January is a hectic month at the gym. I race over right after school drop-off, just to get a parking spot. The treadmills are often taken, and it may take a little muscle to get a bench. By mid-February things will have calmed down, and by April we’ll be back to “Cheers bar” days, just the usual old crew. That’s a relief, though I know that it’s not actually good. It reflects the reality that the January newbies rarely stick.
I get it. My own list of neglected “supposed tos” is pretty long. But there’s a reason why I’m one of the regulars. When friends chide me to take it a bit easier (“you look great, relax!”) I explain that it’s not about the mirror, my doctor, or FDA recommendations. “This is how I stay sane.”
They usually laugh, which is fine. But I’m not joking.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to get into fitness the way I did. My story might hold some broadly applicable lessons, though. Living in a female body is hard. The fertile years can be extremely hard. Just as an athlete or rescue worker must maintain the body that performs physiological feats, so do women—especially mothers—need to care about staying fit.
Why Don’t Traditionalists Promote Female Fitness?
Here is a question I have often pondered. Why is it that traditionalists, who generally view childbearing very positively, haven’t generally embraced female fitness with the same enthusiasm as maternity-skeptical leftists? If you see maternity as a neutral life-choice, then the urgency of staying fit might be less obvious for women. If we want young women to become mothers, we should care whether they’re adequately prepared for this physically demanding undertaking. On the ground though, liberal feminists tend to be much more excited about (literal) girl power.
Several explanations suggest themselves. Women’s sports have often been promoted as an egalitarian measure: girls should jump, run, lift, or play sports because boys do those things. That’s the kind of reasoning that tends to stir excitement in progressives and suspicion in traditionalists. Then there is the issue of protecting women. Traditionalists tend to see this as a strong moral imperative. If you regard childbearing as a natural and defining aspect of womanhood, then this makes sense, since maternity does make women more vulnerable and in need of support. In societies where hard labor is both common and necessary, relieving women of physically onerous duties is a serious social concern. Softball and soccer teams are one thing, but if slaving in the mines or factories is necessary to your economy, it’s definitely a kindness to spare the women. Even if it sometimes goes overboard, concern for feminine fragility could just be an unbalanced application of a chivalrous desire to extend needed protections to women.
I take those considerations seriously, but there can also be less admirable reasons for exaggerating female weakness. Weak and helpless women more readily gratify the male ego, and traditionalists are often attracted to the stable-seeming social arrangement wherein men serve as protectors and providers, while women exist in a protected domestic sphere. It’s easier to argue for that arrangement if we take women to be naturally dependent and weak. But whatever else we think of traditional social roles, we should at least remember this. It’s not actually good for women to be weak.
Sport is one area of life in which men (in general) have some ineliminable natural advantages. The female body can run, climb, swim, and lift heavy objects, but the male body does these things a bit better. This irritates egalitarians. Within more traditional circles, though, it may prompt an exaggerated emphasis on sport and athleticism as the man’s domain, which woman need not—and perhaps should not—enter.
Those inclinations can definitely work to the detriment of women.
The Raw Physicality of Maternity
What would my 30-year-old self have said, seeing me today in front of a mirror doing sets? She would surely be confused. In high school, I took a weight training course solely because I needed the credits. The class had three girls and roughly 30 boys, and I would typically show up for attendance and then sneak off to get tacos with my friends. I never even considered trying to pick up something heavy. To me at the time, it seemed that athleticism was the domain of children and men. I saw adult women doing aerobics sometimes, usually in an attempt to lose weight, but nobody’s mom ran marathons, and if there was a squat rack in a friend’s house, it was obviously Dad’s. I’m not looking to blame anyone for my own negligence here, but it is somewhat remarkable how I barreled into the life of open-to-life Catholic mom without reflecting at all on the physical demands.
I was aware, of course, that pregnancy and childbirth can be unpleasant and risky. But fertility was natural, right? I understood maternal commitment primarily in moral and spiritual terms, which meant that prayer and longsuffering seemed like the go-to coping strategies. Happily for me, I do seem to have been blessed with a fairly sturdy constitution, so I came through that first pregnancy in tolerably good shape, and likewise the second, third, and fourth. It wasn’t until the fifth one that I finally hit a wall.
What I learned over those years was that the entire maternal enterprise is saturated in raw physicality, from the baby bump to the bleeding, breastfeeding, slings, sleepless nights, McDonalds tube-climbing, and strollers piled with small humans. Low-level physical discomfort and relentless sensory overload become the norm.
