Rodney Yee makes me cry

For my birthday, I asked for a Rodney Yee yoga DVD. I know there are a bazillion yoga DVDs to choose from and that it probably doesn't matter whose DVD you have when you're just beginning, but let's face it - the guy is HOT.



Years ago, my friend Wendy and I used to meet up every Wednesday night for yoga night. We'd spend the first hour or so huffing and puffing our way through Rodney Yee's Flexibility VHS tape. The second hour was Recovery Hour which we spent on the couch watching John Cusack films and stuffing our faces with pizza. Or tacos. Whichever. We did fondue night once, too. It's obvious that we weren't in it for the reasons most people are in it for. We just wanted something fun to do and that's what we did.

This was before my Mommy Years. I recently picked up yoga again when I quit smoking last summer. I needed something to help pull the stress out of me once I noticed how the tensed-up muscles tightened until they came close to snapping. Kickboxing was too expensive and too physical. And since I have a bad back, I needed something that was soothing but that would kick my ass at the same time. This, technically, amounts to any activity requiring movement. So I chose yoga. And I chose Rodney. Because the man is delicious. Here, look again:



And then I got lazy for a few months. Until tonight.

Elle wanted to do some yoga with me. She's in gymnastics and can do all kinds of stretchy things with her young, limber body, but she'd like to be able to one day do the splits. I was in gymnastics once upon a time and would like to be able to one day touch my toes again without groaning. Same rainbow, different pot o' gold. I slid the new DVD in my laptop and placed it on the floor. Elle was all giggly because she's been wanting to do this yoga thing for quite some time. She liked the soothing water sounds and how Rodney Yee looks like our friend, Daniel. And she likes that Rodney Yee does his yoga at the beach.

And she likes how Mommy says, "What the shit is he doing!? I can't do that!", while grimacing because Mommy's hamstring just snapped in half and her face is turning purple because being in the downward dog position cuts off circulation to Mommy's head. Elle also thinks it's funny that I have to say "Oh my god!" every time I collapse onto the floor in a heap of sore muscles and oxygen deprivation because...well, yoga hurts when you haven't done a lick of exercise in...say, six months! After I found my way back up to a standing position, I decided I was tired of being laughed at and sent the kid to bed, where she continued to poke fun at me about how I was constantly falling over during the Centering chapter.

Believe it or not, after I read Elle her bedtime story, I came back and tried one more chapter. It was called Surrender and I honestly thought it would be the chapter during which I could be flat on my back on a mat and just do leg work, because that's easy! Man, was I wrong. At least, I think I was. The chapter started with him in some sideways pose with his legs facing one way, his chest facing the other, and his hand and face upward.

Ha! You're crazy. Eject.

My back is still tingly and my right leg is wobbly. But oxygen has found its way back to my brain. And Elle has finally stopped laughing at me.

Flunkies

The little Italian boy sat next to me at lunch everyday. I was the only American kid there and the only person in the entire building who spoke English, otherwise I would have been able to tell my preschool teachers why I cried every afternoon and wanted to go home to my mom.

Because my mom doesn't take her plastic lunchtime fork and jab it into my leg and drag it up and down until my tights are completely destroyed.

I didn't know my family was poor. I only knew my family couldn't afford to buy me a new pair of tights after every mid-afternoon assault. It was frustrating, being there in that school, with such wonderful, loving, dark-haired Italian women who obviously cared about me. It was frustrating because, even though I could point at things and demonstrate with my hands and tell a story with my body language and facial expressions, my teachers and I just couldn't talk to each other.

I eventually learned Italian and became quite fluent. I did so well in my language class, in fact, that my teacher selected me to learn American Sign Language, too. Boy, oh boy, did I ever think I was the bee's knees. Living in Italy came with some perks. The DoD school I attended even thought I was pretty damn special. They invited me to join the Talented and Gifted program. TAG, we called it. It was like being in a club. A special club.

I moved back to the states and had myself set up to test into the district's TAG program in my new school. Oh, wait until they hear my resume! I'll tell them about the time I visited a nursing home at Christmas time and sang "Buon Natale" at the top of my lungs while signing in ASL for those who couldn't hear me singing at the top of my lungs. They were probably the lucky ones that night.

To make a long story short, I failed. I failed the test. I wasn't considered Talented and Gifted enough for the United States. The cultural differences made no difference to them at all.

What cultural differences, exactly? Well, for example, school buses are blue and fire hydrants are brown. And cheese comes from goats. Right?

No. Not right!

This story reminds me of the time I took my daughter to a speech therapy consultation. She was three-years old at the time and it was in the middle of a scorching hot summer. To get a starting point to measure her developmental progress, the therapist showed her a series of pictures and asked her to name each one.

(picture of a dog) = Puppy!
(picture of an apple) = Apple!
(picture of a bed) = Night Night!

And so on...

(picture of a house) = House!
(picture of a book) = Story!
(picture of a cow) = Moo!

Until we hit a few roadblocks...

(picture of a knife) = ......uh, I can't play with those.
(picture of a winter coat) = ....Mommy, what is that?
(picture of mittens) = ....ugh, forget it.

Therapist: "You can't help her."
Me: "But she's never even seen one of those before. This is Florida."
Therapist (to Elle): "What do you wear when it's cold outside?"
Elle: "A sweater."
Me: "*snort* Well, Therapist, what did you expect? Good job, Elle. We're all done here."

Ha. Another Talented and Gifted flunkie is in our midst.

33

After dragging my bottom half out of bed this morning, I hit the snooze button to give myself twenty extra minutes and crawled back under the covers to stretch out my muscles in a spread-eagle sprawl very similar to the chalk outline of a dead body. You know, belly down with my face in one direction and one arm down my side with the other curved up close to my nose and a knee pulled up halfway into my chest cavity.

