by Zibby Owens
Every day since, I am so glad I didn’t quit.
Later, when I was in college at Duke, I got hurt again after running long distances without proper preparation. I had pulled my iliotibial band and had micro tears in my hamstring, so I took up swimming to help my recovery. One day at the pool, I came across a few Duke football and basketball players in the lane next to me. They were swimming, but also mixing it up by running in the swim lane, doing jumping jacks, treading water while playing catch, and doing some funny-looking dance moves.
I had witnessed eighty-year-olds in 1930s-style swim caps doing gentle water aerobics before, but seeing these muscular Duke athletes in action? That was a game changer for me.
For the next few weeks, I headed to the pool to study the athletes’ movements. I created routines by incorporating their moves with my own, mimicking everything from spinning to recumbent biking, cross-country skiing, jumping rope, kickboxing, dancing, and sprints. After each session, I’d come out of the water completely exhausted and actually happier than I used to get after a long-distance run. I loved seeing the muscle tone I was developing everywhere and feeling the endorphin high without the pain of high-impact aerobics, and as much as I missed being outside in nature, being in the water cleared my head in the same way.
I had witnessed eighty-year-olds in 1930s-style swim caps doing gentle water aerobics before, but seeing these muscular Duke athletes in action? That was a game changer for me.
Friends and family members who at first thought I was crazy to go off and hang out in a freezing lake or random pool soon began to join me. In the past twenty years, I am proud to say I have turned many skeptics into aqua jogging converts. I’ve taught friends of all kinds to aqua jog; anyone bored with their regular gym routine or trying to avoid high-impact aerobics due to pregnancy or injury is a perfect candidate for aqua jogging. I’ve helped my parents save time and pain by curating customized low-impact aqua routines for them; on vacations, local lifeguards and hotel guests have joined me in the sea to try a new workout. Even my four-year-old twins, Kingsley Rainbow and Cooper Blue, have learned to feel comfortable in the water by mimicking some of Mommy’s aqua moves!
Aqua jogging has helped me balance my love of sweets and my work at the Candy Bar with my desire to stay fit, but I also love the built-in opportunity to multitask by being social and helping others while I work out. I of course never enjoyed being injured (who does?), but looking back, I’m able to appreciate the life lessons that came as a result of my injuries. I have turned to aqua jogging in the broiling hot summers, in the freezing winter, and when traveling for work; I simply find the nearest body of water—pool, ocean, lake, or lagoon—and I dive right in.
Dylan Lauren is the CEO and founder of Dylan’s Candy Bar, the candy emporium and lifestyle brand. She is the author of Dylan’s Candy Bar: Unwrap Your Sweet Life.
Breaking Up with My Kids
RACHEL LEVY LESSER
It’s not them, it’s me.
A few months ago, I was sitting on the cold, hard bleachers at my son’s high school basketball game, when I found myself focused less on the game being played in front of me and more on the home team’s bench. I was watching my son, who had been sitting there for a while. It seemed to me that he had spent a significantly larger portion of the game sitting on that bench than he had spent actually playing on the court.
He didn’t look thrilled.
He looked kind of miserable.
I was looking for some sort of reassurance from my husband—that the coach would put our son back in the game soon and a smile would return to his face—when my aunt, who had come along with my uncle to watch the game, leaned in toward my left ear and said softly but firmly, “Sometimes you have to divorce yourself from kids—even for just a little while.”
I nodded and looked back down toward the court, pretending to watch the game, which my son was not currently any part of, wondering what the hell my aunt was talking about.
Over the course of the past sixteen years, my aunt has become like a surrogate mother to me, having lost my own mom around the time my son was born. I trusted her wisdom. So, over coffee a couple of weeks later, I inquired about this divorcing yourself from your kids advice.
Sometimes you have to divorce yourself from kids—even for just a little while.
My aunt explained to me that as her kids got older—they are now fully grown with children of their own—she found she sometimes had to separate herself from them when they were going through a particularly tough time. I might want to do the same, she suggested, after witnessing me look more upset about my son not getting ample playing time than he did. This kind of distance would help both me and my kids, she explained.
This advice was completely counterintuitive to me. When my kids were struggling with something, I would talk to them about what was going on, about what was bothering them, and then I’d offer suggestions. I wanted to help make things better in any and every way that I possibly could. This is my job, after all, and I pride myself on being pretty good at it.
Or so I thought.
This was, incidentally, the same aunt who had once described to me what being a mom felt like: She said it was like going out into the world every day, business as usual, except your own heart is off walking around somewhere else, outside of your body. That had made perfect sense to me. On the night of the game, my heart was a sad sixteen-year-old boy, sitting on the bench of a high school basketball court. My heart has also been, at times, a fourteen-year-old girl in a seemingly chronic bad mood, facing ever-fluctuating hormones.
It hurts to have my heart walking around outside of my body.
Perhaps, then, it was time for me to divorce my kids? I told my aunt I’d consider it. We could just take a little break (like Ross and Rachel in Friends) and then we could get back together—just like everyone knew those characters inevitably would.
