Fourth List // October 2024

To Move One's Body

The days darken. It is October, Scorpio season, spooky season, hurricane season, election season, the Season of the Witch, the Day of the Dead, the veil between the worlds is thin. Leo has become enthralled with the Halloween archetype of The Ghost. He continues to ask me Mom what’s a ghost even after I have used all of my poet’s tools to try and explain. I keep trying to help him understand even though I’m also desperate for him not to know.

I’ve had a relatively healthy death acceptance practice for most of my life. In my youth, it manifested mostly as some latent Zen Buddhist spiritual inclinations as well as a high degree of risk tolerance bordering on an occasionally life-threatening penchant for thrill seeking. In my twenties, having been placed in close proximity to death itself, my perspective evolved into a true inability to understand why anyone would be overly preoccupied with it. Guys, we’re all gonna die! Get over it! What about life and living?! In my thirties, I developed a relative stoicism about the matter, compassionately detaching (dissociating?) when creatures beloved to me actually perished. I felt above it all, at peace with mortality itself.

But you know what will really heighten one’s sensitivity to the whole mortality thing? Giving birth. Having my body be briefly in service as a portal between Leo’s non-being and being put me very much in touch with the permeability of the membrane that separates those two metaphysical fields and now, almost three years later, I move through the day with a hypervigilant awareness of it — specifically, of the infinite close calls baked into every moment, a multiverse of potential catastrophes. I regard other bodies with an intense consciousness of their tenuous enfleshedness, as though every person were a sort of meaty claymation figurine temporarily animated by the divine spirit, glooping haphazardly around planet earth in relative obliviousness to the uncanny and miraculous fragility of it all.

I will never know the experience of matrescence without the context of a global pandemic, a genocide, the rapid onset of climate catastrophe. Perhaps it goes without saying that the past five years, and in particular the last one, have been defined by bearing witness to the precarity of living in these tender bodies, the myriad ways they can be destroyed, by particles so tiny that they can float on a breath of air, by imperialist forces so massive that they cannot be stopped even by the protests of millions, by an unforeseen disaster striking at a moment’s notice. I have seen such horrors befall bodies that so resemble the body of my son that for a moment I believe I might turn back time by the sheer force of my despair, deleting these horrors not only from my mind but from the annals of history and lived experience, so grotesque and soul-shredding have they been to behold. Flesh separates from bone and spirit is carried away. The threat of loss looms at scales both vast and intimate, and oftentimes I think I fear grief more than I fear death itself. At the time of this writing, I am so filled with desperate gratitude for the wellness of the bodies of the people I love that I urgently want to put each and every one of them under a little glass dome like the rose in Beauty and the Beast, though I suppose that didn’t stop it from wilting, either.

My own personal wilting process seems to be rather nonlinear. My body, now firmly ensconced in what can only be called middle age, is betwixt and between: nose rings and wrinkle creams, the occasional crop top and the occasional stray gray. I can no longer do a backhandspring on the ground, and can’t remember the last time that I did (how many times have we unknowingly done the last of something?!) but I can still do one on a trampoline which gives me an inflated sense of self-confidence in my athleticism, and then I do dumb shit like the other day when I rode a mechanical bull at the Autry Museum Block Party and it tossed me onto the inflated padding underneath where I heard a chorus of cracks in my neck that seemed to herald something terrible and potentially irreparable. In many such moments I realize that the muscle memory is intact, but the muscles.. less so.

Much has been written lately about my generation, the Millennials, the sandwich generation (do they call us that because we love sandwiches? I fucking love sandwiches) arriving at midlife and straddling the extremes of birth and death: considering both child care and elder care needs, financially planning our own living-will-irrevocable-trust-whatever-thing for our dependents while counseling our parents to do the same. It’s funny, identifying as a midlife person now: I was hit on at a bar recently and told the kind man that I was a Married Middle-Aged Mom and it felt… amazing?! And sometimes not so funny, like when Ewen was watching Euphoria during Leo’s newborn night-feeds and we realized that we were the same distance from the insanity of being 18/19 ourselves as we were from from the insanity of Leo being 18/19. YIKES.

