The body came first

Topics: postpartum, weight lifting, grad school, the inimitable Kathy Smith

When I was seventh months postpartum, I started lifting some five-pound weights I found in my basement. The impetus was simple: my baby was big. They say that you grow stronger as your baby gets heavier, but it felt like my baby was growing exponentially, far out-pacing me. He was a boulder and my arms were blades of grass. Plus, he wanted to be held. All. The. Time.

So I started lifting weights. My pelvic floor physical therapist thought it was a good idea. I found a free postpartum dumbbell program on YouTube called Nourish Move Love, and I rolled out my yoga mat in the middle of my living room.

Lindsey Bomgren of Nourish, Move, Love. If you’re interested in starting to lift weights, I suggest her Postpartum playlist (even if you aren’t pp), followed by her Strong 20 program. Be prepared: she will kick your booty and you will start saying “Holy Bananas!”

My pelvic floor pain was still there, but it lessened. Soon, I could hold Bodie for longer and my back wasn’t hurting as much anymore. I could squat down with him in my arms and pick up the things I had dropped instead of always relying on my freakishly dexterous toes. A few months later, I went up to ten-pound weights. Many months after that, I started grabbing fifteens for some of the moves. But sometimes I still reach for those five-pounders. When I do lunges, I often drop my weights altogether. Part of the strength I’ve gained is knowing when to take a step back and modify, or when to take a break, for a move, or a day, or a week. Saying no can be even more powerful than saying yes.

Next month, July, marks one year of consistently lifting weights. This activity has become a part of my day that my mind and body craves. Not long ago, I was speaking with a friend who also enjoys lifting weights and she asked me if I had ever lifted weights before this, and I said no. But then, like a rush, a deep and long-ago memory came back to me. Like a fever dream, she appeared:

Kathy Smith.

I mean, come on. Look how confident she looks holding those five pounders! The open-mouth smile! The perfectly coiffed layers! The TM in the corner! Icon.

Just look at her. Incredible.

I had forgotten about the many hours I spent in the basement of my childhood home lifting three- and five-pound-weights while Kathy Smith shouted “One more time! One more time! One more time!” so many times that you started to love to growl at her. Plus, she sometimes dropped her weights and ran around the studio pumping up her background worker-outers instead. When I close my eyes, I can still hear her high-pitched “Wo-ooooooooooo” that my mom and I would imitate between our puffing breaths (unlike Kathy, we didn’t take breaks).

Once I remembered Kathy Smith, I began to recall the other periods of intense dedication to other fitness gurus. I went through a P90X phase early on in college, I fell in love with Adriene of Yoga with Adriene soon after I graduated from my MFA program, and toward the beginning of the pandemic, I bought a subscription to a dance choreography website called Steezy (not sure why it was called that…). I danced competitively as a child, sometimes as many as four days a week, but I quit so that I could do theater in high school. Some of my fondest high school memories are of learning the original Jerome Robbins broadway choreography of West Side Story as a chorus member in my senior year spring show. Oh, god, that was amazing. I had one line (“Ooh!” Seriously. That was the line) and I had to watch my high school boyfriend dance with a junior who clearly had a crush on him during the gymnasium scene, but still––dancing this choreography was probably the biggest rush of my theatrical career (and not to toot my own horn, but I’d had some pretty big roles!).

My mom often impersonates me doing this exact move in our tiny kitchen. After rehearsal each night, I’d race home to show her what we learned.

When I was in graduate school, I made some poor housing decisions (I was young! I was poor! I was terrified of making decisions and so made poor ones!) and lived with some…characters. One of them insisted on putting her food in every kitchen cabinet, yelled at me for moving her ruler from my shelves, and insisted I drive her to the humane society across town so she could visit a rather rude cat named Ice-T that she had no intention of adopting. Multiple times. I was stressed about the stories I was writing, I didn’t know if I had any friends (the fact that I didn’t know was somehow more distressing to me than the thought of having no friends at all), I was in a long-distance relationship, and, despite having travelled widely, I’d never lived outside of Minnesota before and felt a little lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In tears one night, I called my mom, just to hear her voice. “Maybe you could find a dance class or something,” she suggested. I googled and found a studio thirty minutes away. There was a class starting in thirty-five minutes. I threw on a sports bra and went.

Imagine me in the front row. Because I was always in the front row.

Thus began my love affair with Just Dance Roanoke, a dance fitness studio that turned down the lights and turned up the music when the next door neighbors in the strip mall complained about noise. I started going four to five days a week. I’d sweat so much my shins glistened and I could wring out my dripping ponytail. For fifty-five blissful minutes at a time, my chest burned, my signature side-pony whirled, and my brain turned off.

