Wobbly

The goal of so many passionate fitness gurus is to strengthen the core. The core – that intricately designed conglomeration of essential anatomy, so taken for granted, so necessary to life-as-most-of-us-know-it. Strengthen your core and the rest will come: balance, muscle, endurance, posture, speed, even grace. Joseph Pilates, my favorite-in-particular fitness guru once said, “A man is as young as his spinal cord.” And while fitness pop culture, dietary fads, those eighteen billion best-butt-busting workouts published in every chick magazine known to woman, and all else (including pinterest pins) short of mountain climbing, usually make my cynical (do not read fat) self scoff with arrogant boredom, there is something about this core idea into which I am completely sold. Somehow it makes sense in a way that surpasses me, that feels ancient and honest. I’ve also seen it work – on myself in particular, which helps with the buy in. But this is not my testimonial to the Pilates method or the practice of working out your core – at least note in the anatomical sense. What I’ve been contemplating lately is my figurative core, which resides, I believe, in roughly the same region as my literal core, but plays a different, if related role in my life. And while both my cores have been sorely neglected of late, it is this other core – less definable, less distinguishable, that has really been troubling my soul.

As I watch my ninth graders stumble through the pitfalls of being – well – themselves, I often think about, and in all honesty, pass judgment on, their parents. There are a handful of students with parents who I know care because I have interacted with them myself, even if they sometimes care in ways that confuse me. There’s an even greater handful whose parents I know not the least bit about and so all the evidence I have is the student himself. (Do not ask me about the small, but infuriating, minority of parents who I have interacted with and know do not care; that is for another blog post that is likely to someday get me in a lot of trouble). Though, of course, I know it’s unfair to assume that the child is the mirror image of his parents’ parenting abilities, what I do know is that the child is a close reflection. This is not the first time I will admit that my own upbringing has left me very little room to fail and that any credit I take for any successes, great or small, in my own life, should be given back tenfold to my parents and my sister, without whom I would be a wretched semblance of myself or nothing at all.

Which is why I have been thinking lately about my core. You may already know that I was 22 when I had my first midlife crisis. But what I am only coming to find out this year is that I had this crisis some four years premature of actually growing up, which is quote phenomenal, but has led to no end of trouble. 

Because this year, the great, wide world, through the key hole of little Sacramento, has come knocking on my door – which has only very recently become only very partially my own actual door – and informed me that I have been welcomed (to use the term loosely) into the land of the adult, where employment (and unemployment), responsibility (particularly financially speaking), bills, and taking care of my own damn self are now very much my personal concern. I read a sign on Pinterest that said, “My friend told me I was delusional. I almost fell right off my unicorn.” My core, this past two years, but particularly these past few months, has been severely shaken, and I can tell you – as an avid unicorn rider -  that it certainly does feel like falling off.

Now, if I’m being really honest, I blame my parents. You could say for giving me the unicorn to begin with. There’s a line in an Alabama song that goes, “leaving home was the hardest thing we ever faced.” That has certainly been my experience. Because as I sit, even here, even now, in this dear apartment, surrounded by things I cherish, given to or instilled in me by people I cherish still more, I still find, amidst all this bounty and blessing, that I am struggling horribly with extricating my own core from the beautiful, sustaining, joyful tapestry of family and home that I have left behind. And lately, as my core finally begins to acknowledge that I am here and not there, and all that here and there implies, it finds itself (I find myself) bare and fragile and a little (and sometimes a lot) wobbly. Very, very wobbly.

So I’m working on strengthening my core. (Lord knows one of them needs some attention!) On figuring out how to reweave myself into the tapestry in a way that fits right now, today, here. So that I feel warm again, without feeling as though I am constantly grieving for the past. So that I feel me again, even when I can’t be surrounded by all the things that fit me best.

-R.E.A.