In some ways, that physicality is beautiful. Physical touch, for babies and toddlers, is everything—the most potent expression of love. Indeed, the experience of nursing a baby infuses a level of meaning into embodiment that you never ever considered before. But with that sweetness comes an immense sense of responsibility. Being mom means living on a treadmill of menial tasks, while at the same time perpetually striving to be physically and emotionally present for everyone who needs you (which, in my case, was a lot of people). It’s sublime. It’s overwhelming. You feel grossly inadequate, but every day you get up and “just do it,” because you have to. You are the thin pink line between civilization and barbarism.
The Breaking Point
Here’s the odd thing about the day I had a breakdown. I really thought I was fine, up to the moment when I definitely wasn’t. I knew, of course, that the previous year had been stressful. My fifth pregnancy was the most complicated by far. The late stages were a blur of hospital appointments, ultrasounds, “non-stress tests,” and meticulous diets that left me perpetually weak and hungry. (I actually lost weight in the final month of that pregnancy.) The baby came, apparently healthy, but soon contracted an infection that had me sleeping on a recliner in Minnesota Children’s for several nights. It was the middle of a brutal winter. The world was awash in dangerous illnesses for which he could not yet be vaccinated. After returning from the hospital, we hardly left the house for the next few months.
People asked how I was holding up, and I said I was fine. Then, in March, we finally got a day with lovely spring weather. I was moving around the house with the baby tucked in one arm, gathering up my seeds and gardening things, thinking about better days ahead. I stepped out on my bedroom balcony to grab some pots that had been sitting there all winter. At that moment, I had a vivid, horrifying, skin-crawlingly realistic vision of myself flinging the baby off the balcony.
I stumbled back inside, trying to tell myself it was just a stray thought. But from that point, the flood gates seemed to open. I was plagued at all hours by a hideous torrent of intrusive thoughts, mostly involving me harming my children and particularly the baby. I felt powerless to end the waking nightmare. Prayer didn’t seem to help. I tried reasoning with myself, to no effect. Everything I had ever read or believed about demons played ghoulishly through my mind. It felt like something demons would do.
With the grisly thoughts came an awful awareness of how many times each day I was in a position to do severe harm. In my rational mind, I knew that I emphatically did not want to harm my kids. But how far did I trust my rational self? Suddenly, I was living in a world of horrors. Driving was terrifying. Chopping onions was terrifying. Every time I climbed the stairs to my third-floor bedroom, I felt the panic building in my chest. My entire life and personality seemed to have turned inside-out in a matter of days, repainted in macabre colors.
Years on, I have read a fair amount about postpartum OCD (which is probably the best clinical diagnosis for what I experienced), but I still can’t pretend to understand it. With this one dramatic exception, I have always been blessed with good mental health, but I’m aware that stories like this can have very ugly endings. Who can say what was in the realm of possibility in that dark moment? I’m still confounded by hard questions about brain chemistry, moral responsibility, and the mind-body relationship. I haven’t ruled out demons.
For all the dark mysteries of the human mind, though, I am sometimes inclined to view the whole thing through the simple lens of the weight room. If you keep adding plates to the barbell without proper training, you’re sure to fail out sooner or later. In a way, I think that’s what happened. That lift just got too heavy.
A Lifeline
“You know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go,” sings Paul Simon in the song “Gumboots.” “What are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know?”
First, I had to ask for help. Clearly I needed it. The hard thing here was that describing the horror in my head to another human being was almost the last thing I wanted to do. Not quite the last, though. I had a keen awareness now of even worse things. That is why, a couple of weeks after that initial incident, I found myself in conversation with a physician who, looking gravely over my recently completed psych evaluation, strongly advised me to try psychotropic medication. “This is pretty severe,” she said. “We need to treat it before it develops into postpartum psychosis.”
I began stammering. “Oh,” I said. “I mean… I’m not really arguing, we can discuss options, but.. well, I’m just saying… I don’t think I’m psychotic.”
“Oh no!” she said soothingly. “Not yet!”
It was the most curious sensation. A cold wave of terror crashed over me at the exact same moment that I felt a powerful impulse to laugh. Are you supposed to say that to people with pathological anxiety?
The drugs did help curb the acute crisis, and by summer I no longer felt trapped in a psychological hellscape. But I still felt severely diminished, like a shell of my former self. I yearned to turn a page, set new goals, find joy in the things I used to love. Realistically, just getting through the day still seemed hard. Fall came, and I did set one goal: I wanted to quit the medication. I’m very uncomfortable with mind-altering drugs, and I thought I was ready to manage without them. This turned out to be a transformative moment.
