What I want ... to want

I am sometimes struck by the desire to get fit, a desire that to be realized would require that I start running and stop eating dessert everyday. I am not opposed to running, but I'm also not any good at it. The only time in my life that I could run a mile was when Aron and I lived in an apartment with an exercise room that no one ever used and that had a broken treadmill in it. It wasn't non-functionally broken—it still served its primary purpose of being a machine to run on, but all of its digital trackings were way off. I didn't initially realize they were off. I trusted them when they indicated to me that I had run a mile in eight minutes, and I was so pleased with my eight minute mile that after a week of running it once a day I overcame my exercise-shyness (which is not shyness so much as shame over my unfitness and un-endurance) and decided to run publicly, among my peers at the UGA gym. That's where I realized, after being able to complete only a little more than half a mile in the time I "had been" running a full one, that the treadmill in the apartment complex's workout room was a broken deceiver. I would return to the UGA gym to use the elliptical and then become too discouraged to do even that after hearing it said by real exercisers that three miles on the elliptical—which I'm barely capable of—is a decidedly less rigorous exercise than a mere mile on the treadmill. I don't belong in the gym. I have nothing in common with exercisers. It shocks me that they listen to music through headphones while they're running. I don't, because I need to be able to aurally monitor my breathing and determine how close to dying I am. It would be neat, I sometimes think, to have a jogging stroller for me/Graham, but every time I see a child being pushed around by an athletic parent, the child's body is bent in a way that looks not only awkward but also painful. The baby-body within the jogging stroller is almost invariably shaped like a backwards, lowercase r, and the older child's body within the stroller takes the shape of a backwards, upside down, uppercase L. No matter the letter or the age on the child, a neck ache is sure to follow. Shyness and anxiety are the two main staples of my psyche, so not having a jogging stroller is not what keeps my goal of getting fit from becoming a reality. It's the fact that there isn't a single spot in the world that I can visit in workout shorts where at least one lightcone—the pervasive lightcone of the sun, the merging lightcones of headlights, the moon's comparatively kind lightcone—doesn't hit. Also, I have asthma.

Occasionally I look at my eyebrows in the mirror and want to pluck them or have them waxed. And if I got them waxed, I on these occasions think, I might as well also get a facial. I actually have had a facial before, and the experience was shockingly uncomfortable because it involved the removal of my shirt (the chest, evidently, belongs to the face), and I remember the beautician who administered my facial saying, "You can keep your bra on," with a tone that silently added, "if you're a total prude," which I was and remain. On the occasions that the reflected image of my eyebrows makes me think of the word wolf, which also become occasions where I notice oily constellations on my nose that make me think French fry-amoeba, I decide that if I were to pay someone to yank hair and squeeze grease from my face, I might as well also buy a massage. Sometimes I want to pay strangers to touch me so that I can stop staring at the messes on my face. Sometimes I want to pay someone to punch me in the neck.

At least twice a week I want a cigarette break.

But what I want most persistently is to begin each day by sitting next to Graham on his pillow-blanket pallet and reading a poem or two by both Adrienne Rich and William Carlos Williams. And this is in fact how our days begin, after I start the coffee and wash the dish off of which I ate dessert the night before while Graham, after a diaper change, gets a bit of exercise in his bouncy chair. This morning we read "The Sparrow" for the first time (and then a second and third). I love that poem:  it's both hilarious and ominous. Graham usually holds one of his cloth books while I read from a paper book, which I hope helps him to develop muscle memory for reading. I am deeply interested in the future and the health of his brain. I don't think having the hobby of reading is sufficient for smarts, but I think it's likelier to cultivate a love of learning than watching TV, which is another hobby I have. If I am going to impart a hobby onto Graham just by having that hobby in his presence, I'd much prefer it be the hobby of reading or cooking than watching teevee. Aron and I do enjoy watching TV (on the computer via Hulu and Netflix), but we only watch once Graham is asleep, and we keep the volume low enough so that Graham can't hear it, which is less for fear of waking him than for fear of him learning language that resembles television show dialogue, even though we primarily watch comedies and I certainly want him to develop a sense of humor—it should develop from his own sense of self, from things like the faint infant memory of hearing his mother say, "I want to be Graham's first girlfriend." (Aron's response:  "Oh, you're going to be one of those weird moms?") I do listen to episodes of "This American Life" with Graham, but because the narratives it presents are so varied I regard the radio program as expanding rather than training his personality.

These activities are actually as much about me as they are about Graham, maybe more, but hopefully not. They're about my most persistent non-parental desire—to be always absorbed by a poem or a story. Graham is involved by default in everything I am and everything I want, and it's fortunate that my love of stories and poems isn't a detriment to him the way smoking, which I only want to do infrequently, would be. Graham is so good for me, and I want to be good for him.

I'm in the middle of the novel Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle, who says in interviews that he spends the first four or five hours of each day writing. If I said I was jealous I should also be able to say that this is the way I formerly, before becoming a mother, began my days. I'm not jealous, and while I regret not having spent more of the free time I used to have in abundance on writing stories, the quality of a life that involves sharing my joy with Graham, by reading poems to him, will always be high. Being absorbed in poems and stories is the desire I desire. When I don't want to read, I want to want to read. Reading and writing are more pleasing than any other pleasures, and when the desire to read or write disappears it's like the arrow of life is gone. That's how serious it is.

So I'm really counting on Graham to be first my listener, then a reader himself, and finally a writer. Actually, all I require of Graham for now is that he naps long enough for me to write a poem or read a few chapters, a requirement with which he never fails to comply. And of course at some point he'll have to let me be his girlfriend. And I would love it if he wanted to play baseball. What I am trying to do is balance my own desire to read and write with my desire to do a bang-up job raising Graham, and I want him to be a part of everything that matters to me without making the mistake of pinning all my hopes on or burdening him with my dreams. I don't want to bore him, I don't want to burden him, and I don't want to leave him out. 

A definite merit of reading is that it's an inexpensive pastime, especially if you stick to novels written by Thomas Pynchon's sister Penny. Get it? Penny Pynchon.

JOKES!