Are you looking for some good books to read? I have been reading a bunch of good books. I am going to tell you about the best ones in reverse chronological order until this post gets too long.
The day before yesterday I finished Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, which is fluffy but hilarious. It made me laugh out loud over and over again. It's the story of a single mom (mum, I should say, since she's English) who lands a spot on a thinly disguised Great British Bakeoff. WILL Rosaline find love and contentment? WILL she shake off the pressure of her parents' unreasonable expectations? WILL her cake rise? The suspense is not intense, but the dialogue is snappy and the laughs are abundant.
Two days before that I finished Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. I tore through it compulsively, eager to see where the characters found themselves next. It's a book worth going back to. It tells the story of two Ghanaian half-sisters: one marries a slaver, and one becomes a slave. The author traces their descendants' lives across 200 years. It's a hard read. As soon as I finished it I wanted to find whatever other books the author had written. But I also wanted to take a little time before I started the next one, because she is writing about some tough truths.
After more than a year of being stuck in chapter 1, I finished Intuitive Eating. And I think? it might? change my entire attitude toward food, weight, and occupying a woman's body at midlife? I hesitate to make bold pronouncements only a week after reading a book, but it made me think a lot of Serious Thoughts. They're all tied up with the Thoughts I've been thinking about fitness: how did I absorb the message -- from elementary school onward -- that I would be better, somehow, if there were less of me? In the same way that there's a weird taboo about getting bulky at the gym, there's a weird taboo about enjoying food and responding to our appetite cues and accepting our current shapes.
In most domains we accept that our bodies' cues exist for an important purpose, you know? If we're tired, we should try getting more sleep. If that doesn't fix the problem, maybe we should see the doctor and get some bloodwork drawn. Part of being a Catholic adult is learning about rightly ordered appetites: tending our bodies in a way that allows us to live life to the full. We can believe this is true with respect to our desires for sleep, work, sex, etc. But there are an awful lot of Catholic women out there -- an AWFUL LOT -- thinking it is somehow virtuous to disregard their bodies' hunger cues on a regular basis.
Huh, I suspect I will have more things to say about Intuitive Eating, but I am going to get up at 5:30 so I can go to the gym at 6. I may have been talking a big game here this summer about TAKING UP SPACE etc., but it still feels pretty weird to be the only middle-aged woman in the weight room at the student fitness center. Not quite weird enough for me to stop going, but weird enough for me to aim to be there when the concentration of 19-year-old males is lowest. Will Jamie bump it up to 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press tomorrow? Stay tuned for more exciting weightlifting updates!
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