Remember this show? I totally forgot about it until just now.

My roommate situation was still wild, my friendships still felt new and shaky, and my stories were still mostly garbage, but I felt like I was coming back into myself, one Ariana Grande hit at a time.

Ten years later, I needed to come back into myself once again, but in a totally different way. I had had a baby, which was the most powerful thing my body had ever done. I built a human, and then I birthed that human. And then I fed that tiny, vulnerable human with my body, and I held him while he breathed all of this new, new air. Many of you know that my birth was difficult. I’ll write my birth story at some point, but for now, I think it’s enough to say that my pelvic floor pain has been present and in many ways prohibitive up until I was 18-months postpartum.

In the early months after Bodie was born, I felt a strong internal pressure to write, to create. After all, writing had been the focus of my life for the past decade, and I was terrified that I would lose it. I was terrified that I would lose myself. It didn’t help that I had had a male teacher I revered tell me that once a writer became a mother, she just started writing about her kids and nothing else (as if that isn’t interesting or worthwhile). I forced myself to work on a novel that I knew I couldn’t possibly hold in my brain. I started up a Substack and posted about it on Instagram. I had so much to prove to myself. I tried to write while Bodie napped even though all I wanted to do was sleep. I was tired. I was tired of the pressure I felt coming from no one but me. My arms were tired from holding my growing baby. My pelvic floor hurt all the time. And I simply didn’t have enough energy to take care of my body and to dedicate myself to my writing. It was a decision that came slowly and then all at once. My body felt broken and my mind felt cloudy. I took a deep breath and told the mind clouds they could come or go, whatever, but I wasn’t going to worry about it. I was going to stop writing my novel and my Substack. Only for now. Deep down, I knew and I know that I am and always will be a writer. That will never stop being how I view the world. But I also knew that the mind would come, like it did once I found Just Dance Roanoke. Like it did when I felt the rush of dancing in West Side Story and could let go of my teenage jealousy. So much of what a mother does is emotional and mental, but so much of it is so very physical. I had never used my body so much before in my entire life. I reprioritized. I let the body come first.

When Bodie slept, I slept. When he watched Ms. Rachel, I lifted weights. I jotted down ideas for stories and poems in the notes app on my phone, but I didn’t try to delve into my projects. Instead, I read for pleasure. I read and read and read. More than I had read in years. I got more ideas that I wrote down in my phone. And most of all, I gave myself permission to stay in my body. When Bodie crawled over to look at something, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled over, too. When he jabbered at me, I jabbered back. When he was ready for a nap, I held him in my arms and watched him breathe, and I told myself the truth that I had learned: being here, being here, in this moment, was far more important to me than any word I’d ever write again. I let my art take a backseat to the art that was my present life. I let myself be completely, totally present with this little being who was changing so much. With myself, who was changing, too.

Everyone who has seen him––since he was in utero!!–– has looked at me and said, “That’s a big baby.” They’re right.

They say that it takes two years for a mother to start to feel like herself again after having a baby. From where I stand on the track, that seems about right. But. Also. I feel so incredibly different now. For one thing, my body has morphed into something new. It is softer, warmer, a home. It has also somehow time-traveled to the young me who needed to sweat it out and dance or lift along with Kathy Smith. It doesn’t look the same and some of my dancer’s grace has rusted a bit, but that blood-pumping, chest-tightening, brain-clearing rush I get from moving my body has re-centered me in this new motherly body of mine.

I needed to train like an athlete to be the kind of mom I wanted to be: one who could hold her baby and keep up with him once he started running. Where I am is today is a place I could not have imagined two months, four months, or even six months postpartum. After giving birth, it took me six weeks to be able to walk down my block and back. It was over a year before I could walk two miles without pain. Today, I walked three hilly miles while pushing a stroller with no pain and yesterday I did twenty push ups from my toes (not all at once, but…!!!). Many women have harder births than mine and experience painful complications long after they give birth. Other women struggle to get and stay pregnant, and the different paths in their physical, emotional, and mental journeys are full of difficulty in a whole host of other ways. So many, for so many reasons, are not able to inhabit or use their bodies in all of the ways they want to. I feel so profoundly grateful for what my body has done and is doing, and that the birth injuries I experienced were only as painful as they were and not more so.

This is why I work out. So I can “Diggiday.” (Bodie language for “Hold my hand.”)

Learning how to be a mother in this body is a daily exercise. And in order to do that mental work, I had to let the body come first. I wonder where she’ll lead me next.

In what ways do you like to move? What makes you feel connected to your body? Is it a fun work out? Holding a cup of warm tea? Holding hands with your beloved? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear. Wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well.

With love from my kitchen table,

Kaia