About that Peloton ad...

My favorite thing to do in life is dance.  Period.  That has been true since I was five years old.   If I go too long without dancing, I feel like I'm going to explode.  I get stressed, anxious, and depressed, and I hover on the edge of tears, feeling like I'm strapped onto a gurney in a straitjacket.  And since moving to Grand Rapids, for the first time in my life, I haven't been able to take regular, high-level dance classes.  I continue to give myself classes in my apartment, occasionally rent a studio, and take the two classes a week in the city that are difficult enough to be worth going to, but it's not enough.  Being physically active for me, and pushing myself to be better every time, to push outside of my comfort zone, to challenge myself physically, to reach that point where I'm dripping sweat and want to just fall down and lie on the floor, is necessary for my mental health.  If I don't have that, then I feel sluggish and can't get much accomplished.  My writing turns both uninspired and clunky, and my productivity in everything else goes similarly downhill.  So I knew I needed to find something to fill the hole in my life that losing my NYC dance classes created.

I found boxing (just a heavy bag, not a person).  My boxing club is my favorite place in this city.  I love going there, and I love how it makes me feel.  After a boxing class there, I feel like myself for the first time since moving—because it is the most challenging, intense workout I've had since moving.  The trainers push everyone in the class to go beyond what they're comfortable doing.  Hit that bag faster, hit it harder, hold the plank longer, get more reps in before the round is over....  And everyone in class gives it their all, with the room filled to the brim with positive energy and a can-do attitude, from the experienced boxers to the men and women who swap their suits and dresses for lunch-hour workout clothes to the teenagers with their parents to the first-timers who do what they can and get energetic encouragement and corrections from the trainers so they never feel like they're anything less just because they're not at the same level yet.  Everyone is welcome, and everyone pushes and is pushed hard.  A sign on the wall says, "Now is your time. This is your place." And that's what it is to me.

Am I doing it to lose weight?  No.  I don't need to lose weight.  Fitness and workouts to me are not about weight-loss.  They are about mental and physical health, which is so much more than about weight.  Intense physical activity, especially now that I live in a city where cars are the primary mode of transportation rather than walking, makes me feel better in every way possible.  I even strongly encouraged my (also not overweight) husband to join, and after taking two boxing classes with me, he bought his gloves and is now on my family plan.  He's never been into working out and only used the elliptical when I pressured him to, but he's found an athletic activity that he enjoys and de-stresses him.  It's healthy for both his physical and mental health, in a way that has nothing to do with a number on the scale or an image in a mirror.

So it is with perplexity that I see everyone on social media up in arms about that Peloton ad where the husband gets his already-slim wife a bike for Christmas, and after a year she says she didn't know how much it changed her.  I see post after post on social media about how demeaning it is to tell your skinny partner to lose more weight by getting her a Peloton.  But nowhere in the ad is weight mentioned; nowhere in the ad does she step on a scale or look at herself in the mirror admiring how she looks in an outfit.  This is not a Special K or Weight Watchers or Noom ad.  In fact, there is not one single hint that the Peloton and the woman's resulting new workout routine have anything whatsoever to do with her looks, to either herself or her husband.  Instead, we see her feeling good after a workout, getting excited by the encouragement she gets mid-workout by a trainer, adapting to and loving how her new fitness routine makes her feel, not how it makes her look.

To me, what's concerning isn't the ad itself but the reaction to the ad.  Why do people associate fitness only with weight and looks?  Fitness is about so much more.  I watch the Peloton ad and I see an ad where the husband gives his wife a gift that she loves, that makes her feel better, more energetic, happier.  How has exercise become associated only with visuals and the sexual desirability of a person?  Why do we jump to the conclusion that a gift of a bike means "lose weight so you're more attractive to me" rather than "I thought this might make you happy to use"?  Is it a problem with our view of fitness?  Or is it an even broader societal problem of getting hooked on anger, looking for things to be angry about to feed that feeling of hating something, looking for judgment where there was none, choosing to bond over our anger at a target rather than finding proactive steps to take to be happy?

I don't know.  But I do know I'm going to go work out now.  Because it makes me feel happy.

Leave me my name

This is my husband's and my cat, Mister.  Actually, his full name on any paperwork we sign for vets, cat-sitters, etc. is Mister Pollack (or, as I like to call him, Mr. Mister Pollack).

