balance, grasshopper

As many of you know, I'm a gimp, born with one hip socket. After a spica cast and 3½ surgeries I am able to walk and practice tae kwon do and live life pretty normally. But I can't jog or run or stand in one place for long periods, and during tkd classes in which we're doing nothing but kicking drills, the fact that my glute on the left side is attached at the wrong place means throwing my left leg over and over with all the contracting power of a flaccid rubber band. All the other muscles in my lower back, pelvis and leg have to compensate, and I end up sucking air like an emphasemic Marlboro junkie.

After 4 years of tae kwon do, and having achieved my black belt, I still cannot walk more than one flight of stairs without stopping to catch my breath. There's simply not enough oxygen getting to all the muscles that are necessary for me to try to repeatedly haul up my gimpy left leg.

Last Thursday, after 45 minutes of kicking drills and sparring, I didn't know which would come first: throwing up, passing out, or collapsing into a puddle of frustrated tears. The school spun around me as I stepped out of the drills and tried to catch my breath. Every fourth week at our school is "sparring week," and I approach it each month with dread, waiting for the moment when I'll have no choice but to suffer the indignity of bowing out of a drill or a sparring match.

So I've been trying to figure out which is better: to go all out until I feel that hypoxia is just one more roundhouse kick away, hoping that this will somehow improve my stamina in the long run but knowing it's at the cost of 2-3 days of limping and sleepless, charlie-horse nights, or to skip sparring, train on my own those weeks and forgo the pain and humiliation all together.

I still haven't figured this out, not least because our son L. - while fully functional in all his various parts - hates sparring week, with its padded sparring gear that turns him into a beet-colored, sweaty mess by the end of each class. So if I drop out, L. will try to beg off, too. Not good for a boy who has his mom's tendency toward ass-sofa magnetism.

Another thing I'm currently puzzling over: my husband J. and my Mom & Dad's desire that I stop using profanity on this blog.

I'm tempted to quote the former bassist for Harry Chapin, Big John Wallace, who would finish Harry's proffered "For those of you looking for a family show..." with "...that's too goddamn bad."

This is definitely not a family show, in the sense that 1,000,000 dead Iraqis is a profanity much more horrific, and Hank Paulson's recent robbery at Treasury a profanity much more brazen, than anything my fevered brain could ever come up with.

And yet, the thought that some of my older relatives may have found this blog when looking for information about my recently-deceased Aunt Camilla does give me pause. If they looked beyond those individual posts, these opposite-of-crass Canadians may have been shocked by their cousin to the South, and I know that at least my Mom and Dad do not feel comfortable with their daughter projecting herself internationally as a foul-mouthed harpy.

While I do understand that profanity is a big part of the patois of the blogosphere (especially on the left), and while I am completely comfortable with it, other people are not. And maybe I am, as J. said, driving off people who might be more open to my message if I stayed away from Carlin's 7 Words.

So, lots to think about coming to the end of this year and looking into the next.