the new badass

I just found yet another old and fabulous friend through facebook. I love facebook. Anyway, she now has two kids and recently ran the Portland marathon. Now, mind you, the last time I saw this friend I was probably twenty-two. We were probably dancing very late at night to very loud house music. Or we could have been staring at a ceiling fan at four in the morning talking about, "the afro in the sky." Or maybe we were eating some ungodly diner breakfast after a long, hazy night and drinking massive amounts of coffee. Any way you cut it, we weren't exactly pillars of health.

Seeing these tough girl pictures of her lean muscles getting ready to set off for the marathon reminded me of how tremendous women are. Women and their insanely capable bodies. We can grow children. We can birth children. Our stomach muscles completely separate and then come back together again. We can have babies, and then, run marathons.

I teach a yoga class once a week. My average student is in her mid-thirties, super strong, and able to hold some fairly intense poses for sustained periods of time. I always tell the ladies in class how fun they are to teach because, in their toughness, I don't worry about them pushing themselves beyond their limits.

But the other day I had three girls show up who were probably around the above mentioned age. The age of unhealthiness. Granted, they were much further along then I was because they were at a yoga class, not, say, twirling around on some beach in Santa Cruz. But it was so apparent that they were totally out of touch with their bodies. They were shaky and unsure. As much as I adjusted them and helped them throughout the class, they never really met my eyes. There was a deeply rooted insecurity that seems to come with barely being in your twenties, barely having a sense of your body's true potential.

I so don't miss that time. Today after a busy day in the classroom, I decided to take Eliana to do some errands on the bike. After a fairly spontaneous lovefest with our girlfriends in the park, I ended up biking a decent distance to the market and then proceeding to bike home with a cartload of groceries. After getting home, bathing, feeding and putting to bed Eliana, I hit "my wall." I felt a bit shaky and my back was (...still is) on fire. As I was grumbling to Jeff about my exhaustion, he reminded me of that bike ride. He mentioned that I was probably carting about thirty extra pounds. He reminded me that this bike fixation is new and isn't exactly something that I've been practicing for years.

And there's something about that, about this new badass, this post baby badass, that I totally get off on. I love the fact that I think I'm a stronger dancer now than I ever have been. I love the fact that I can hustle up the mountain behind my house way faster now than I ever could before Eliana. Because it wasn't so long ago that I was struggling back into my first dance class. That I couldn't hold plank or navasana and was still not back at ease in my post-baby body. Going through that journey and coming out not just on the other side, but in an even stronger place, is pretty tremendous. Not only that, I have something pretty damn tremendous to show for it all.