No, this is not a post on hot flashes or night sweats, a common experience of a second life. It has nothing to do with menopause at all. It has to do with exercising. Wait, come back. If you’re not, you know you should, and if you are, you need to be sure you are benefiting from the effort. And sweating tells us that we are. Our bodies are like cars; they can overheat and shut down. Sweating is the coolant that keeps us going and that lost coolant has to be replaced, which is why we take water bottles with us to our workouts. (For more detail, go to Simple Fitness Solutions.) Sweating is a gauge I now use to insure I am exercising enough and properly.
So the ways I sweat the most and in order of wetness are:
As is often the case, I am a living statistic of my generation. This time I embody the parent whose beautifully educated child beaten down by an unforgiving job market must return home to heal and regroup. I have another child too at grad school arming herself with more degrees--this time vocational--and racking up loan money she'll have to repay when--and if--she gets a job in her new field. But that's another statistic.
Is it any wonder then I sat out Mother's Day in the country alone? By choice, I'll add. Our little family of three needed the space to recharge. I did so by sitting on my Havana day bed in the garden peacefully finishing The Newlyweds. Then nature sent me a metaphor.
That’s not a picture of Diana Nyad, the championship long distance swimmer training to cross the Straits of Florida. It’s only me getting ready to swim across my pool. We just opened it for the summer and I’m looking forward to jumping in, stretching out my muscles and gliding to the other side and back and back. I remember being afraid as a child to put my face in the water at summer camp. Now I do multiple strokes without taking it out and have completed three Danskin Women Triathlons. Was it easier when we were younger to overcome our fears and do the unthinkable?
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| 1st life 2nd life |
In her first life, Mary Kay Blakely had many roles: mother of two sons, free-lance writer and divorced spouse. In her second, she is a college professor, grandmother of four, and partner in a new relationship. Among her non-fiction books, she has written about her own nine-day coma in her 30s, raising two boys as a single mother, and the depressing state of our nation. She is currently working on an account of her decade-long caretaking of her mother, who had Alzheimers. Caryl asked her what she's learned
during her multi-faceted life.
No, I’ve never met Goldie Hawn or Blythe Danner, haven’t had coffee with them and our children didn’t go to school together. Then what do we three have in common? We don’t want to be called “grandma.” I’m not saying we don’t want to be grandmas but that we don’t want to be identified by a name that typically connotes an age much older than we feel. So Goldie and Blythe had their grandchildren rename them: GlamMa and Lalo respectfully.
