May Blossom has recently stopped calling me Mummy and now refers to me as Money. Either she has developed a speech impediment or she is channelling Vince Vaughn in the 1996 indie hit film Swingers. I am leaning towards the latter option, because she also drew the picture above when we were out at dinner the other night. It’s not just me, that’s a martini glass, right? She is so money.
In other areas of my life in which I am clearly not money, I went back to the gym today for the first time since I was five months pregnant. It was not, as they say, a complete success. It turns out there is a difference between fat and fit. I thought that since I had lost all the weight I gained with the pregnancy, and since I spend all day every day running around after a toddler, that I would be fine with a proper workout. Not so much.
I started off okay. I did a five-minute warmup on the rowing machine, which was easy peasy. Then the trainer had me do ten lunges on each leg, pull down a bar thing attached to a heavy weight with my arms, and skip with a skipping rope for thirty seconds. I repeated that three times. I wasn’t feeling bad. I was slightly out of breath, but not seriously, and my legs hurt but not so much that I had to stop. I think that was the adrenalin working for me. Because as soon as I finished that set of exercises, I started to black out and thought I was going to spew. It was as though while my body thought this exercise was all right, some deeper part of me, probably my soul, was screaming ‘NO NO NO WE DO NOT DO THIS THIS IS NOT WHAT WE DO STOP STOP STOP ENOUGH OW WE DO WALKING AT TODDLER SPEED AND EATING CAKE AND OW THAT IS ALL THIS IS NOT IN MY JOB DESCRIPTION I AM REPORTING YOU TO HR AND ALSO YOU ARE GOING TO BE SICK ON THE FLOOR OF THE GYM IN FRONT OF YOUR TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD TRAINER HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?
The trainer took me downstairs to get some fresh air, which only made me feel worse. So I had a little lie-down on the ground, next to a bright yellow plastic bucket she procured from somewhere in case I hurled. It was a busy time of the morning and a few people came over to see if I was all right. I was so ill I didn’t even give a shit about how embarrassing the whole situation was. I lay for a while in front of the sandwich board advertising the gym. I may have damaged their brand somewhat.
I was two blocks from both my place and from my parents’ house, where May Blossom was hanging out, but I couldn’t even walk that far. My dad had to come pick me up.
In answer to the questions you no doubt have for me, I will say no, I am not pregnant. Yes, I had eaten breakfast, but possibly not long enough before the gym for the muesli to have digested and done me any good energy-wise. No I was not hydrated enough. With a toddler who has once again decided that breastfeeding is Da Bomb, there is no such thing as hydrated enough. I am a husk of a person. No I had not had enough sleep, obviously. No it did not occur to me that perhaps the morning after a terrible, breastfeeding-bingey night of little sleep, several days after returning from a family funeral in another time zone was not the morning to launch into a full-scale new exercise routine.
Man, I am so money and I don’t even know it.
Comments