Waiting until my late 30’s to have a child was a great decision for me, in particular because I was able to cultivate my Buddhist mindfulness practice in my early 30’s (which I truly recommend to all parents and people everywhere - talk about death acceptance!). But the drawback to this inadvertently late-in-life decision is that my body has now been on the planet for 40 years of very intense and mostly ill-advised physical activity and now has to lift a toddler in-and-out of a carseat every day. MY BACK HURTS, Y’ALL. I want to run and tumble and jump and play with him like the young fit parents in the ball-pit gym place but my musculoskeletal system says Girl: If you want to be here for the long run you need to play the long game. At least stretch first.

And I think I do want to be here for the long run! Despite the awfully bleak reports about what might await us, I do want to stick around and see what happens. Despite “our body politic (being) subject to the same gravitational pull of feminine obsolescence, the uneasiness that swirls like dry autumn leaves around a woman past her childbearing years, the suspicion that anything she may possess of intellectual or economic or sexual potency somehow perverts the natural order of things” I still believe that it is worth investing in my own futurity. I spent much of last June dysphorically self-identifying as the dead husk of an octopus clinging pathetically to an undersea rock, having been evacuated of any meaningful contribution to the world. But now that I’ve emerged from that mental cave and shaken off the last remaining debris of postpartum mood dysfunction I actually see quite clearly that I am, in no uncertain terms, a fucking G at so many types of work and labor that contribute greatly to the wellbeing of humankind and I would very much like the opportunity to continue to participate.

Joanna Newsom sings “Hey hey hey, the end is near. On a good day you can see the end from here.” So true! BUT/AND: on a really good day, I can also see my own grandchildren. And so my death acceptance has been gently replaced by a vested interest in longevity, which I know is not guaranteed.

This month’s list is a catalogue of the ways in which I invest in that longevity. This way, I can just hand it to my doctor at our next appointment when she asks the magic three questions that seem to determine one’s health profile in the Western medical paradigm: Q1. Do you smoke? (A. God no. I mean except that pack a day habit between ages 15 and 22 WHOOPS LOL) Q2. Do you drink? (A. God no, I mean maybe like one drink a month but have you ever tried to parent a toddler while nursing a hangover? I’d rather pour the drink directly into my eyeballs) and Q3. Do you exercise? (Warning: you will be billed $7k for this conversation. Don’t pay it! Never pay a medical bill without negotiating it first! I’m a doctor I know these things.)

Here you go, Doc: an annotated list of the movement-based things I do to try and keep my corporeal form in good working order. I perform some combination of them ideally 2-3x a week, accompanied by a vegetarian diet, approx 8 hours of sleep a night on my new Avocado pillow (thanks Ewen!) and – most crucially - a constant hum of high-frequency neuroticism aka undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder sublimated beneath a chill exterior that secretly propels my metabolism like a hamster on a wheel who is also neurotic and is also smoking meth. The paragon of health / The fountain of youth!

I’m also cheating and writing this list for accountability because so far this week I’ve done exactly none of these exercisey things. It is really hard to maintain a Fall of Fitness when you also have a toddler wading around every day in the preschool germ cesspool, making it more like the Fall of Flu, or Phlegm, or Fugue States in which I can lift nary a weight greater than my index finger to scroll the Instagram feed of Democracy Now until I gently collapse under the psychic weight of the times.

