This morning I made the best waffles I have ever tasted.
I often make waffles for my kids for breakfast, especially when I have berries and whipped cream on hand. And of course, as the cook, it my duty to taste them to make sure they are delicious. I am of the opinion that if you add enough butter and warm maple syrup to anything, including cardboard, it will taste delicious, but this morning’s waffles, even without butter and syrup, got an A+.
This is a huge achievement for me as cooking is not one of my talents, but with quarantine happening, I have been cooking very elaborate meals, and some are even edible!
Another benefit of quarantine is that I am exercising a lot more. Before quarantine, I would go to yoga here and there, Pilates once a week, or dance around my house, but now I take frequent “jogs”, meaning I put on my favorite music and plod along like an old Clydesdale, slow and steady, but with a jaunty high step.
When my teens are with me, they beg me to stop. They say my high-stepping slow pace is embarrassing, even though there are no other people around to observe said high-stepping. I now have answers to unanswerable questions like: “If a tree falls in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound?” Yes! “If a parent high-steps around their neighborhood when there’s no one around, do their teens feel embarrassed?” Yes.
So, another quarantine activity that I have started is what I call “mind-wanders”. These are the delightful new activities of worrying about things that will most likely NOT happen, but might someday. Someone else might call these thoughts ANXIETY, like Claire Bidwell Smith, who wrote the book I am currently reading called “Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief”. Claire is a renowned grief therapist, and her book caught my eye when she wrote about the physiological panic attacks that can happen with grief. I often get panic attacks, and they are most unpleasant, in fact, one might say they are downright scary when your heart starts pounding and suddenly you can’t breathe and you have to pull over your car to get out until your breathing goes back to normal. But I don’t call it anxiety because I don’t like labels. She says anxiety, I say “mind-wanders”.
As a new divorcee (three months!) in the middle of a pandemic, my latest worry is that my ex-husband will bring one of his new spring chicken paramours to my son’s 8th grade graduation.
Now, you might say:
You’re worrying about 8th grade graduation? But your son is in 7th grade.
Yes, I know, he will be in 8th grade next year.
But that event is more than a year away.
Yes, I know.
Who even knows what will be happening with graduations a year from now with quarantining and virus mania?
Exactly! But I need to start jogging and doing crunches JUST IN CASE my ex decides to bring a paramour to a POSSIBLE graduation next year or the year after or whenever!
I know, this sounds crazy, but try telling that to my mind. It won’t listen.
And I guess motivation is always a good thing, at least it’s getting me off my very cozy couch and out into the world to see the stunning flowers and breathe the fresh air with the added bonus of working my heart, getting my blood flowing, lifting my spirits and maybe even my butt–I see no downside.
Except for the mental spiral that is hard to stop.
It’s kind of like when my sisters are coming to visit me and all of a sudden I start doing crunches so my stomach will be flatter than theirs when they arrive. I take a night off of crunching on buttered popcorn and instead crunch my abs, imagining how they will coo, “Your stomach is so flat, you bee-otch! What are you doing?”
I will giggle to myself and shrug and say, “Oh nothing, this is just the way I am! Fast metabolism I guess.”
(My sisters call each other “Bee-otch” as a term of rebellious affection–I don’t think it’s a word, but at this point, I’ll take the affection, any affection really.)
I play out this fantasy in my mind, but the problem is, I start doing crunches the NIGHT BEFORE they arrive, therefore my stomach is NOT FLAT when I pick them up from the airport, but theirs usually are because they actually exercise regularly and don’t start the night before.
I can trace this behavior back to my teenage years, when I decided to try out for my high school gymnastic team. I put on some sporty shorts and lunged my way upstairs to the kitchen. My Dad said, “Where are you going?” I said, “The gym. I’m trying out for the gymnastics team.” My Mom said, “When are the tryouts?” I mumbled, “Tomorrow,” as I lunged out the door to the sound of their laughter.
I went to the recreation center down the street that evening and lifted some barbells, did a few handstands, and stretched my splits. I thought, “I can do splits, backbends, walkovers and even a handspring on occasion without falling on my head. I’ll be shocked if I don’t make it.”
The next morning I went to tryouts. The coaches were surprised to see me there since I was the girl who always brought a forged note from her parents excusing her from PE for various reasons like mysterious sprains or internal injuries invisible to the naked eye.
The coaches had me do a somersault on the beam. I fell off. They had me do a leap on the beam. I fell off. They had me do the hardest trick of all—a back walkover on the high beam. I stood there on that high beam in my sporty shorts, one toe pointed in the air, both arms straight up, praying I wouldn’t miss and end up in traction for a year. I remembered my old gymnastic teachers’ words, “Back walkovers on the beam are easier than front walkovers because when going backwards, your arms are in a straight line from your legs. It’s actually really hard to miss the beam in a back walkover.” I prayed this was true, and with great bravado given to me by my sporty shorts which held some kind of mystical power to make me feel athletic, I went for it.
I went for it and I stayed on the freaking beam, cheering for myself when I didn’t fall off, well, cheering in my mind because I didn’t want to act too cocky. I acted like I did walkovers on high beams a hundred times a day. I dusted off my hands and said what next? They asked to see a round-off-back-handspring, which I had bragged I could do, even though I couldn’t. But again, my gymnastic teacher always said it was psychological. You just have to go for it and think “STRONG”. Now in hindsight, I have to say he left out a little something, like I would also need to have the skills for the trick, a little something called arm strength and leg strength and flexibility. But I went for it, and my arms collapsed, and I did not end up in traction, but I did end up hurting my neck and maybe spraining my ankle. And of course I didn’t make the team.
