It started gradually, of course. One day Carrie casually mentioned an upcoming trip to a holistic spa. Pam asked if she could borrow my copy of The Power of Now (“Shelly has it, ask her to give it to you when she’s done.”). Formerly normal conversations were suddenly peppered with stories about emerging this and manifesting that and invoking God knows what, but still I didn’t think much of it. After all, I live in Southern California, which last time I checked was a notorious granola gathering spot. But then a New York friend—a high-powered finance guy, mind you—went on a “spiritual trek” to India and a pal from London gave up marathon running for tai chi and one of my best friends in South Carolina started raving about how Transcendental Meditation (TM to devotees) was changing her life, and I realized it had nothing to do with zip codes.
(Aside: In case you’re not familiar with TM—and I wasn’t, either—according to Wikipedia,* it’s a specific type of “self-development mantra meditation,” which costs thousands of dollars to learn and “has been incorporated into selected schools, universities, corporations, and prison programs in the USA.” And you know it’s got to be awesome if they’re using it on inmates and you can’t pick it up by watching a YouTube video, right?)
I’ve given this some thought, and I think it’s legit to liken the midlife interest in spiritual enlightenment to hiking: When you’re climbing up the mountain, you’re only thinking about the top—how great you’ll feel when you get there and how beautiful the view will be and how nice it will be to finally sit down and how delicious that PowerBar in your back pocket is going to taste if you remember to take it out before you sit down. But when you start the downhill descent and you’re no longer focused on the effort or the payoff, your thoughts turn to the more distant future: the bath you’ll have to give the tick-covered dog when you get home and what’s for dinner and basically all of the other crap you have to look forward to after your hike.
Just yesterday-ish we were too busy husband hunting and baby making and/or clawing our collective way up countless corporate ladders to give a rat’s ass about the purpose, the point of it all. Now suddenly, we’re all holding mudras and chanting mantras and standing in public parks on one foot, all crazy Mr. Miyagi style, and trying our best to “be still and go within,” whatever the hell that means. “It’s all about the mind-body connection,” our gurus tell us, which seems a little redundant to me because one without the other is either a transplant waiting to happen or a zucchini.
On the surface I am one of the enlightenment seekers, but I have to admit I’m sort of half-assed about it. I do have a vision board, but the contents rarely change, and I still don’t have an infinity pool or a Range Rover, so obviously, I’m not doing it right, but I haven’t bothered to figure out how or why. I only buy milk and eggs from happy cows and chickens that are able to roam freely when they’re not producing my breakfast staples, but I also eat crap way more than I should.* I bought my own copy of The Secret DVD as soon as it came out, and I have every intention of watching it one of these years. I believe that thoughts have energy, yet I still carry around plenty of shitty ones. I did try to get my chakras cleaned, you may recall, but I was only willing to invest a measly five bucks in gleaming energy centers, so what does that tell you?
It was a trip to a regular old Western medicine doctor that convinced me I had some work to do.
“Are you tired a lot?” the Harvard-trained professional asked after the routine exam.
“Oh my God, exhausted, constantly,” I told her.
“Do you get irritated easily?” she wanted to know.
“Um, some people might say that . . .” I admitted, thinking she was about to tell me I was officially menopausal.
“You’ve got muscle and joint pain, and your blood pressure is about as low as it can be and still allow basic functioning,” she continued.
“I agree, I’m a wreck,” I told her. “So what do I need? Surgery? Vitamins? A complete overhaul?”
“You need to relax,” she said simply. You think?
“I’m pretty sure you told me that last year,” I replied.
“And I’m pretty sure you didn’t do it,” she countered. “You have no balance. You go, go, go all day long, and your adrenal glands are shot. You need to rejuvenate yourself. Have you tried yoga or meditation?” This wasn’t some alterna–witch doctor doling out this advice; this was my primary care physician, one who accepted real insurance and everything.
“I can’t meditate, and yoga is boring,” I told her. “It’s so . . . still.”
“Yes, you can—if you want to—and the stillness is the point,” she insisted.
I paid my co-pay and left, swinging by Starbucks on the way home because man was I tired after all of that poking and prodding and exhausting talk about yoga.
I managed to put the whole chat out of my mind for a while. But recently, when I started feeling even more run-down and irritable and achy than usual, I started thinking seriously about what she had said. I really have tried meditating, but honestly, my thoughts are like a room full of sugared-up kindergarteners in a bounce house: good luck trying to quiet them. I’ve also done plenty of yoga in my life, and while I like the physicality of it, I have no patience for the esoteric mumbo jumbo part. (That’s the point, my doctor whispers in my ear. I mentally poke her in the third eye.)
On the other hand, Madonna does yoga, and she’s fifty-five with the body of someone half her age. I suppose if I’m going to take any steps toward inner peace and tranquility, I might as well get buff arms out of the deal. My mind made up, I buy myself some cute yoga pants and a cushy mat and a month of unlimited classes at a local studio for less than I’d pay for a few venti lattes,* excited to watch my life be transformed.
I will be disciplined and dedicated and totally . . . yogic, I tell myself. Yogic! That’s actually a word. I feel smug just thinking it.