And yet somehow Caity does Orange Theory workouts multiple times a week! Amrit wakes up at 6am to lift weights! Raky and Nate work with personal trainers! Ewen goes to the gym with his app! My father, who is seventy seven, rides his bike thousands of miles through the wilderness! They execute these regimens faithfully and monogamously but I? I am a promiscuous and inconsistent exerciser, for no other reason than I have found no form of exercise to satisfy all of my needs. If I could bottle the warm-up from certain modern dance classes I took in grad school and attend that class on a regular basis, perhaps fitness monogamy would transpire, but as it stands I cycle through the following list of movement modalities over the course of a given month and, thus far, they are keeping me alive.

1.     Swimming

20 minutes of laps at the Glassell Park pool on a sunny afternoon. Breaststroke and crawlstroke, alternating. No screen, no media, nothing but the breath and the mind and the coordinated rhythms of the body propelling me forward through space. A decade ago, living in Massachusetts for the Summer, I swam the length of Walden Pond, and it was a truly transcendent life moment. Now Leo is learning to swim – just this morning he discovered he could blow bubbles in his milk cup and exclaimed “Mom! I can go underwater!” – and his favorite book is one called “Our Pool” about the pleasures of a day spent devoted to swimming as public municipal act. I thrill at the notion of our future swims once he can keep himself afloat, slippery mammals playing in the water, and recall with fondness the way my Mom preserved lap swims as the province of her own self-care, her Hawaiian Tropic coconut lotion in her black pool bag with big jewel-toned flowers in the locker room, her 90’s perm disappearing beneath the lap lane while we horse-played in the shallow end until the whistle blew. I’m so grateful to have pushed through my full-body reluctance on cloudy Colorado days when parent-mandated swimming lessons found me at the concrete edge of the public pool, preparing to undergo some perfunctory breathing drill or terrifyingly-named maneuver such as the “dead-man’s float” because as an adult I am now at one with the water, intimate with the water, I feel balletic when I swim, and at least once a year treat myself to some kind of show-offy flip-a-thon on a public diving board just to prove I can.

If I could swim every day I would but here’s the thing: my gender is femme. A blessing and a curse, this means that it is my obligation to look good, or at least presentable, whenever I might be perceived by any other person alive on the planet. And, as mentioned, I am now a middle-aged femme and so the stakes are very high! I cannot just go for a swim and then, like, head to Trader Joe’s afterwards looking like a drowned scraggly-haired rat who got punched in both eyes! And so immediately after swimming I must furtively exit the locker room in a ballcap and big sunglasses, like a celebrity, and drive back home for a full everything shower: shampoo, comb-through conditioner, double-cleanse the face, serum, moisturizer, face oil, gua sha*, hair treatment, a full face of no-makeup makeup before I’m back in a state of being available for just basic public visibility. It’s exhausting, and now my little 20 minutes of laps swum has metastasized into a two hour ritual endeavor. Someday perhaps vanity will effervesce from me and I will be free to swim all the day long and will not care if I look like a hag for the hours in between! But at the moment I live in Los Angeles where the Trader Joes might as well be fashion week all year long, and I am just hardwired to play that aesthetic gender game I’m afraid. Ugh! And so, swimming, my truest exercise love, is relegated to maybe once every two weeks. Instead, I try…

2.     Yoga

In her brilliant one-woman theater show, The Unexpected Third, my dear friend and inspiration Kathryn Grody attributes her arrival in the third act of life (she’s in her late 70’s) to several things, including yoga. “You’ve got to stretch the fascia every day” she says, or something like that – I’m paraphrasing, but these days whenever I find myself in some kind of stretchy shape on my dessicated old yoga mat I hear her encouraging me to think about my fascia (alas I, too, am simply animated flesh) and I feel I am making a small deposit in some kind of longevity bank, another ten minutes added to my time on earth because of this downward dog.