My breakup with my kids was hard, which shouldn’t have come as such a shock to me; I’m not good at breakups! I’ve been in a relationship with the same hairdresser for more than twenty years. I’m still in the process of getting over a few ancient boyfriend breakups, and I can’t even think about that one time I had to break up with a girlfriend.
The more they could see me not getting so upset, so involved, so invested in their problems and in things not always going their way, the more weight was lifted from their shoulders.
One night, I forced myself to walk out of our family room, leaving my son to sulk alone on the couch in the dark after an especially long day. When my daughter launched into a laundry list of complaints about schoolwork another evening, I didn’t take the bait. I told her it sounded like a lot, but I knew she could handle it—and that she had no choice but to handle it. Then, I went into the other room to do my own work. It was difficult to do but, surprisingly, my heart didn’t hurt quite as much as I thought it would.
Eventually, I came to understand what my aunt meant about these little breakups being better for my kids, too. The more they could see me not getting so upset, so involved, so invested in their problems and in things not always going their way, the more weight was lifted from their shoulders. I actually remembered a few times in the past when they had tried to make me feel better about my worrying about them! I definitely didn’t want to continue down that path.
So, I continue to divorce my kids every once in a while. I’m not even sure they’re aware of it when we’re on these breaks, but that’s okay. I know it. And I know that it’s good for all of us. I also know that we will inevitably get back together at some point, and we do. That’s always my favorite part.
Rachel Levy Lesser is the author of Life’s Accessories: A Memoir (and Fashion Guide) and several other books.
I Finally Learned to Dance Like Nobody’s Watching
COURTNEY MAUM
After birthing a child, my body found new ways to move.
My first attempt at public dance was at a surprise party for my thirteenth birthday. The event was a
big deal: I went to an all-girls’ school, and the party was a coed affair with imported boys. My mother took camcorder footage of me attempting to find “The Rhythm of the Night,” and shifting into moroseness when nobody wanted to slow dance to “Nothing Compares to You.” Watching the tape afterward, I zeroed in on my body—which had developed more quickly than my classmates’—bopping in a crowd of khaki pants and ponytails. I looked jumbly and uncomfortable. I was horrified.
Over the next few years, I braved a variety of athletic pursuits but dance wasn’t one of them. My attempts at rhythmic movement lived and died within that fête. Though I certainly became more comfortable with my body as I aged, I had absolutely no desire to shake my frame around. In my teens and in my twenties, I felt discombobulated and ungainly, more gesundheit than gazelle.
It wasn’t until I was pregnant that I got the hang of my own shape. I’d been doing yoga for years like a good girl from Connecticut, and one day while in triangle pose my baby kicked me into an important realization: I did not like yoga. I was bored out of my skull with yoga. I suddenly realized that during this time of profound stillness and incubation, I wanted—and needed—to move the hell around.
In my second trimester, I put on big-beat music like Major Lazer and the French electronic artist Sophie, and I popped and locked and posed. After years of resenting my curves, I’d finally figured out what to do: I could drop it to the ground. I could drop it like it was hot. I got harder, faster, stronger to the music of Daft Punk.
It wasn’t until I was pregnant that I got the hang of my own shape.
Of the many gifts that motherhood can bring, one (for me, at least) was the cessation of caring what people thought about my body. All of my muscles and organs and bones had worked together to birth my daughter, and I wanted to celebrate our hard work. So I kept on dancing. I put on louder music and danced with my girl in her baby carrier all around the living room. When she developed sea legs, we hung a Jolly Jumper from the ceiling so that we could bounce together. The neighbors could see us waltzing from the window, the postman found me sweaty whenever he dropped a package off. But I wasn’t embarrassed to move in public any longer—my mother body brought me joy. In addition to the mounting pride I felt, my actual structure got better after childbirth, too. My body grew longer and more supple, stretchy and more languorous, like a house finally settling into the ground on which it’s built. Episiotomy be damned, I could touch my toes from a seated position. I could do a pirouette and land in fourth position; my daughter was my spot.
My love affair with movement flourished as my child crawled from infancy to toddlerhood. I signed up for the community classes offered by Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, a seasonal opportunity that allows plebeians like me to join professional dancers in their morning warm-ups. There was only about ten minutes of chaste stretching before we were ordered to leap and fall and tumble (elegantly) across the ground. This exercise—which took place in front of actual professionals, mind you—would have been my idea of hell when I was younger, but something magnificent happened as I rolled across the freezing floor: because I didn’t care if anyone was watching me, nobody did.
Of the many gifts that motherhood can bring, one . . . was the cessation of caring what people thought about my body.
In my experiments with public dance classes, this lesson has been repeated for me on a larger scale. Being comfortable in your body is a gift, of course, but it’s also a gift for others. When you spend time around people who actually like themselves, you can’t help but be tempted to accept yourself more, too. In the years since Jacob’s Pillow, I’ve tried everything on the menu in our Massachusetts corner: tango, belly dancing, hip hop, ballet, modern dance, online Masala Bhangra videos, even contra dance. When I’m on book tour, my Ballet Beautiful subscription is the first thing I pack, moving along to the founder’s port de bras, attitudes, and demi plies via video in my hotel room. To the endless delight of my daughter, I’m the only parent who appears in the back of the little Zoom square during her online ballet classes. I figure if she’s going to spend forty-five minutes sashaying around our bedroom, why can’t I?
The weather has been bad in our Northeast corner during COVID-19: cold and gray and rainy, the kind of damp that makes you want to binge-watch Ozark instead of going for a walk. And so I turn to dance to shake my fear and sadness out. My husband joins us in our impromptu dance parties in the living room; we let our daughter jump from couch to couch. We can’t travel, we can’t plan, we can’t go to the town lake. But inside of our houses, we’re still called to move.
Courtney Maum is the author of multiple books including the novels Touch and Costalegre and the nonfiction guide Before and After the Book Deal.
Racing against the Coronavirus: How Working Out Is Keeping Me Sane
ZIBBY OWENS
I need to work out.
I’d been comfortably ignoring this truth while managing my four kids’ logistical mayhem and building my business. But these uncertain and terrifying times have shown me how much I depend on it.
Emotionally. Physically.
Several weeks ago, as news of the coronavirus’s inevitable arrival in the United States seeped into my consciousness, I started to panic. This wasn’t a test. This wasn’t a movie. It was coming. And I needed to plan. To protect my kids.
To take cover.
At first I was dealing with mundane things like rearranging plans for spring break and canceling flights. I quickly moved into preparing for all the kids’ schools to be shut for months. Next thing I knew, hospitals up the street were considering building tents to prepare for the onslaught of patients. (I still can’t believe this is currently in place.)
Was this actually happening? I thought that in this hyper-speed day and age, we were impervious to these types of horror-story afflictions.
Oh, how wrong I was.
I thought that in this hyper-speed day and age, we were impervious to these types of horror-story afflictions.
As I raced around the apartment packing up the kids, shutting down my podcast, trying to find the birth certificates, my divorce agreement, all of our passports, my sentimental jewelry, I felt hysteria overtaking me. I was shaking. Quaking. Crying. Although even in my panic I knew how fortunate I was to be able to leave New York City when others couldn’t.
That age-old fight-or-flight instinct took hold: I had to run.
Right then.
Urgently.
As a recreational jogger once or twice a month, I found this intense urge curious and unexpected.
But I listened to my body. I stopped packing, changed into my workout clothes—which, if I’m being honest, had gotten a little tight—and descended down into my building’s basement gym.
A typical “workout” for me involved reading on the elliptical machine for thirty minutes, barely breaking a sweat. This time, I blasted music in my headphones, cranked up the speed on the treadmill and sprinted. My legs spun, my arms pumped, and I zoomed. (Back when “zoom” meant to go fast, not to communicate with the outside world.)
The music blaring was equally therapeutic. The lyrics took on new meaning, like in Jess Glynne’s “Hold My Hand”: “Tryna find a moment where I can find release.”
The kids’ Frozen 2 soundtrack seemed wise and prophetic, especially the song, “Into the Unknown”: “Every day’s a little harder as I feel your power grow.”
That first day I only ran for seventeen minutes until my older daughter came down to the gym asking me to help her find her homework. But it was enough. My face was almost purple with exertion, my heart was pumping, and I felt suddenly free. Uplifted. Empowered.
I did it again the next day. And the next. Until the car groaned under our heavy load and we headed out of town to hide out for the foreseeable future.
I’ve kept up the running. Even just twenty minutes a day is enough for me to emotionally reset, to find a slice of calm in the chaos, to re-center me so I can parent more effectively. I’ve gone running outs
ide on the squishy grass as the last drops of rain splattered down. I’ve done online workout videos with the kids, dancing to Kidz Bop.
Every day, a little something.
All I can do is keep my head down, try to find meaning in the world by helping others, particularly those in the literary community, and pray.
This time is simply terrifying. My natural inclination to plan has been thwarted. I can’t see past this day, this hour. If I peer out at what’s coming, I panic. Will I get sick? Will my parents be okay? What about everyone else I love and care about? How will everyone in the country be able to eat and pay the rent if no businesses are open and no services can be provided? What will happen as a result of millions of people essentially being imprisoned in their own homes with no release date in sight?
I don’t know the answers to these questions.
I can’t know.
All I can do is keep my head down, try to find meaning in the world by helping others, particularly those in the literary community, and pray. One hour at a time.
Moving my body is keeping me sane. So I’ll keep squeezing into my sports bra and lacing up my sneakers as we all weather this storm together.
Minute by minute. Mile by mile.
Into the unknown.
Zibby Owens is a writer and mother of four in New York City. She is a literary advocate and the creator and host of the award-winning literary podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. She runs a literary salon with author events, a virtual book club, and a daily Z-IGTV live author interview series.
How a Failed Relationship Made Me a Runner
JILL SANTOPOLO
My ex taught me how to run.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I learned how to run when I was a kid, sprinting—down the field in soccer games or racing a few quick steps before turning a round-off into a back-handspring in gymnastics. But he taught me how to be a runner. He taught me endurance, how to race, and what it means to keep going when you think your body is ready to give out.