Before showering, I spent seven minutes plucking gray hairs out of my head, parting my hair and forcing it to go in unnatural directions just so I could catch a glimpse of any gray hairs that got away. There are always gray hairs that got away and this bothers me, but not as much as I used to think it would.

As I was showering (don't worry, we'll keep it clean...heh, clean...puns are fun), I considered shaving my legs but soon realized that nobody's feeling me up anyway. I also don't like the fact that I have a splotch of something big on the back of my left leg and people like to call it vericose veins. I don't like to call it that so I just call it my splotch. I've had it since before I was a teenager. I guess if I really looked at it closely, I could map all the cities of West Virginia with much geographical accuracy because it is such a weird shape, but really it's just a splotch.

After showering, I plucked my eyebrows and slathered my face with some expired Nivea anti-wrinkle cream, paying special attention to the crow's feet, my sun-damaged forehead, the new freckles on the bridge of my nose, my "parentheses" around my mouth, and the dry patches of skin that have become my cheeks. Okay, fine. I slapped that damn cream all over my face.

Since I quit smoking last year while I was a relative newbie to my dirty thirties, my ass has expanded and my tummy pudges out. My pants size has climbed from sparkly-butterflies-on-the-ass size 16 girls' to a whopping women's size 2. Because the weight gain is something I've welcomed, I usually rejoice in the need to buy underwear that fits me and makes me feel like that infamous line from Steel Magnolias wasn't captured on film just for me. C'mon, you know the one..."Looks like two pigs fightin' under a blanket!" Yep, that's the one.

My feet are so sore that I stick light-absorbency pantiliners in the soles for some cheap cushion. My body screams for coffee every morning because it cannot fall asleep every night. If I take a sip of water at 9:33pm, you can bet I'll be awake at 3:17am, muttering curses about my effing bladder while blindly groping my way to the bathroom with eyes half-open and hoping I'll be able to fall back asleep, if I can even remember how to get back to bed.

Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm turning thirty-three. Maybe the birthday fairy will gift me with a bone-shattering calcium deficiency or...oh, better yet...hot flashes. To be honest with you, though, I'm most looking forward to being spoiled by my daughter and eating carrot cake and not having to do laundry. I'm hoping to unwrap a Rodney Yee DVD so I can finally get my sore body into some kind of working order again. I'm even planning on splurging at Starbucks by upsizing to a grande...with 2 shots of espresso!

See, I'm not one of those women who complains about getting older because getting older upsets me. No, no, no. I have a pretty clear, although basic, understanding that the human body changes with age, both internally and externally, and there's not a damn thing we can do to stop it. Science provides us with the chemicals to cover it up - the Botox, the laser skin removal, the surgical remodeling of one's face - and that's fine for some people. Not for me, though. I'd rather be accepting of what's to come than add one more worry to my already stressful life.

When I wake up tomorrow, I'll have endured yet another year of triumphs and heartaches, of successes and failures, of embarrassments and admiration, of motherhood and friendships. My daughter will probably overwhelm me with hugs and kisses and "I love you, Mom", and present me with one handmade card after another (because, sometimes, she's just downright uncontrollably crafty). My co-workers will ask me if I have any special plans for the evening and I'll say, "Yep, I'm eating cake!" I'll open the birthday cards that arrived in the mail and share a dinner at home with my family.


It will be as simple as that. No tears. No depression. No anxieties about growing old and lonely. Besides, I only have one cat and I need to hold on to some emotional breakdown symptoms for when I turn 40.

I follow recipes. Sometimes.

I received this on the couch this morning:

All About My Mom

My mom is a exelent baker cause she sometimes follows recipes. An some just pop out of her mind. My mom is very very funny but I dont know where she gets this from? And especially she takes good care of me. An most of all moms birthday is only 3 more days is'nt that cool! huh? is it? Well mom I love you.

Love,
Elle

Awwww, shucks. I love you, too.

Differences

(Elle - the birthday girl!)

Finally, after two years, Elle got her ears pierced. For two years, I've had to listen to the "...because it's gonna hurt" or the "...just do it next year" and it really started to get to me. Each time Elle walked away and backed out was just another invitation for disappointment and frustration. She would kick herself and tell herself that if she had just done it, it would be over with already. Smart kid.

This afternoon, Elle climbed into that chair, chose her earrings (called Pink Ice for the October birthstone), and immediately froze. I could see by the expression on her face that she had already mentally checked out. If I tried to talk to her she would roll her eyes in my general direction and stare right through me. It was freaky.

She woke up as soon as the first post was thrust into her earlobe. Aaaaaah....tears!! Shit!!! What do I do? What do I doooo? The last time I made her go through a procedure against her own will was when she was catheterized by a group of nurses and it took five of them just to pin her down! (Elle was three years old but she has the strength of a pissed-off pitbull terrier. And, apparently, the memory of an elephant. She still brings up that incident in the hospital.) So I regrouped and looked Elle straight in the eyes and said, "Well, now you have to do the other one or you'll just look ridiculous!"

She took a deep breath and kind of smarted off to me. "Fine! I just want to get this over with!" Yes, my threats of social awkwardness worked! Way to go, Mom. I patted myself on the back and admired my beautiful, evenly pierced daughter.

After that traumatic experience, I bought myself an iced hazelnut latte and told Elle about the time my parents tricked me into getting my ears pierced. I was five years old and hardly a girly girl. And I screamed. Man, did I scream! And my parents kept telling me that I looked like such a pretty little girl because of my new earrings and I wanted to punch them because I didn't want to be a pretty little girl!!

That's one of the differences between Elle and me. That she does want to be a pretty little girl. And she is. Oh, she is!