I first began doing yoga at age 15 at the Rally Sport in Boulder where my best friend’s family had a membership, and I felt I’d discovered some sort of secret ancient portal or elixir or palliative magic, which I guess I kind of had? Wait: I can do all of the stretching from gymnastics practice, but I don’t have to do the scary balancing and tumbling parts? I can just, like, breathe and vibe and look at this candle and listen to sitar? This was 25 years ago and I’ve been a devoted and faithful practitioner ever since, though never a sincere participant in the larger yoga culture. I feel ill-at-ease when white people speak Sanskrit. Is that bad? Am I a hater? I will not digress into a critical takedown of wellness culture here in this newsletter, though living in LA believe me I COULD WRITE A BOOK. But I don’t necessarily want or need mantras and chanting and swirly henna designs on my leggings, all I want is to stretch the fascia!

Sometimes a Yoga With Adriene video will hit the spot – or, if you happen to be trapped inside during a pandemic, one of her 30-day challenges. Other times a mid-day slow flow class with Mason Rose at Silverlake Yoga will do the thing I need, stretch my body slowly like a lump of bread dough until finally I can be left to rise and all aches and sorenesses evaporate from me and I’m a perfect little unbaked loaf of alignment and integration and low-frequency beta waves. But honestly? The best yoga class is the one that I lead myself through in my living room, because it replicates that first high, the first Ashtanga flow in that shitty little Rally Sport basement. I know what my fascia need, and I can give it to them, except for the fact that I am almost never in my living room alone. There is a tiny human there, and a tiny car wash, and a farm with buttons that make farm animal sounds, and baskets of blocks, cars, trains, musical instruments, Sesame Street characters, this is not me complaining! I love playing with Leo in the living room more than anything! A sanctuary is a sanctuary is a sanctuary. And so I tell myself that I will do yoga while he’s napping or at preschool, but self-discipline is a scarce commodity these days, and to muster the willpower to roll out the mat and do that extended side angle pose when I am in my house, the locus of all activity, and there are emails to be replied to and dishes to be done and laundry to fold, man I gotta get out of here! I need focus! Accountability! Community! Someone to witness my new thrifted magenta bike shorts! These thrifted magenta bike shorts aren’t gonna wear themselves!

3.     Pilates

Can you believe it took me 40 years to get to a pilates class? Sometimes the universe keeps you away from something until you’re ready – Ewen and I attended the same tiny college, taught at the same tiny preschool, had several of the same best friends, etc, for years before we met and fell in love! Not to compare my soul-mate-love-of-my-life with a pilates class, but earlier this year I was talking to Leo’s nanny (a gorgeous blue-haired tie-dye clad sprite whose name is literally Squid, you can’t make this shit up, I love LA so much sometimes) about the physical impact of taking care of children all day, and she said “bendy people like us, we keep on going to yoga, but what we really need is pilates. It’s basically the most hardcore workout of your life while, like, lying down.” Girl, say less! I instantly signed up for 9am Magic Mat Mondays with Devika at Everybody Gym, the neighborhood gym, the queer gym, the absolute best gym on planet earth with the secret sauna in the back, and it was the magic missing piece. Making your core stronger, it turns out, also makes your core stronger, if you know what I mean.

A pedagogy nerd myself, I have a very low tolerance for subpar instruction, but Devika is a master: queer fashion, a postmodern dancer’s clever/oblique referential vocabulary, a psychedelic panorama of imagery at her command, an understanding of anatomy so thorough that things like “feel your skull expand” or “wrap your ribcage around you like a vest” actually make sense, plus she’s saying all of this while holding her body aloft in an actual V shape, teetering on the fulcrum of her own sacrum, nary a tremble in her voice while her ill global south playlist bops on repeat. After my first class I came home, picked up my toddler, and the vague-yet-searing backache I’d come to associate with that very gesture was nowhere to be felt, so stitched-together was my abdominal wall. A MIRACLE. Come for the pain relief, stay for the snatched waist.

The downside? No cardio. Your girl needs to break a sweat! How am I going to survive the apocalypse if I can’t move at high speeds without losing my breath?! Plus, I’m helpless around a good beat, but surrendering to the groove whilst supine in Pilates class is unfortunately somewhat déclassé. At a certain point, let’s face it: I just gotta go to dance class.