Now, you have to understand that when I heard my old gymnastic teacher’s voice in my head, it echoed like the 1975 tv show Kung Fu. If you aren’t lucky enough to have been exposed to this show, Wikipedia describes is as an “American action-adventure martial arts western drama”, which could be a way to describe my entire high school experience. In the show, blind Master Po relays his wisdom to his young student, whom he calls “Grasshopper”.
I don’t know why I listened to my gym teacher with his red hair cut in a buzz cut, complimented by his red military moustache and legs paler than a sheet of paper in his own very short white sporty shorts. I probably shouldn’t have been watching so many King Fu episodes, which my Dad loved. He had an endless cache of jokes involving calling us kids “Grasshopper”, like “Grasshopper, come eat your dinner”. “Grasshopper, put on our pajamas and go to bed.” Now that I think about it, I don’t know why we laughed so hard when he started his “Grasshopper” jokes. In any case, the words of my gymnastic coach echoed in my mind like the words of Grasshopper’s teacher.
But back to the action-adventure drama that was my high school experience. I also tried out for the dance team, the cheerleading team, and even the pep squad and made all of them!!
Just kidding.
I made none of them.
I DID make the tennis team where I played in the #10 spot out of ten girls, and most likely, only ten tried out. I DID get into the chess club, even though I didn’t know how to play chess, and I do remember feeling like a graceful high-stepping circus pony stumbling into a pride of wild African Chess lions when I walked into that room. These lions looked less like lions and more like skinny nerdy boys who may or may not have every talked to a girl before.
And to be fair to my horrible high school list of rejections, my goal in trying out for all these teams was not to be on the teams. I just wanted to have my photo in the yearbook more than once. Why? Who knows what I was thinking? I was probably “mind-wandering” and imagining myself in forty years as a sad loner who could sit in the gutter with a tattered boa and a bottle of vodka and reassure herself she wasn’t always a lonely hobo, she once was so wonderful she had not one, but three photos in her high school yearbook. Ironically, I have no idea where my yearbooks even are, or if I even ever had one. (I’m probably using the word “ironically” wrong as my ex-husband liked to point out to me every time I said it, but again, who cares?)
When I got rejected from songleading, I came home in my new bright yellow sporty shorts, and my Mom said, “How did it go?” I burst into tears and she hugged me saying, “Oh Marci, I think you need to start working out for these things earlier than the night before.”
She was right.
I have finally started listening to my mother, which is why I’m starting my crunches now, during quarantine, just in case I have to meet one of my ex’s paramours in the far future, hopefully the very very far future I call “NEVER”. This is one of those parts of divorce that you never hear about and can’t really understand until you go through it—having to interact with the person who betrayed you, who, if there was any justice in the world, you would be seeking a “Count of Monte Cristo” level of revenge on, or enlisting the help of Don Corleone on his daughter’s wedding day, instead of smiling and laughing and tossing your hair with him as you sit with him and his new love to cheer on your beloved child together.
I can’t explain it, but it feels like a bit like this: The Creature of the Black Lagoon has ripped your heart out and thrown it on the ground and stomped on it, then has slimed your children over and over again, and you have spent years holding your children in the middle of the night, rebuilding them and your heart, and now some time has passed and post-divorce society demands that you sit down and have tea with the Creature, even though you will be covered in black slime afterwards.
Don’t you think you would feel better seeing the creature if you feel “strong” which is code word for “have a stomach so flat and legs so toned you can rock a string bikini in your 50’s?”
And then I think, can anyone rock a bikini or a speedo in their 50’s? I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s a contest I don’t want to judge, even though I highly encourage people to wave their freak flags or tiny swimsuits high. I guess at this point, who cares? I’m half a century old! I have two beautiful children! My rocking body has gone the way of the dinosaurs! Time to cultivate my mind and soul, so people will say, what a gorgeous mind that woman has! And a hot soul! Such sizzling kindness! And so hilarious!
But then I see Shakira and J. Lo. and my pro-fitness sister-in-law, Nicole, and I think, damn it!
They are middle aged Moms that can do the splits on a pole and rock a leotard! (AM I showing my age? Does anyone use the word “leotard” anymore?)
I really have no excuse, not pregnancies, not middle age.
If they can do it, so can I!
I know, I know! They defy science, age, culture, the world!
But they inspire me too, and I think if they can do it, I can do it!
All this talk of toned bodies is making me look sadly at the pool of syrup and dash of whipped cream left behind on my waffle plate. I had planned to finish it off by mopping it up with my son’s remaining waffles. But I’m SURE J. Lo, Shakira and Nicole would just walk away and go eat a carrot and do some pullups on a nearby tree.
But it seems wrong to waste something as valuable as Vermont maple syrup which costs nearly the same as a bar of gold. And the whipped cream is organic, which is code for “healthy”.
But I swear on my life, it will be a sad day when I choose to eat carrots over waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Because as Mae West so eloquently said, “The only carrots I care about are the carats in a diamond.” Amen Mae. But even better than diamonds?
Whipped cream and strawberries on a hot buttered waffle smothered in warm maple syrup.
