Flabulous
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 20, 1996
TWENTY days after making that new year's resolution, the truth is starting to sink in. And it is this: I don't know how to get any more exercise. Something has happened since I had children: I don't exercise, and I don't even remember how to go about it.
Still, I did try to go for a jog the other night. Really. I put on some shorts and a baggy T-shirt and ventured out on to the streets at 10 pm, after the children were in bed. I made efforts to remember my joggers' etiquette from a decade ago. (There have always been unwritten rules about how to pass other joggers: your back should straighten, you should take pains to make your gasps for air sound like controlled breathing, and your eyes must never meet those of the other jogger until at least the third circuit.)
But jogging was not the same as it used to be. Part of the problem was physical, but a lot of it was psychological.
There were no other joggers around on the quiet suburban streets. Presumably they were all inside watching TV. This is a hard time of year to act on get-fit resolutions: there is too much good sport on TV.
The only people I encountered in half an hour were a couple walking their dog who looked at me as though I were an escaped prisoner, and a couple of teenage youths in a beaten-up Valiant who yelled some incomprehensible insult. Security lights went on up and down the streets as I trotted by; dogs barked vigorously behind wooden fences.
Out in the suburbs, it seems, no-one ventures out late except dog-walkers and burglars. Perhaps that is why all the lockedup dogs got so excited when I panted by: they thought that anyone out at that time of night was either going to take them for a stroll or rob their houses.
All in all, late-night jogging was a depressing and isolating experience. So now I am all out of ideas. Would someone please tell me how a working mother can possibly stay fit?
Out there right now, there are thousands of women who are trying to fit the square peg of their new year's resolution into the round hole of their daily routine. How is the working mother meant to maintain muscle tone in between getting the kids up, making three different breakfasts, ironing school uniforms, washing up, doing some housework, sitting at a desk all day, rushing home, surviving the pre-bedtime rat hour, reading stories, preparing dinner and maintaining some sort of acquaintance with her spouse?
Husbands give working wives exciting lingerie for Christmas and hint that we could afford to lose a few pounds. Well, yes, but how?
Feminism has brought us this far but has yet to address the problem of when the working mother is supposed to exercise. Yes, we have careers, challenges, intellectual stimulation (ha!). What we don't have is afternoon tennis and yoga classes. They are the preserve of the stay-at-home mother or the selfish single.
Now I know why so many size-10 women come back from maternity leave as size-14s. There is something about having children that puts on weight. And there is something about working that puts on weight. The two together are fatal.
Don't suggest jogging at lunchtime. Or if you do, let me know how anyone can put on a pair of shorts and get into an office lift. It would be easier to cross the Himalayas in winter, naked. No-one with the merest illusion of a career path could bare her cellulite in that way, let alone risk being seen pounding George Street or the Botanic Gardens.
Gym classes would seem to be the answer. But only the other day I phoned a city gym to investigate and was told I would require a fitness assessment. Fitness assessment? After all this time, I would have to go on an exercise drive just to pass a fitness assessment. And if they think I am going to step on a set of scales in front of a witness, they have another think coming ...
Exercising at weekends is, of course, impossible. Have you ever tried to persuade a five-year-old to go for a jog? And even if you succeed, it is no fun asking your child to stop and wait for you to catch up. No, children have to respect mothers - and they are not going to do that if they see you exercising.
That rules out the home exercise options such as exercise bikes, walking machines or fitness videos. Anyway, I have never seen a fitness tape which didn't look ridiculous after the third showing. With extraordinarily bad timing, I was given Cher's fitness tape just as I announced my last pregnancy. It is hard to exercise to something which you have spent nine months watching for sheer entertainment value: in the end, I concluded that those outfits she wore were actually tattooed on.
So that's it. There seems to be nothing working mothers can do, short of lobbying for legislation to make it mandatory for employers to establish private, women-only gyms right there in the office (with no fitness assessments required).
But as that is unlikely to happen, I have instead decided to subscribe to the theory that each of us is allocated only so many heartbeats in a lifetime, and that exercise is nothing but a waste of valuable heartbeats.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald