1
THE WINDS OF CHANGE
Becca
‘Is this supposed to be stress relieving?’ I whisper to Niamh as we transition from Plank Pose to Child’s Pose. Sweat is dripping from my forehead, my stomach muscles are begging for an early death and I am fighting for my life when it comes to holding in the gaseous emission that desperately wants to escape.
I’m not sure why I’m fighting so hard to hold it in – it seems that a significant number of people in this room have no qualms at all about letting their wind blow free. This room – this hotbox of sweaty, super-bendy people – smells like a twisted combination of old socks, farts and patchouli oil.
‘Itisstress relieving,’ Niamh – my ride-or-die best friend of more than forty years – hisses at me with a ferocity that would make Medusa look and sound positively fluffy in comparison. ‘Can’t you see the stress leaving my body?’ she snarls as she folds her body in two with such flexibility I wonder if she removed a couple of ribs before coming to class.
As I try the same move, stretching my arms across the floor in front of me while my bum rests on the back of my legs, I know there is no neat folding going on. My stomach is acting as a sort of oversized bolster cushion between my spine and thighs. The closest I can get to folding in half is hitting a thirty-to-forty-degree angle betwixt leg and belly. Briefly, I wonder if wearing Spanx next time would help me improve on this, but then I think of the inevitable sweaty gusset situation that would ensue and nix the notion. This is hellish enough. We do not need to add a bad case of thrush to the horror.
Niamh is a natural – able to move her body as if she lacks a skeleton. She manages to make each twist and extension of limb look effortless. Only the grunts and moans coming from her mouth give away the fact she’s feeling the burn.
I grimace as I realise those grunts and moans are probably not a million miles away from her sex noises. Then I grimace again because I absolutely don’t want to think about my best friend’s sex noises. This must be what people mean when they talk about intrusive thoughts.
I should not have let Niamh talk me into joining her at one of her twice-weeklytorture sessionsyoga classes. At forty-six (and a half) I should know my limits by now and yoga should be near the top of the no-can-do list. It’s something I’ve tried multiple times, convinced things will be different with each attempt. They never are.
‘You just need to give yourself a chance to get used to it. Your body won’t want to move that way at first,’ Niamh had said. She certainly wasn’t lying about that second part. As I now try to ‘deepen the stretch’ as directed by the instructor, my body screams in protest. This is not relaxing. This is not giving me a sense of peace.
However, it is, I suppose, at least distracting me momentarily from my ongoing troubles which are three-fold:
(1) I am going to be a grandmother. I can’t quite wrap my head around being old enough to be anyone’s grandmother. That and the fact that my child, Adam, who is the baby’s father, is only nineteen and in the middle of his university studies in Manchester. I am focused on appearing non-stressed by all of that when I am in Adam’s company. The last thing his quite sensitive soul needs is judgement and blame. But inwardly? Inwardly I am fighting the urge to grill him about how on earth he thinks they will cope with or provide for a baby.
(2) The baby’s mother, Jodie, is the daughter of the very bendy Niamh. I suppose this isn’t the worst-case scenario. If I’m going to rock a co-granny dynamic, I can think of no one better to do it with than my long-term BFF – but I’m still worried. What if the stress of it all leads to a major bust-up between Adam and Jodie, and a follow-on major bust-up between us? Niamh and I have only just reunited our triumvirate of long-term besties by making peace with our number three, Laura, after a decade-long falling-out. I never want to go through that again.
(3) Along with the ongoing crises surrounding the news of the unexpected baby in the uterus area – as Niamh described it – has come a whole new list of responsibilities, as Niamh and I support our young people through this life-changing development. If they decide to carry on with the pregnancy, this is only likely to increase ten-fold. Even now, I’ve found Adam needing almost constant reassurance that everything will be fine and I will fully support them whatever. Where that has created a problem in my own life is that my emotional energy is being entirely swallowed up by navigating these stormy parental waters, and I have little to nothing of me left to offer to what had looked like the beginning of a very lovely relationship.
Conal – brother of Laura – and I had been getting along very nicely indeed and heading to the point of no return, and hopefully many orgasms, when the shit had hit the fan.
There is nothing in this world that puts the brakes on a fledgling relationship quicker than a surprise pregnancy. Even if that pregnancy is not your own.
So that romance, and the associated prospect of my decade-long drought being declared well and truly over, is now on the proverbial back-burner.
The best I can hope for is that it keeps simmering until I have the time and energy to turn the heat back up on it again. My fear, however, is that the proverbial pot will have boiled dry before I get the chance to give it the attention it deserves.
Our instructor tells us to lie on our backs and get comfortable. I do exactly what I’m told and close my eyes, concentrating on my breathing and the soft cadence of a whispered meditation. This is the part of a yoga class I like. The slipping into just being at one with my body and breath in a space where I can convince myself that everything will indeed be okay. I even get to enjoy the momentary smugness of having completed a full-on exercise class and not being dead. This won’t last long. As soon as I try to walk on shaking legs or lift anything heavier than my car keys, I will realise I haven’t escaped as unscathed as I’d hoped.
Inhaling, I imagine soft warm sand beneath me, and the gentle rush of clear blue waters to shore. I can almost feel the warmth of the sun on my face and smell the coconut-scented aroma of sun cream when a loud voice clip of Stewie fromFamily Guycalling repeatedly for his ‘Mum’ starts to echo through the room.
I know instantaneously that it is my phone that is ringing. Because of course it is. This is my life now, I think. A series of unfortunate incidents and embarrassments. I mentally wring the neck of my older son, Saul, who has clearly messed with my phone settings while he was home for the Christmas holidays. He’s quite fond of playing on my increasingly poor grasp of ever-changing technology. At least, I think, as I scramble to my hands and knees and crawl to the back of the room making an apologetic facial expression, it’s not as bad as the time he set my phone to play a loud fart sound when he called me. Then again, I might just have gotten away with that one in this room.
With my phone out of my bag and clamped to my chest – in the hope my matronly boobs will muffle the noise – I get to my feet and make for the exit as quickly as possible.
As soon as the door is closed behind me, I answer. ‘Saul? What is it? I was in the middle of a yoga class.’
‘Oh, shit, sorry, Mum,’ he says, and even though he has only been studying in Manchester for four months I can already hear a northwest of England twang in his voice. He’s not quite gone the full Liam and Noel Gallagher yet, but there’s a definite deviation from the broad Derry accent I’ve known and loved.
Saul being Saul – the eldest of my twin sons and heretofore the more problematic of the pair – he needs to be led through a conversation even when he has initiated it himself.
‘So, you were calling?’ I say, as I open the door of the community centre and revel in a cool blast of icy January air. Somewhere along the way I have gone from being a lover of all things warm and sun-soaked to a woman desperate for icy goodness and Arctic breezes – and this one feels so glorious I step out into the cold, bare-footed. The perimenopause has a lot to answer for.
‘Yeah. The thing is, Mum, the extractor fan is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.’
He says it with a tone in his voice that leads me to believe he thinks I have some sort of magic electric appliance superpower and can will the fan back into life from the icy car park of a community centre. It would be a handy power to have, I suppose, but I don’t think Marvel will be battering down the door to offer me a franchise deal on the back of it.
‘Okay, love. What do you mean by broken, exactly?’
