Active family

Abigail is taking swim lessons on Monday afternoons.  It makes for a complicated afterschool schedule, but it’s worth it – she loves swimming and these lessons are really helping her develop her stroke.  That means that this morning in addition to packing my gym bag and clothes for work, I had to grope around the still-dark garage, trying not to trip over the various bikes and bike parts, to find the bike rack. Because Dusty will bike home after work and walk with Abigail to swimming.  I will pick up Eleanor and Dusty’s commuter bike and then drive to the pool to get the others.  As I was getting my stuff together this morning, Abigail saw me putting on work shoes and asked how I was going to bike to work in my work shoes, so I went through the complicated pick up shenanigans, to explain why I wasn’t biking.  So, as I was groping around the garage, I was thinking happily about what an active family we are. 
 
This pleases me so much.  In my last marriage, I kept saying that I wanted to be more active as a family, that I wanted Eleanor to see us incorporating exercise into our lives, and I wanted to do active things with her.  But I never succeeded in making it part of our life in an ongoing way.  A lot of it was me, because I hadn’t gotten the exercise bug yet.  I tried periodically, but nothing stuck for long.  The most sustained period of fitness I had before I was 40 was in the year and a half before I got pregnant, when I was going to the gym regularly to get in shape pre-pregnancy, but I didn’t keep it up during pregnancy or afterward.  It wasn’t until I started running right before my 41 birthday that I began on the path to getting into shape for real.  I still have a way to go, but I do know that no matter what, exercise will be a part of my life on an ongoing basis.  But it’s not just my personal internal changes that have made the difference.  It’s far easier to sustain what I’m going because Dusty does it too.  He values physical activity for himself, for the girls, for us as a family.  So if I need to join a gym to get over my tendency to hibernate in the winter, he’s going to encourage me to do it even if it means leaving the house at 6:00 (okay, I never actually manage to leave at 6:00, it’s usually more like 6:20 by the time I get out the door) and leaving him to run the morning routine with the girls.  It wasn’t exactly that I had to fight to get the time in my old marriage, it was more that there was no value placed on the activity, and it was far easier to drop it than to push against our family culture of inertia.  It’s not that we didn’t ever do anything physical, but it wasn’t a regular part of our lives, and it wasn’t something we found easy to do with Eleanor.  Even when I went to the gym, I did it during my lunch hour from work, so she never saw me getting sweaty.  Now, several mornings a week her first sight of me is as I return from my run, sweaty and panting and happy.  Or I’m at home, because Dusty is on his run.  Or we are all heading to the playground to throw the Frisbee around.  No one questions that physical activity should be a priority (in fact, particularly with Abigail, if she is out of sorts we usually prescribe some physical activity, and it usually brightens her mood and brings her back to herself).  Not that my ex ever outwardly objected to the idea of exercising. It was harder to combat than that, because it was all unspoken habit and assumptions. This is not meant to be a diss of my ex. We were both part of this culture. It's just that I'm noticing how much easier it is to be active when it's part of the family culture, and how hard it is to change family culture.