For or Against: Kettlebells

It was scary, realizing that change wasn’t necessarily in my control.

I started using kettlebells because I joined a gym in December. I joined the gym because I wanted to sign the baby up for swim lessons and it was cheaper if you were already a member, but also because I’m living in Ohio with my parents for a few months and it’s nice to have a place to go in the winter.

As it turns out, I love the gym — there’s childcare for up to two hours in the mornings, and there’s also a separate playroom where the baby can crawl around and play with a million plastic toys amidst far fewer perils than at my parents’ house. Plus there’s free coffee in the lobby and an electric fireplace that I like to perch in front of while I give the baby his bottle.

Anyway, I settled on kettlebells as opposed to other types of weights because there was a poster in the gym about exercises that you can do with kettlebells and no posters about what exercises to do with dumbbells, which is a rude name for a perfectly respectable piece of equipment, now that I’m typing it out. The idea of doing strength training in general was on my mind because my friend A. told me recently about how important it is to do once you hit your 40s and start losing more muscle mass. It doesn’t seem right that my body should lose any of its powers just yet — my brain is still so young, in that I don’t know what’s going on at any given time at all — but biology is hard to argue with. Though some try.

So far I haven’t noticed the kettlebells having much of an effect on either my appearance or strength, but I haven’t been using them that long. Then again, for me, the mental health benefits of exercise have always been more evident than any physical changes. I remember telling my friend O. on the beach a few years ago that my body seemed to have chosen stasis. No matter what I ate or how active I was, no matter what I tried when it came to IVF and getting pregnant, my body just stayed the same. Moreover this was during deep Covid, Groundhog Day for the whole planet and my efforts at other types of changes — jobs, for example — also weren’t taking. I became increasingly convinced during this period that I could not change my life, no matter what I tried. I believed bad things could still happen to me, sure. But it seemed possible that if I moved across the country and went to sleep, I would wake up back in my apartment in Brooklyn in the morning.

Of course, my life did change eventually. But it was scary, realizing that change wasn’t necessarily in my control. Novelty is so important to me; it has been ever since I went to boarding school where there was a concert or a reading or a play almost every evening. I always went, not just for the art but for the feeling that I’d injected a little meaning into my life that day, differentiated it from the next.

Now my days are repetitive again in some ways — there’s only so much that can happen in 24 hours when you’re working remotely from a Cleveland suburb and have a young child. Lotta nights in. Days too. But it’s different; I chose this. I do see that same craving for novelty in the baby, who gets bored with his toys easily. I have to rotate them in and out so he can greet his familiar flower rattle or wooden beads anew, studying them like a sculptor, exploring their shapes and shadows.

Yesterday I handed him a shallot from the fruit bowl and watched his tiny smile as he turned it over and over in its hands. I started to think it was beautiful too: its papery skin, its pink-russet shade, the soft light reflected in its curves. Thank you for showing me the shallot, baby, I told him, but he wasn’t listening. He was too busy peeling its layers away.