"His last name is 'Pollack,' by the way," I had informed my husband one day early on. "Not Donahue.  Because any human kids we have will be Donahues, so I get this one as a Pollack.  Plus I'm the youngest Pollack, and there will never be any Pollack children with Pollack as their last name in any known branch of our family, so now there's another!"

"Okay," my understanding husband said. ".....Do your parents consider this a continuation of the line?"

I couldn't answer the question because my face was buried in Mr. Mister Pollack's fluff.

I have always felt tied to my name, both first and last.  My name represents me and not only all my accomplishments, experiences, and growth over the years but also that of all my family.  My last name represents the survival of this branch of our family during World War II.  My last name stands for all the Pollacks who fell victim to the concentration camps during WWII.  My last name stands for my great-grandparents who came over from Romania and Russia and started a life here.  My last name stands for my Grandma Pollack, who sculpted and taught mentally disabled children.  And though I don't share a name with my mom's side of the family, it still stands for them, too, to me, because my name represents my identity, and they are a part of it: my great-grandpa moving with his family from England to a farm cottage in Canada and building a house in Detroit in a field and later my grandfather also building a house in Detroit for his five children and yet another cottage in Canada; all the letters I read in that Canadian cottage between the family members who had already immigrated and those still eagerly anticipating their move; all the stories my mom has told me about my great-grandma and her love of lavender and tea time and the hours my mom spent with her sitting in a log in her back yard transformed by imagination into a boat....  All of those people, experiences, risks, and accomplishments are wrapped up in my name, "Pollack," so when nearly a decade ago, my husband asked me if I would take his name when we married, my answer was "No."  Not because I don't love him, not because I don't want to be a family with him, not because I don't recognize that marriage involves compromises and meeting each other halfway, but because for me personally, my name is my name.  It is part of my identity, and call me headstrong and obstinate, but I won't give up any part of my identity for a relationship, especially not a part that men are never asked to give up.  I had always balked as a child at the idea of one day changing my name, and when I saw and read The Crucible in the 6th grade, though the line in no way has anything to do with name changes and marriage, John Proctor's declaration "I have given you my soul; leave me my name!" resonated for me as a female who would one day be expected to change my name.  "How may I live without my name?" Proctor declares.  And I remember thinking at the time, "I want my name....  I don't want anyone taking it away from me.  It's MY name."

Fast forward to me getting married, and despite my anti-traditionalist stance on changing my name, I nevertheless swore I would not be one of those women who gets all offended every time someone makes the understandable assumption that I took my husband's name.  After all, to most people outside of New York City at least (the vast majority of married women I know in New York kept their birth names), it is still quite standard, and particularly to past generations, it would likely never occur to them that a woman would keep her name.  I remember my mom getting cards addressed to "Mrs. Edward Pollack" when I was a kid....  She didn't even get to keep her first name with some people of the generation ahead of her, and not because of any offense intended, but merely out of tradition.

So whenever I talked about my decision to keep my name with anyone, I always added, "but I'm not going to get all offended if people assume my name is Donahue."

Turns out, what I say and what I feel can be two very different things.

Christmas card after Christmas card is coming addressed to "Jonathan and Jessica Donahue," and every time I see it, no matter how much I don't want to be annoyed... I wrinkle my nose and make a face.  Every time, it strikes a chord and grates on me—because every time, it's like a little piece of my identity is being shoved behind my husband's.  Perhaps it wouldn't bother me so much if my husband and I hadn't gone to such great care to use my last name in all the return addresses of our thank-you cards for our wedding.  Or if most of the people who have given me my husband's last name in Christmas cards weren't women who have kept their own names, and who were my husband's friends first.  I know I shouldn't be offended, I know that it's tradition and I'm an abnormality and I can't expect other people to read my mind or to anticipate abnormalities, and I know that Christmas cards, of all things, are not an object about which to get upset but about which to be thankful... but I can't help it.  It just bugs me.

So while I work on accepting that people who knew my husband before they knew me will assume I have taken his last name and there's nothing I can do about it but smile graciously and keep using "Pollack" proudly whether or not they notice, I will leave you with a video of the cutest "Pollack" around—Mr. Mister Pollack: