I have a love/hate relationship with exercise. When my alarm clock rings at 5:00 AM, I can't think of enough words to describe the depth of my hatred. Hatred for the alarm. Hatred for morning. Hatred for the extra helping of rice and gravy I ate the night before, necessitating the 5:00 alarm. As I struggle to swim up out of sleep, I repeatedly slap the snooze bar, knowing that with each desperate swing of my arm, I am coming closer and closer to the type of exercise I hate most: the type where I won't get a full workout in because I won't have enough time. This will prompt me to ask the constant question: was this workout really worth getting up for? If I only do 20 minutes of cardio, would I have felt better to just stay in bed?
The main reason why I struggle with exercise, I think, is because of the mixed messages I got about exercise as a kid. On the one hand, there was my dad: super-fit, super-tough, made-of-steel man. He had an exercise wheel that he would use each night. I remember watching him do fifty or more reps with that wheel and he would go all the way down until he was grazing the floor with his entire chest, then rise back up. This summer I tried to use the exercise wheel at the gym and either a) flopped directly to the floor like a huge, flailing halibut or b) could wheel myself no more than a few inches out for fear of falling like the already mentioned halibut. He did 100 push-ups every night. Real push-ups, using the kitchen chairs and my brother and I as ballast. He was like a rock. He repeatedly broke his ribs by slamming into the hatchcombing and jumped right back up, cussing and screaming, but he kept working nevertheless. He never even went to the doctor to get them checked. No time. Work to be done. Luckily, he was in such good physical shape, he could somehow keep working, and I mean physically labor. You can't hurt steel, apparently.
And then there was my mom. How many fad diets did she start and quit? How many times did she start some crazy kind of exercise plan and never follow through with it? How many times did she yo-yo back and forth between a healthy weight and one that was likely to take years off her life?
With these two role models, it's no wonder I struggle.
Questions for my writer's group:
I would like to zoom in on just one important idea in this memoir, kind of like Sandra Cisneros did in “Eleven.” I feel like I am talking about too many things in this piece. There is the part about my dad. Then there's the part about my mom. Then there's the thing about me exercising. What part is most compelling to you as a reader?
Should I just drop the idea of exercise altogether and just make this piece about my mom or about my dad?
I feel like I need help with my conclusion. How can I work on that?
It's way over 150 words. (Sorry!) What can I cut/save for later? (Maybe 150 words is a cruel limit...should we expand it??)
