memoir

 Loosen up my buttons, baby

Commissioned and published by No Lights, No Lycra.

Spring, 2013. I am pregnant with our second. The hormones make me feel sad and unhinged. My partner closes off tightly from me, like a fist. 

While there are joys—does anything possess more anticipatory sweetness than a newborn-sized bonnet?—a taut balloon of anxiety swells underneath my chest-bones.

I haven’t discovered the gym or meditation yet. This comes later, during the divorce. (“It turns out that all those perky assholes were right,” I text my best friend, “Exercise makes you feel great.”

“Ugh, what bourgeois habit is next?” she replies. “Yoga? Regular meals?”)

I’d kill for a drink, to get tipsy and dance this anxiety off.  I’d kill anything, that is, except my son’s developing brain. 

  The house is empty, except for Apple, my old mutt, tonguing her paw in the corner. An idea appears, born of desperation: I guess I could try just the dancing part—sans booze? 

The winding intro of the song I choose—Buttons, by the Pussycat Dolls—starts: a sensual wail like a charmer beguiling a snake from a basket. I slowly roll my hips, then snigger self-consciously. Jesus. I must look ridiculous.

I check again that the blinds are down—they are—and start to move my prenatal heft. Awkwardly at first, my teeth gritted with determination, and then, slowly, with bemused enthusiasm. 

Loosen up my buttons, baby, the Pussycat Dolls sing.

I play it again. Man, I love this song! I’m getting puffed and warm, and a thread of something vital is unfurling in me.

There’s something inherently sexual about dancing, isn’t there? To pretend otherwise is to affect a pearl-clutching chasteness. I’m not talking about the performative element—although that has a power, also. I’m talking about that primal part from where unselfconscious sexuality and dance originate. That egoless place where—and when—our noisy, bossy, self-critical heads shut the hell up, and we stop seeing ourselves from the outside in—how do I look doing this?—and it becomes, instead: how do I feel doing this? 

It feels hilariously lewd to be gyrating with my bump (or, more accurately: bumps. My pregnant boobs are like two obese pugs scrapping for space on a sofa) and, as I move, the mischievous raunch of the song—and, quite frankly, the lack of an audience—makes me feel brave, silly and kinda sexy. I’m a sexy mama, blares the song. Who knows just how to get what I wanna!

How does it feel if I do a star jump? What if I pretend that I am in an 80’s aerobics class and do lunges? What about trying to twerk, my huge belly pushing against the top of my thighs, or to attempt a clumsy booty-drop? 

I play it again, and again, dancing—and falling over—until I am puffed-out, giggling, and the balloon of anxiety under my chest has deflated, and I can breathe again.

When the doorbell chimes, suddenly, the spell is abruptly broken. I stand up, fix my dress. But I’ve gotten a glimpse of my inner sober Pussycat Doll. Lucky, too, because she comes in handy later.