4.     Dancing

I can’t write an essay here about the history of my relationship to dance, it’s a memoir all on its own. What I will say is that when I think back on those yummy salad days of arrival in Los Angeles, the first few years of my thirties, when my dance friends and I regularly attended Sweaty Sundays class with Ryan Heffington, the phrase that comes unbidden to my mind is “I’ve never felt so alive”. This, I tell my mind, is hyperbole, but something about wearing a giant T-shirt and sparkly hot pants while those opening strains of the Magician remix of I Follow Rivers by Lykke Li thumped throughout the old Sweat Spot on Sunset Blvd really made me feel like I’ve made it, this is it, I am at the center of it all, I am touching the Sun. The Sweat Spot did not survive the pandemic (RIP), though Ryan Heffington really gave us his god-damndest by full-out leading (the man does not mark it, ever) FREE Instagram Live classes throughout the first several variant waves. Since then, it seemed he had receded into the shadows of enigmatic obscurity, but then last time we were at the beach in Santa Monica I saw him running past us in little running shorts and I said “oh my god, I think that’s Ryan Heffington” and he turned around, mid-jog, without stopping, and gave me either a shaka or the rock n roll sign of the horns, and I swooned myself into oblivion. Nowadays, his disciples Melissa and Nathan and the rest of those former Sweat Spot all-stars teach class on the weekends in Pasadena and every once in a while I go and it is aerobic and dynamic and sexy and so close, it is so very close to the euphoria of the Sweaty Sundays of old, but the true rapture always seems to elude me and I plummet back to earth with slightly elevated dopamine levels and extremely elevated soreness levels. I should also mention that I have been flirted with by passersby twice when attending these classes, so not sure how much of the dopamine is accounted for by what.

I realize as I write this that, similar to my Substack about jobs, one of the unmet needs I seem to have in this phase-of-life is an excuse to wear fabulous outfits in public! In addition to my collection of professional ladybusiness attire I also possess an unreasonable amount of objectively fabulous aerobics gear - no wonder strangers are flirting with me! - and I lament the fact that I find myself bereft of contexts in which to wear them. I fear I can no longer do my beloved Emilia’s Pony Sweat Dance Aerobics with a mushy postpartum pelvic floor, though her class truly does inspire some amazing outfits and got me through the last Trump administration so if the worst (meaning the actual worst) should transpire politically I may have to overcome my apprehension and just pee my pants in public for the sake of moving in fiercely noncompetitive unison with my radical comrades. Meanwhile: how can I break a sweat?!

5.     Riding Bikes

Who doesn’t love riding bikes?! You’re instantly nine years old. My memory of the aftermath of Leo’s birth is a little foggy but I’m pretty sure it was Ewen’s very first action item to acquire one of those back-of-the-bike baby seats - like, he may have ordered it from the hospital’s postpartum recovery room. Now, every so-often we drag our bikes out from Ewen’s office ( slash garage slash film production lab slash baking supply goods storage unit slash car repair shop), pump up the tires, and cruise our lil bike gang down to the LA river path. Great blue herons! Hipsters! Kayakers! Skateboarders! Pro-Palestine graffiti! Iced coffee from La Colombe! Sandwiches from Wax Paper! A morning spent in Frogtown is a morning well-spent indeed. If we’re really in-it-to-win-it, we’ll keep biking towards Griffith Park and then turn right over the North Atwater Bridge, past the horse stables to a little playground in the shade. The ride back home is grueling because our house is situated at the top of a little hill on top of another little hill, but isn’t that how they organize Peloton rides, putting the hardest cardio push at the very end? Speaking of fitness: evvvvvvvery once in a blue moon I have the time and wherewithal to treat myself to a solo bonus bike ride in which I turn right at the River instead of left and ride my bike to pilates! The pilates gym is across from Rio de los Angeles State Park so honestly we could bundle it into a fam jam in which we all ride together and then Leo and Ewen hang out at Rio watching for Metrolink trains through the scrub oak while I pilates to my heart’s content, but there’s also something utterly liberating about biking by myself, wind in my hair, unconcerned about the safety of the bodies of the people I love most in the world balanced precariously next to me atop a pair of slender wheels. Once I even did a solo triathalon in which I biked to Rio, met Laurelin, went for a hike, and then went to pilates. Gold medal for me! Speaking of hiking..

