Cycling saved my life.
No, I was never going to drop dead without it, but I can say without exaggeration that it saved my life.
After having a lousy time getting pregnant, I had a lousy pregnancy. Grateful beyond measure, but lousy. Five months on bed rest, a liver condition that made me itch uncontrollably, heartburn that prevented me from even a few sips of water, worry about little E, the smaller twin and her not-very-fast-heartrate, and oh yeah, my Dad died after a relapse of prostate cancer.
The pregnancy wrecked my body. The time spent lying in bed wasted my muscle mass, and the strain of carrying twins gave me a hernia and diastasis, which basically means that my stomach muscles had torn, leaving a ridge in the center of my stomach, and I no longer had any strength in my core. When I picked the girls up, it was with my back, which then led to a disc problem.
I have always been athletic. I spent the best part of my time in high school out running, usually 6 miles a day. I ran in the rain, in the dead of winter in hard-packed snow. At night through quiet, dark neighborhoods. I played softball, rode horses and competed in shows, and everything I did revolved around being active and using my body. This all stopped in college, which I think is true for most people, particularly if you're a woman attending a small art school in a city. I believe that as someone prone to depression, a nice gift handed down by not only my mother but my father's side of the family, without this exercise, this pushing my body up hills and for longer distances, high school would have been even more of a nightmare for me. That I went for so many years in my adult life sitting idle, drinking, with no self-awareness that the times that I've been the happiest were when I was the most fit, was something that I am only beginning to reconcile in this, the 45th year of my life.
I had my stomach muscles surgically repaired in 2009. My hernia was fixed at the same time. I could now walk down the street without an unpleasant pushing sensation, as if my intestines were trying to force their way out of my abdomen. I had been drinking a lot, too. The surgery didn't fix that. As soon as I stopped breastfeeding, I started to drink. I waited until the girls' bedtime, then went to the kitchen and made myself the first of many gin and tonics. I drank Plymouth gin, thought Bulldog was rubbish, and was very discriminating about my tonic, usually going with Q or Fever-Tree. My ice cubes needed to be clear - the clearer the better. For the first time in my life I had an amazing refrigerator, a Sub-Zero, and it made me ice that was the perfect shape, and it always knew when it needed to make more. This is what I loved the most, the anticipation of that first drink - the fizz of the tonic, the acid of a fresh lime. The strange, wonderful botanicals of the gin. If I had stopped at half a drink (because I made a strong G&T), I would have been left with that pleasant buzz, the slight numbness to the day, to what would happen tomorrow. This is what I imagine a normal drinker takes away from alcohol, how they know when to stop. But for me, let's get all the pleasantries out of the way and drink until the television starts to talk to you about whatever high calorie dinner you're eating, the loaf of garlic bread paired with the whopping fat content of a Fresh Direct Lasagna. The television was in my head while I ate, and I would think, whoa, it's good I'm eating, I'm pretty hammered!
And where was my partner A. during all this?
The girls were born in 2008. I remember having to go into the hospital for stress tests 2 times a week the last month before the C-section. The TV in the waiting room announced armageddon for everyone's home, everyone's 401K, everyone's business. A, who owns her own company with a partner, was in the heavy-lifting period of launching a new business, the start of what would be two years of around-the-clock work for her. At first she worked from home, in our bedroom, as we had just moved into our new apartment when the girls were 10 days old, but when the kids started getting around, she got her own office, and she would be gone during the day. She was with the girls in the morning, and would always be home by six, an hour before their bedtime. But afterward she very often had to go out. And she had to be away at least one week out of the month. So my drinking picked up.
When I look back at it now, it's as if every night with my gin and tonic is winter, A is never home, and I am alone with two little girls sleeping in a room 25 feet away from me. I am drinking at my own pace, only thinking about dinner when I'm sure I've had enough to drink. I know it wasn't like this. I know the seasons changed. I know I would go for periods of time without a drink, if only to calm my own head, to prove that I didn't have a drinking problem. But this is what life felt like before I discovered the bicycle.
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