in heaven and angels but I kept her ignorant of the hell and damnation component. Two reasons for that. First being that if she is going to believe in God in some fashion or other, I want her to do so without the fear factor. Too many people are religious for no other reason than they are afraid not to be and this, in my opinion, is the root cause of poor Christians. Second, there is no good reason to scare the crap out of children to promote blind obedience to any creed. That kind of nonsense is why Catholic priests were able to get away with abusing children and why Catholic schools were hotbeds of physical and emotional abuse as well.

“Baby, if there is a God, do you think he would kill little children?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied wide-eyed and very serious.

“Moses is a made up story. Churches used to tell horrible stories like this to scare people into believing and being good,” I said – and that’s about as age-appropriate simple as it gets.

“Why?”

“A very good question,” I said. “But I don’t know the answer.”

“God is a good person,” she assured me. “And Daddy Will and Grandpa live with him in heaven and do good things too.”

Seriously, can you wish more for your child than believing this?

But, naturally, the green glowing hand of God came back to slap me about a half hour after I’d put Dee in bed.

“Mom?’ came a plaintive wail from upstairs which I followed and discovered a wide-awake worried child at its tail.

“Can’t sleep?”

“It’s that hand of God,” she said.

Dang-it hand of God. Curse Cecil B. De Mille.