Some bodies are just different

I am the least flexible person I know. It’s quite shocking. It scares my children. They didn’t believe me when I told them I couldn’t sit cross-legged and when I proceeded to demonstrate that inability (at their insistence), they were visibly horrified. If I ever have to stretch alongside other people, I look like I’m a different species. Instructors look at me with concern and mouth: Are you OK? Yeah, I just can’t do the most basic stretches, I tell them. My body doesn’t move that way. I said this to a trainer recently and she said “Some bodies are just different”. And I do believe this to be the correct answer! The answer I don’t believe - one I’ve been told a few times - is that my “hips are tight because there’s a lot of emotion stored there”. Like, what am I meant to do with that information? Go get a therapist? A talk therapist? And when the therapist asks me what I’m here to work on, I’m going to say: my hip mobility please????

It was my consistent and persistent hip immobility that led to me making a Monday morning appointment with Stretch*d - where I paid someone to stretch me. I officially have more money than sense…though that says more about the level of my sense. After the stretch, I did this nonsense leg treatment and I texted a picture to my friends, saying I need to leave New York and/or go back to work. No seriously:

I left Stretch*d and picked up an Apollo bagel for lunch and as I went to pick up the kids from school, I passed Sarah Jessica Parker on the street!!

Bagels and celebrities on a Monday - like I said, I need to leave New York.

Last summer, there was an Irish college student working in our local bakery for the summer. This might not sound remarkable but, it is a bit, because the Upper West Side is not a typical place for J1ers or Irish people his age to hang out. We chatted any time I was in - he had just finished first year and was studying the same course that I had done, he’d lived in New York as a child and his distinctly Dublin accent gave me hope for my own kids.

Fast forward a year and I’m in the bakery of a Tuesday morning. The man behind the counter, who had just taken my order, asks me my name and when I say ‘Aisling’, his colleague standing behind him, whose back had been turned to me, spins round to face me with a smile! It’s my pal from last year and I’m so happy to see him I can’t believe it! He’s happy and tanned and taller and thinner because he’s grown now from 19 to 20. We catch up on his second year in college and his plans for the summer and it cheers me right up for the whole day.

I survived a 92 degree day.

Hillary Clinton and I have another encounter. We have to stop meeting like this! This time it’s dinner in the Lotos Club, a fundraiser for Barretstown Foundation USA, where Hillary Clinton was interviewed by News by Hil.

I spent the morning packing for a camping weekend Upstate, as well as cleaning the apartment for the Home Exchangers who are staying there while we’re gone. It’s so much extra effort when getting ready for a trip but I kept thinking about the points we’re banking for our free Tuscan villa holiday next year.

We set off Upstate after school, with Dave driving because I failed my driving test.

When I checked my test results online the night of the test, Dave (who passed his) was suspiciously supportive, coming up to the laptop to see specifically, and in detail, precisely how I’d failed. He quickly admitted that what he was doing was memorising every one of my demerits to quote back to me, any time I criticised his driving. So what did I do? I consciously said nothing about his driving the whole way up and it was….reasonably difficult. Definitely a noticeable effort on my part. I feel a dynamic has shifted between us forever. I was so afraid of a dynamic shift when I gave up my job…I never foresaw the power dynamic change after I failed a stupid driving test!!!

We check into the campsite and I pick up the golf buggy we’ve hired for the weekend1. The kids join me on the golf buggy as we follow Dave, driving 5mph to our log cabin. We’re about halfway there when the 6 year old says “Wait …I thought you failed your test??”. Oh gimme a break!!!!!

We had dinner in Irish restaurant, Garvans in New Paltz, then settled into the cabin for the night with the kids up in the loft à la the Ingalls girls, with us (Ma and Pa) on the settle bed downstairs.

The forecast all week was for rain. I knew it was for rain but even as I packed the kids’ rain coats and rain boots, I only ever pictured the weekend sunny.

When I tell you: it never stopped raining, not one split second. And it was cold, too. It was like when you take a chance on the Canaries for Winter sun but the Canaries don’t play ball and you’re left shivering, poolside, under your towel in 16 degrees while dressed in the clothes you so hopefully packed for 26.

This entire day was an endurance test. Everything we did was with the sole aim of passing the time and still it passed as slow as molasses. “How is it only 9:23?”, for example, we’d say over and over. “Christ on a bike it’s still not 11!”. Dave came up with the amazing plan that we just go home! The simple genius of this idea lasting only seconds before we remembered we couldn’t go home because of the Home Exchangers!!!

This is going to sound like we did a lot but you should know, none of these events lasted long and we were freezing for every one:

• Got breakfast sandwiches in the Tiki Bar

• Coloured pictures of Yogi Bear

• Went back to the cabin to collect the sodden letter Yogi bear had dropped off in this morning’s mail

• Tie-dyed t-shirts (GRIM)

• Had pizza for lunch and resting the warm pizza box on my legs was a highlight of the weekend

• Went to the outdoor pool in the rain

• Napped (we are years beyond kids napping but it was something to do)

• Went bowling in Poughkeepsie (this was very fun actually)

We watched TV, played cards, went to the cinema (The Sheep Detectives..not bad), went to a silent disco

We are still on the campsite and at 5am the sound of birds chirping woke me up. I rolled back to sleep and at 6am, the pelting rain woke me up again.

We had a pep in our step this morning though because we are, at last, LEAVING.

Got back to the city where the sun had come out and the Home Exchangers had left us lovely gifts. We spent the evening unpacking, doing laundry, batch cooking and washing the kids. Ah God. It was great to be home.