On my first day of class, the sinewy yoga instructor strides into the studio. “Namaste, I’m Summer,” she says with a languid bow by way of introduction. Of course you are. I guess that makes me Fall. (What? Old habits die hard.) “Let’s start today by standing with our feet firmly rooted in the earth, closing our eyes, and opening our hearts.”
I try not to roll my eyes. I am pretty sure I can stand relatively still, and I probably can even do it with my eyes closed, but I’m a little concerned about the opening my heart bit. Isn’t that something best left to skilled cardiac surgeons? Focus, Jenna. Just focus. Sarcasm is not even a little bit yogic.
After Summer warms us up with lots of panting, we move into downward-facing dog. I love this pose because my dog does it all the time, and every time he does, I scream, “DOWNWARD-FACING DOG,” in the hopes that he’ll eventually learn to do it on command. He’s thirteen and has yet to pick up this skill. “Breathe into the backs of your knees as you press your heels into the earth,” Summer instructs without a trace of irony.
Breathe into the backs of my knees? How exactly would one do that? I know the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone and everything, but I’m almost positive there’s no direct airway from my lungs to my middle-leg region. Still, I do my best to will oxygen down into my legs, because I am yogic and also because I’d really like to look like Summer.
She’s folded practically in half, her heels are flat on the ground, and honest to God, she doesn’t have an ounce of body fat on her. In fact, it sort of looks like she’s wearing her muscles and tendons on the outside of her skin. I catch a glimpse of my own midsection down my ballooning shirt, and while I’ve never actually viewed the underbelly of a nursing cow before, I am pretty sure I know what it looks like now.
“Quiet your mind as you pull your pelvis away from your lower back,” Summer intones.
Listen, hottest of all seasons. Both of those things seem fairly impossible to me on their own; pulling them off simultaneously might be a bit advanced for an intermediate yoga class, don’
t you think?
I make it through the hour, doing my best to stifle a parade of cynical thoughts, and fall asleep in Savasana. Clearly, I have great yogic potential, because Summer did ask us to release all thoughts and revel in the profundity of stillness. You can’t imagine how profoundly still I am in that corpse pose.
My first month of classes ends and I buy another. Then, because I’m already on Amazon and have to spend ten more bucks to get the free shipping, I order a few yoga DVDs. I even take them with me when I go away for a few days now. Because—and don’t tell anybody I said this, especially my smug-faced doctor—I feel better when I do yoga. Stronger, more flexible, less achy, and maybe even a tiny bit more balanced.
Have I learned to quiet my thoughts? Not even close. Do I look like Summer? Only in the sense that we both have four limbs and a nose. Will I ever? The odds are up there with Jenna Marbles being invited to speak at the Vatican. But yoga is the closest I get to Zen, so I’ll take it. Plus it beats the hell out of colonic irrigation.
CHAPTER 19
I Liked My Kids Better before They Told Me My Ass Jiggles
Let me start here by saying that I love my daughters more than anything else in the world times infinity plus eleven. Raising them is both my life’s greatest joy and most rewarding challenge. I would throw myself in front of a spray of bullets, jump into icy, treacherous rapids, or wrestle a congregation of hungry alligators for either of them without a second’s pause.* But I have to tell you, when Joe and I decided to start a family—which was not a decision we came to easily or simultaneously, I might add—I had no flipping idea what I was getting myself into.
First of all, I can recall every last should-we-or-shouldn’t-we debate as if it happened yesterday, and I am 100 percent certain that the object in question each and every time was a baby. Were we ready to have a baby? Could we afford to have a baby? What would we name the baby? Who would be the baby’s primary, default caregiver? Were my boobs big enough to feed a baby? Would Joe be the hottest baby-daddy we knew? And how exactly did one swaddle a baby anyway?
So now I’m over here scratching my head and wondering how on earth I could possibly be responsible for two extremely large, relentlessly chatty, and downright demanding mini-people who roll their eyes at me on a regular basis and want to know why I’m allowed to get massages and pedicures and they’re not. (“Because I have a fucking job, that’s why!”)
“I’m sorry, but I signed up for the baby plan?” I’ve tried shouting, but nobody can hear me over the Taylor Swift that’s forever blaring in the background.
My sister got married a decade before I did, so her oldest was turning nine the year I was due with my firstborn.
“He’s halfway out of the house,” she whimpered on his ninth birthday, with actual tears and everything.
“Are you PMSing?” I asked, baffled. (If my sister wasn’t a card-carrying teetotaler, I’d have assumed she was drunk.)
“Jenna, you don’t understand,” she sobbed. “I don’t even know where the last nine years went! It’s not enough time. I’m not ready for him to leave!”
And I was considered the “dramatic one”? Unbelievable.
“You have him for at least nine more years!” I’d countered, because I hadn’t yet entered the accelerated time-sucking vortex that is parenting myself. Nine years was a lifetime, an eternity bordering on infinity. In nine years, I thought, I’ll be forty-four! Hahahaha! I could never be forty-four! That was just crazy talk, and my sister was nuts, and that was all there was to it.
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When my wife reminded me that when I can finally share my favorite film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, with my son, it will be over thirty years old.