6.     Hiking

Controversial! Is a hike in LA actually a walk? Is a walk in LA actually a hike? All I know is that lately Leo and I will be playing in our Elysian Heights backyard and the impulse to take a “nature walk” gradually overcomes us and we drift out the gate and up the hill and suddenly it really does feel like we’re in nature: oxalis and nasturtium and wild mustard threading through the old Paul Landacre house, hawks soaring overhead and coyote prints underfoot. He puts rocks in his pocket, watches ants march along the escarpment overlooking the 5 freeway, and inevitably wants me to carry him the rest of the way home, a true full-body workout indeed.

The quest to carve out time for the solitary pursuit of exercise seems to be yet another one of those maternal fools errands, but we pursue it nonetheless - a Room of One’s Own, with a mat and some weights and a good workout playlist. And then there is the integrated version, where the quotidian acts of devotional care are woven together with ways to use the body that nourish rather than deplete it. Lifting Leo from his bed with good posture, an aligned spine, a deep breath. This morning’s high-energy pajama dance party (to Josh’s genius recommendation, Elton John’s cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) in the kitchen as the Sunday soup simmers on the stove. Yesterday’s cathartic backyard scrub-down restoration of a second-hand play kitchen — the most I’ve sweat in weeks! The body continues to move and evolve in ways both intentional and not, and whether these daily acts bring me closer to or farther from my inevitable demise is in the lap of the gods. I don’t know what kind of shape I’m in. I don’t know the number of my remaining days. But last week the dermatologist looked over every square inch of my body and said it looked, and I quote, perfect. It ain’t true, but I’ll take it.

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A note on writing: The other day the phrase “purple prose” appeared in a New York Times word puzzle and, having never heard of it, I looked it up and thought Hey that’s me! before realizing it isn’t a compliment. I also read in one of my favorite comic Substacks about how someone wrote something about how Substack is just “women monetizing their diary entries” and I thought HEY THAT’S ME! and it made me recall a Bikini Kill show I once attended where famous Scorpio Kathleen Hanna said to the crowd I like being up here having all of your attention, and you all enjoy giving me your attention, so what’s wrong with any of it?! And to that I say Nothing: I will continue to write here in my florid and overly stylized manner, at least until the end of the year, and the monies derived will continue to flow in the only urgent direction I can think of to shunt them. I may never be an economist of either money or language, but I certainly know what I do (writing) and don’t (suffering) enjoy. It is a blessing to be able to be alive to tell some tales of my body and what it has been through. Thank you for subscribing, thank you for fundraising, may we ride out our years in bodies that have been adequately loved and moved.

*I also feel compelled to say that we can often be derisive when discussing skincare routines but I think they are really important, not just for maintaining a youthful appearance (and/or trying in vain to counteract years of sunblock negligence while studying abroad as an undergrad in equatorial countries), but for spending time every day actually making contact with the little boundary that determines the threshold between you and not-you. I became very obsessed with gua sha my first Summer postpartum, during which the understanding of me and not-me because very blurry indeed, and the ceremony of physically touching each inch of the barrier that comprises the skin of my face, oiling it as a sort of protection against external forces, fortified me and put me in touch with myself in a very valuable way. I still don’t think 12 year olds should be spending hundreds of dollars on Drunk Elephant products at Sephora, but I do think it’s good to look at oneself in the mirror and make tactile contact as a way of saying: this is where I begin and end.