“30 Steps to Losing 30 Pounds in a Pandemic”
by Maureen O'Leary
Eat Less
Exercise more
The week before the pandemic hits, deliver a eulogy at your dad’s funeral where you break it to everyone that he hadn’t known who you were since 2007. Don’t call it dementia. Instead say: In the train station of his memory, I was the first to leave the station.
At the gathering after the funeral, eat three plates of potato salad with potato chips. When you finally go home, take off your extra control top pantyhose, put on your pajamas to give the deep red equator dug into your waist time to fade.
When your mother calls with the news that her assisted living facility is going into lockdown, invite her to come live with you until it’s over. Spend the next hour speed cleaning the spare bedroom. Work so hard to get her moved in with some of her things that you skip your Saturday gym time. Tell yourself that it’s okay to skip the gym because this is a family emergency and you are doing the right thing. Tell yourself that the lockdown will probably last two weeks, tops.
Go on walks with your eighty-four-year-old mother every day so that she won’t have to be alone. Keep up with her even though her pace is really fast. When she breaks it to you that back in January she co-signed a lease with someone for an extravagant monthly rent that her fixed income can’t cover along with her own expenses, stop walking. Put both hands on your knees. Try not to freak out as she admonishes you to stop ruining the walk with your negativity.
Move your mother into your house for real.
Go on walks with your mother every day so that she has someone to talk to about your father. Tell yourself that when she tells you how much your father believed you were an ugly bald-headed lying alcoholic who did drugs that this is good for you to hear. Tell yourself that hearing your mother admit that your father didn’t like you is only a matter of the truth coming out at last. Tell yourself that the truth hurts less than your father pretending that he loved you. Tell yourself.
Stop walking with your mother.
When your gym closes for the pandemic, find the green and purple plastic step and risers used for step aerobic classes in the eighties that you pilfered from a junk pile thirty years ago. Set it up in the side yard and mix a playlist of Metallica, Kendrick Lamar, and Duran Duran. Invent a routine.
When the step workout doesn’t dispel your rage, add a run through your neighborhood afterwards.
Start weighing yourself every day.
Eschewing alcohol is not a challenge for you because you have never been a drinker, nor do you use drugs, despite the fun your father thought you were having. Avoid all forms of processed sugar. Eat watermelon and eggs and chicken and zucchini. Drink water. Make kale and spinach and collagen protein smoothies with almond milk in the blender every day and ignore your mother making fun of you. Ignore her singing along to the noise the blender makes. Ignore her saying the sound of the blender is too industrial. Ignore her calling your food “your health stuff.”
Remember when you were ten and your mother poked you in the stomach in front of company and said you had a potbelly.
Remember that at fourteen when you told your mother that you loved Grape Nuts cereal that your mother said that was how fat people talked.
Remember the day when you were fifteen and you said you liked the way whipped cream felt in your mouth that your mother said that was how fat people talked.
Remember the year you were sixteen and subsisted on one bowl of raisin bran a day. Remember feeling so faint and light headed that you couldn’t study. Remember the school counselor telling your mother you were in danger of becoming anorexic.
Remember that in college when you told your mother you were binging and purging she asked if throwing up worked for you because it never did for her.
When the step workout and the runs aren’t enough, add pushups to your workout. Add lunges, squats, yoga, planks, sit-ups, and long stretches.
Remember that when you came home for spring break at nineteen after a few months of resolving to stop throwing up on purpose that your father was angry with you for the weight you’d gained. Their friends were asking what was wrong with you, he said. You were embarrassing the family. Remember that your mother took pictures of you during that visit in order to point out later how fat you had become. Remember that you never saw their friends during this time. Wonder what that was about. Don’t really wonder.
When during the pandemic your mother asks if she can make you pasta remind her that you are allergic to wheat. When she asks if you want bread, remind her that you are allergic to wheat. When she asks if you want some of the cookies you bought her, remind her that you are allergic to wheat. When she bakes cookies and asks if you can be tempted, remind her that you would just as soon take a prickly cactus and rub it all over your face and then swallow it whole because that would have the same effect on your body as eating one of those cookies because you are allergic to wheat.
After dinner one night, ask your mother about suspicions you have that your dad hit you when you were young. Listen to your mother tell you that she only remembers the one time when you were a baby in your crib but that after all you had hit him first.
After dinner one night, listen to your mother make excuses for your abusive uncles, for your Trump supporting cousins spewing hate on her Facebook page, for her own father. Ask how she can have so much sympathy for brutal men and do not buy the answer about God’s forgiveness.
After dinner one night, tell your mother that if the person she co-signed a lease with asks her for any more of her money that you will be calling the police. Listen while she calls you harsh and unforgiving.
Listen to your mother wonder aloud why you take no enjoyment in food.
When a step workout, a run, squats, lunges, yoga, planks, sit-ups and long stretches don’t dispel your rage, add free weights. Add an extra walk after dinner. Rack up twenty thousand steps a day.
Start taking pictures of yourself in the mirror for proof of your own fitness level because the more you lose weight the more overweight you look to yourself. Wish that being aware of the dysmorphia would make it go away. Wish that you were evolved past caring. Know that your fatphobia is bullshit and politically fucked up. Know that your fatphobia is anti-feminist to an extraordinary degree. Know that you are essentially a cog in the wheel of your own and others’ oppression. Know that you are fifty years old and should have gotten past this back in 1990. When your mother tells you that you are looking downright skinny, understand that what she means is that you aren’t skinny enough, and tell her thank you. The next day, add jumping rope to your routine.
While you work out think of Sarah Conor from Terminator 2 cleaning her gun while her biceps and shoulder muscles gleam in the sun. Sarah Conor from Terminator 2 would know how to behave in your situation. Sarah Conor from Terminator 2 never had to put up with this shit. Add ten minutes to your step dancing routine. Now you are up to three hours of working out a day, seven days a week. Record your progress in a special notebook.
Six months into the pandemic, when it becomes clear that you are going to have to return soon to in-person work despite the risks, help your mother arrange to get her own apartment for a price she can afford because you are afraid of infecting her with the virus. The day your mother moves out of your house into her own apartment, cry.
Know that you failed your mother. Know that you will never be the daughter she really wanted. Know that she knows that you didn’t try hard enough. Decide to take the day off of working out to rest. Run four miles instead.