—JP
When my daughters actually were babies—and in retrospect, so was I—well-intended strangers constantly approached us with the singular purpose of doling out unsolicited and similarly bewildering advice.
“Ah, enjoy these days,” they’d say, looking all misty eyed. “They grow up so fast . . . It goes by in a blink.”
I’d look down at the milk rings around my boobs and the spit-up dripping down my shoulder and think, You people are complete morons. Enjoy these days? I can’t wait for them to be over. And you think two decades is going to go by in a blink? Yesterday lasted twelve weeks alone! Time is practically standing still over here! I honestly couldn’t even fathom that these tiny, chubby, hairless, flailing bodies I had produced would ever be capable of walking upright, calling me “meaner than the wicked witch if she existed” or begging for a $1,200 drum kit. It just wouldn’t compute.
And then I blinked, and here I am. At this writing, the top of my oldest daughter’s head comes up to my nose, a fact I still don’t quite believe, and as such, I am constantly looking down to see if she’s wearing high heels or standing on her sister. (She almost always isn’t.) She has crushes on boys, can apply eye shadow better than I can,* and has already figured out that she’ll turn sixteen on a Saturday, which means she’ll have to wait an extra two endless, torturous days to get her driver’s license than she would if her sweetest of all birthdays fell on a weekday. Her driver’s license! Ridiculous, right? I mean, babies can’t drive cars.
When you still think you have babies, you are caught wildly unprepared when your double-digit child comes to you and drops the following bomb: “I asked Dad how babies were made, but he said that you’d be mad at him if he told me.”
Oh, he did, did he? Nice deflecting, buddy. No really, I got this one. Been looking forward to it for ages, in fact.
“Why don’t you tell me what you already know?” I said, trying to assess how much playground damage I might need to undo first.
“Literally nothing,” she insisted.
“Do you know what sex is?” I asked her.
She shook her head sadly.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. (It’s worth noting here that I never had this conversation with my own mother, ever. In fact, I have vivid memories of sitting on my living room couch one evening reading my Judy Blume book while my mom was cooking dinner. “Mom, what does m-a-s-t-u-r-b-a-” I hadn’t even finished spelling the mystery word when she snatched the book from my hand and sent me to my room. Ooh, it must be something really good, I remember thinking. Naturally, I started saving my paltry allowance that minute, and as soon as I had enough money for bus fare and a new book, I hauled my ass to the mall and bought myself another copy. Which I hid under my mattress, of course, because trip once you’re clumsy; twice you’re stupid. Who needed a mom who was comfortable talking about sex when you had Judy Blume? Which book was that, I wondered now? Maybe I could get a copy for my daughter and call it a day. No, wait. We’re supposed to do better than our parents did, to learn from their mistakes and right the wrongs of our histories. We’re supposed to be able to talk about sex.)
“So all mommies have seeds in their bodies, and daddies have seeds in their bodies,” I explained. “You need both seeds to make a baby. So after a man and a woman get married and decide they want to have a baby, even though it’s really hard and expensive to have a baby and it hurts really badly when you give birth to it, then the two seeds come together to make the baby.”
[To self: Nailed it!]
“How do the seeds get together?” she wanted to know.
“Oh, that,” I said. “Well, the daddy plants his seed inside the mommy, where it grows until it’s ready to be born.” Answer their questions but don’t give them more information than they ask for. Damn, I’m so good at this, I might need to take my show on the road! I’ll bet other parents would pony up to have someone else have this conversation for them. Not me, of course. I’ve got this.
She thought about my seed story for a minute, nodding her head as the information sank in. Maybe I wouldn’t even have to say penis and vagina!
“But how does the daddy’s seed
get into the mommy?” she pressed.
Jesus, kid. Have you ever considered a career in law?
It’s just a word. You can say it.
“The penis.”
Horrified look.
“What about the penis?”
“His seed comes out of his penis.”
“And goes where?”
[To self: You were given this information once, and it did not in fact kill you. She can handle it. Just spit it out and get it over with.]
“The daddy puts his penis inside the mommy’s vagina so the two seeds can come together.”
She stood there with an honest-to-God-I-might-vomit expression complete with holding-her-gut-and-cringing posture.
“But . . . why?” she demanded.
“That’s just the way it works,” I explained. For the record, this was not in the parenting books. “It’s kind of a weird system when you think about it, huh?”
She nodded like a bobblehead with ADHD.
“How long does the penis have to stay in there?” she wanted to know.
“Not that long,” I told her, because she was starting to look worried and also because it’s true.
Afterward I was regaling my friend Cori with the painful details of my inaugural sex chat with my daughter.
“Oh, I tried the whole husband-and-wife thing with Catelyn, too,” she said. “But then she got all quiet and finally she said, ‘Wait a minute. Aunt Lori has a baby . . . and she’s not married.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, she got a special permit for that, it’s really complicated.’”
“You did not!” I screamed, doubled over in happy tears.
“Oh, I did,” Cori insisted. “Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was like what on earth am I saying? The worst part was when Dave came home I had to tell him that if Catelyn asked anything about the not-married baby permit, he was going to need to go along with it.”
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 18