Prenatal Classes

This week April and I started our prenatal classes.

Everything began well with a cheerful hello from our midwife and some encouragement to find a spot on one of the comfy blue mats lying on the floor, take off our shoes, and find a relaxing position.

We began our exercises by scrunching up our toes, relaxing them, scrunching them up again, then rotating our ankles in circles.

The whole experience immediately reminded me of a class I took in college called “Voice and Body Warm-ups.” I was the only guy who took the class then, and looking around the room at the four pregnant women on mats, this class was the same.

To put things into perspective, at the end of that college class I was absolutely ecstatic to have achieved my personal goal: I had managed to touch my toes without my legs quivering like a newborn calf. The rest of the class, the girls, however, had long moved on to complex yoga positions which such intimidating names as The Sun Salute and the Warrior I pose and others I’ve thankfully managed to forget.

At that to say, I think it’s safe to assume most women are more flexible than men, and even as far as men go, I’m at the bottom of the totem pole.

I remember going to the physical trainer with a knot in my hamstring after a high school soccer game. After using all but the baseball bat sitting in the corner of the room to work out the knot, she shook her head and wiped off her forehead. “You’re one of the most inflexible people I’ve ever worked with,” she said.

Anyway, despite the fact that the mats and the gym clothes and the mirrors on the walls all reminded me of my voice and body warm-up days, I nonetheless felt optimistic for one very obvious reason: these women had watermelon bellies.

Our instructor asked us to stand up (we were lying on our backs doing breathing exercises), and I watched these round women struggle to their feet with the same compassion as one watches puppies trying to climb stairs.

“Only a few months,” I thought, oozing with empathy, “and you’ll be back in the shape you were before.”

My only hesitation at this point was that I might get bored. Pregnant women have to do easy exercises. Here I was, a healthy, young guy, doing exercises with pregnant women. It was no contest really.

That’s about the time things began to change, as I remember it.

We were down on all fours, positioned like a cat, breathing deeply and arching our backs, and I noticed something I hadn’t expected. Sweat. I was beaded up with the stuff like a newly waxed car.

Given my history, of course I was concerned. “Oh no,” I thought, shammying myself off with my shirt, “I’m getting hot. I’m working too hard.” The pleasant images of April and myself relaxing over a picnic in a shaded forest without distraction, without bugs, without an uncomfortable bum (which is what I usually remember from picnics) was suddenly interrupted with a comic sketch of me as a human boiler, a heat machine with eyes and ears and a mouth like Mr. Potato Head, and about to explode, shaking violently and billowing with steam that filled the small aerobics room.

“Just don’t make me touch my toes,” I thought, pleading with the instructor in my head. “I know my body can’t handle it, but I’m talking about my ego. We ended on such a good note in college. My ego is like a soft little cuddly bunny that wouldn’t hurt anybody—like the Easter bunny. We don’t want to hurt the Easter bunny, do we?”

There’s only one exercise for me that’s worse than touching my toes. It’s called the butterfly. Nice name for such a cruel invention. The goal is simple. You sit on your butt, put your feet together so their bottoms are flat against each other, and pull your feet as close to your groin as you can, so in effect, your knees stick out from your body like butterfly wings. Poetic, isn’t it?

Next, using your hands or the inside of your elbows, you push your knees as far as you can downward to the mat underneath you, stretching your groin.

The whole experience for me is like prying open a clamshell. You literally have to break the joint holding the two shells together in order to open a clam. The different is clams are dead. I was not. (Not to mention, if the thought hasn’t crossed your mind already, we are talking about stretching a particularly sensitive part of the human anatomy.)

I didn’t look like a butterfly. I looked like I was still in my cocoon or like I was a junior high boy balled up for a cannonball just about to hit the water.

I couldn’t help but gape at the other women, their bellies light as balloons, fluttering their legs like happy butterflies. I imagined them all laughing and flapping their legs, slowly lifting themselves off their mats and flying away into the cool Mediterranean sky.

The instructor walked slowly around the room observing each of the women. Much to my appreciation, she walked past me without more than a casual glance, which I can only guess was because of one of two reasons. Either she thought about the fact that I’m a guy and won’t be giving birth, so I don’t really count anyway, or more likely she realized I was a lost cause and couldn’t be bothered by my piddly efforts. Either way, she continued on to where April was sitting and stopped.

April looked bored. She had her knees pinned to the mat with her hands, and occasionally she would flap her knees and do the stretch all over again just for fun.

“In some cases,” the instructor said, “some people are too flexible for this particular stretch. You’re one of those people. Let me show you the stretch I use. I think it will be more effective for you.”

Things got entirely out of hand by the end of the workout. Yes, I was sweating. Yes, I was feeling a burning sensation in many muscles I didn’t want to know I had. Yes, my pride was worth as much as a handful of Spanish pesetas. But up until this point I had avoided pain.

For our last exercise, our instructor asked us to shake out our arms and shoulders, loosen them up a bit, then one at a time rotate our arms like windmills.

I started with my right arm, and everything went well. The room filled with a flurry of body parts. We switched to our left arm, and everyone began again. I was really getting into this stretch. I could feel my shoulder stretching. As my arm spun faster and faster like a ceiling fan, I focused on relaxing the muscles in my arm, then my rib cage, and finally the shoulder itself. The muscles expanded even more. I felt in complete control of my body.

That’s when the clicking began. It sounded like chopsticks breaking or like the pulse of an electric fence if you put your ear close to it and listen. It sounded painful, and it was. The clicking sound was coming from my shoulder. I didn’t know whether to stop flailing my arm or not, so I kept doing it, hoping the problem would work itself out.

It only got worse. Now the clicking sounded like a hammer on a nail, and people started looking around the room trying to find out where that clicking sound was coming from.

Of course I stopped. I gave up. I rubbed my shoulder. I looked at these women, cheerfully carrying around their sand bags, fluttering their knees like butterflies, whirling their arms like propellers, happy to be in training for the race ahead. And that’s when I knew (as if I didn’t know before) that there was good reason April was pregnant, and I was not.