I Never Wanted To Do Yoga

My four-year-old is up in the middle of the night for the fifth night. She climbs into our bed, arranges herself into a comfortable position, shoves me into a spot that suits her, kicks my kidneys, and finally settles in to pick the mole on my neck. I can’t sleep.

Dimming the screen, I scroll through pictures of my birthday weekend spent in Ubud, eating and drinking, and Tampaksiring celebrating Nyepi. They are happy photos, everyone smiling, but mine is strained. I’m sick again. I’ve been sick or hurt most of our three months in Bali. My children don’t sleep well. I don’t sleep well. I have stomach issues. Female problems. Colds, heat rashes, more stomach issues. I look like a sweaty, bloated, greasy, frumpy, older version of my former self, and I don’t like it. I’m not healthy.

I have just turned forty-six, have young children, and need to make a change. But starting a new workout regime takes a bit more thought than in my twenties and thirties when I would feel sluggish or party too hard and then go for a twenty-mile run in the morning. My back aches, my knees creak, and I slouch so bad my boobs almost rest in my lap, poor girls.

Yoga is suggested. I don’t like Yoga. My only actual reason for this beyond the imagined smug, enlightened, and svelte practitioners I’m sure to encounter is the one class I took in upstate Maine twenty years ago, which touted itself as “for all levels” and then tried to make me do a headstand in the first session. It didn’t go well, and I may have taken out a few people in my row.

But, for whatever reason, at 4am on a Tuesday, with tiny toes burrowing into my stomach and a sharp fingernail determined to remove that mole from my neck, I decide Yoga is for me. I announce my plan to my husband, purchase the twenty-session pack, and let delusions of grandeur carry forth an image of myself in six months smug, enlightened, and if not svelte, at least fitting into the suitcase of clothes I brought that are all too tight now.

I’m one minute late to the first class, sweat pouring down my face as I’ve run the two kilometers in flip flops, having woken late after the 2 am dance party with my daughter. I attempt to follow all the moves but can’t see well through the salt water streaming into my gritty eyes. The Yoga instructor attempts a few corrections to my form then, defeated, ignores me, thank goodness.

I know none of the terminologies and can’t follow his heavy accent. I’m guided by the grandmother in front of me, twisting herself impressively as I shake and fall over. I can’t focus as ants tickle my skin. That is not a metaphor. An hour and a half of steamy hell later, the instructor rings the gong, hums deep in his chest, and the class is over. In front of everyone, he asks if it’s my first class; they all smugly and, somehow sveltely, chortle. In my haste to hydrate, I smack my lip on my water bottle, and now I’m bleeding.

I’ve got nineteen classes to go on my punch card. They say do Yoga for a month, and you’ll never stop. I’m not giving up. Mostly because I don’t want to see the look on my husband’s face if I do, but we all need our own inner motivation. It will get better. I will bet better. It has to get better. Right?

Namaste.