Turning the problem over in my back-from-the-brink mind, I reflected on how little I’d done over the years to take care of myself. Having five babies in ten years is physically punishing, and what plans had I ever made for coping with that? The fact that I’ve generally been low-drama and even-keeled probably contributed to the problem, because “it’s fine, I can handle it” is just what everyone (including me!) had come to expect. Now, though, it was time to pull it together. Raising five sons is a heavy lift, and I’d already wiped out once. Obviously, I needed to get stronger.
That started with kicking the drugs, which turned out to be somewhat challenging. No matter how slowly I tapered my dose, the side effects (colloquially known as “brain zaps”) quickly became debilitating. After a few unsuccessful attempts to quit, I found myself combing through internet forums in search of new ideas. Some people claimed that strenuous cardio exercise was helpful. I bought some running shoes.
It turned out this strategy worked—at least, kind of. It only gave me relief for about sixty to ninety minutes. So I turned to the obvious solution: I went running every sixty to ninety minutes. Fortunately for me, this was the spring of 2020, so my calendar was clear. I would wake up in the morning, immediately head out for a run, and then help my kids with their distance learning, breaking off every hour or so to pound my way around a mile-long bike trail near my house. In the evening, the kids and I played ball or took brisk walks together, which was enough to keep the brain zaps reasonably under control.
I remember those hours being genuinely blissful. It felt like such a gift to be there with my kids, moving and laughing together, drinking in the new leaves and the warm spring air. The world was coming alive, and so was I. Online, I saw people moaning about declining fitness, paralyzing anxiety, and insomnia, but I had never been less troubled by those things.
Within a month, I had tossed the drugs but not the running shoes. I had grown somewhat addicted to the runner’s high. Even beyond that, it definitely felt as though the exercise was keeping me balanced and sane. I’d finally found a lifeline out of that cloud of anxiety and gloom, and I had no intention of letting go. Relentless running tends to lead to injury without a balanced routine, though, so the following January I was one of the first through the doors when the gyms were finally permitted to reopen. I don’t think I fouled up anyone’s workout routines in my first month. The place was like a ghost town.
“You’re Always Dancing Now”
I’m aware that exercise still has, for me, some obsessive elements, like another compulsion to keep the demons at bay. I’ve considered, too, that the body eventually breaks down, such that I may over time need to cultivate some other sanity-preserving habits, or risk hitting another wall. I am a person of faith, and that plays into this story too, but that’s a subject for another essay. Check back in 20 years for an update on how it’s all going.
In the meanwhile, fitness wasn’t an arbitrary solution. It addressed a major piece of the problem, and it also yielded significant external rewards. As I gained more physical confidence, I branched out into all sorts of other activities: swimming, climbing, racquet sports, sailing with my husband, scuba diving with my son. Apparently it’s not too late! “You’re always dancing now,” one of my sons said awhile back, laughing at me. “It’s like you can’t even hear a song without dancing.” I guess he’s right. I hadn’t thought about it. I’m a lousy dancer really, but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I’m just grateful for this body, and for having worked out a way to live in it.
I think sometimes about the maladies to which women have supposedly been prone over the centuries. Hysterics! Nervous disorders! Get the smelling salts! Maybe in some ways we are “the weaker sex,” but how much of that is just a failure to believe that women, too, can be strong? In fact, we need to be. And that’s not just a metaphor, any more than labor pains, for a woman, are mere metaphor. Actual muscles may be part of the deal.
The baby in this story is now an earnest, wide-eyed kindergartener. Sometimes I look at him and feel a rush of gratitude for his life and the chance to be in it. I love all my children, but there’s an extra note of poignancy in the love we feel for those for whom we have truly suffered. I don’t remember crying during that period of acute crisis, but now I feel close to tears every time he passes some tiny milestone, writing his name or learning to roller skate. Motherhood is hard, but some things justify both suffering and risk. If I regret anything, it’s only that it took me so long to learn the importance of taking care of myself. If I’d started working out in my 20s instead of my 40s, this all might have gone a little easier.
Don’t get fit because you feel pressure to be sexy and thin. Don’t do it because your doctor is nagging you to drop a few pounds. Do it because life is better when we care for our bodies and enjoy them. Do it so you can be strong for the people who need you.
Come join my gym! The treadmills may be a little crowded, but we’ll make room for you.
