Who Knew Motherhood Could Hurt?
Plush and green and in a dog-free zone maintained by groundskeepers who must get paid by the weed, the slope outside our apartment door is prime body-rolling turf.
And so we roll, first me and then Will, until his 31 pounds crash as forcefully as 31 pounds possibly can into my sorry carcass at the bottom of the hill. And then, because Will says, “Let’s do it again,” we do it again.
I had my first and only child three years ago this month, and my back and the backs of my legs and various other muscle groups have ached since Day One.
The how-to mommy manuals, the misguided Lamaze coaches, the nurse practitioners, the doctors, my own mother --none of them ever once hinted that I would be expected to use muscles that had been blissfully dormant for 33 years.
I never imagined three years ago that repeatedly lifting and rocking and bouncing a precious load of only 8 pounds, 2 ounces requires stamina.
That simultaneously pushing and shaking a stroller--an odd gyration that, please God, just might mellow a crybaby--causes a fierce pain between the shoulder blades. (Or that, even more painful, I’d have to listen to my husband’s child-safe version of the theme from “Shaft”: Who’s the little man who’s the drool machine to all the bibs? . . .)
That hoisting a toddler up to the monkey bars for more than a minute at a time is impossible when great wattles of flesh suffice for upper arms.
That holding a small hand while scrambling up and down a steep embankment on a high-speed butterfly chase is one way to both wrench a shoulder and achieve an aerobic low--that feeling of being irrevocably out of shape.
Unless you’re Kathie Lee Gifford, a can-do-type career gal who romps around on weekends with husband Frank and those two kids with rambunctious-sounding names and still summons the wind--after the holidays, mind you--to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” before an audience of billions at the Super Bowl, motherhood is a physical trial.
And if, like me, you’re soft-bodied, motherhood is a major detour from life as you have known it.
I have always been of the ilk--not coincidentally the very ilk that grew up with mittens tethered to its collective parka sleeves for seven months of the year--that would embrace a movement toward human hibernation. As a child, I spent entire weekends under my pink electric blanket, emerging only to change books or stinky socks. My mother says she often mistook me for a houseplant.
I neither feel the need to stretch my legs nor “to get up and move around.” If I were to walk briskly, it would be to ensure that I get a seat on the train or bus. Once at work, I rarely budge.
At home, though, I am no longer allowed the pleasures of inertia. When I occasionally get up the nerve to tell Will that I’d rather stay put than try to keep up with his constant and abrupt segues from hill-rolling to ball-playing to structure-climbing, I know the punishment will be swift and severe. My boy will stare up at me in disbelief. “ Come on, Mom, let’s go,” he will say just once.
And so we go.
