Women's Artistic Motherhood

Screenshot from my motherhood/gymnastics parody video

In a recent article with a catchy title that poses the question "Is Watching Gymnastics Worse than Being an NFL Fan?" the author, Meghan O’Rourke, an ex-gymnast and longtime fan, writes about her conflicting feelings toward the sport. She’s both “enthralled by the spectacle of adolescent girls defying gravity” and yet can’t help but be reminded of its “history of sexual and emotional abuse” as well as its “amplification of adolescent body-image problems.”

Later, she goes on: “This year’s U.S. Championships were replete with many of the stranger trappings of the sport, the startling incongruities between the gymnast’s strength and her performance of girlishness — her spangled leotard, her beribboned hairdo, her makeup…”

As I read the article—an ex-gymnast and longtime fan myself—I related to much of what O’Rourke was saying. As I’ve written before, I’ve bristled at the sight of U.S. gymnasts in bright lipstick and heavy eye makeup. One of my favorite gymnasts, Aly Raisman, the reigning Olympic floor champion and the owner of body-builder-esque trapezius muscles, often posts about her pre-meet makeup choices on Instagram. At the same time, I can’t blame her. Raisman is 22. At 22, I straightened my hair and wore lots of black eyeliner. And yet when I try to imagine the U.S. women’s soccer team running down the field with lips in the shade of Nars’ Dragon Girl and colorful ribbons tying back their hair, it seems so silly.

But with gymnastics, it’s not silly—at least not straightforwardly so. After all, the full title of the sport is Women’s Artistic Gymnastics. That is, the women are being judged on their athleticism, on their ability to perform incredibly difficult skills, as well as on artistry—a word that, unlike Raisman’s muscles, eludes a clear definition. The most unambiguous one I could find was within the International Gymnastics Federation’s 2013-2016 “Code of Points,” which is the official and behemoth-sized rulebook for judging gymnastics skills.

Although numerous mentions of the word artistry or “artistic performance” exist, it isn’t until "Section 12—Balance Beam" that we get the following explanation: “An artistic performance is one in which the gymnast demonstrates her ability to transform her [routine] from a well-structured composition into a performance. In so doing the gymnast must demonstrate creativity, confidence of performance, personal style and perfect technique.” And then in a separate, one-sentence paragraph with a couple of bolded words (and one strangely capitalized H), we get:

            This is not “what” the gymnast performs, but “How” she performs.

In other words, gymnastics is a sport where you have to do it all. Style points literally count. You must perform jaw-droppingly difficult skills and look good doing it. I don’t think the same can be said for most other sports. (I’m specifically thinking of those triathletes that collapse across the finish line in a style that might best be described as “dying an extremely painful death.”)

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The more I read O’Rourke’s piece, the more I began to relate less as a gym fan and more as a woman and mother. Just like my young gymnastics heroes, I too have felt the pressure to do it all.

Specifically: I want my body to work; for my belly to stretch to carry my children; to stretch—to put it gently—even more in order to birth them; and for my breasts to fill (read: stretch) with milk and therefore grow larger than they ever had been in my pre-child life. And yet I also want my body to “bounce back” to my pre-child level of thinness, to my pre-child muscularity. (Bounce is actually a horrible word for it, since, in order to work out—to run and jump—like I once did, I now have to wear two sports bras.) And then I want to adorn this imaginary post-child-yet-pre-child-level-of-thinness body with loose, shapeless dresses, wear no makeup, and appear effortlessly beautiful.

Like I did with my first son, I want to be at home with Isaac for at least his first year. I want to breastfeed him for at least that long as well. I want to know what he’s eating, to purée his food, change his diapers, and cover his face with kisses. Simultaneously, I also want to have time to take care of myself, my body, and my brain. I want to read, to work on my next book, to journal, to go to yoga; I want to have this long, sexy hair even though I can’t wear it down for more than two seconds without Isaac or Teddy painfully yanking on it.

I want to have a beautiful, clutter-free, clean house, and yet I also want to enjoy my home, to not feel, as psychotherapist Francis Weller puts it, “flattened under the weight of domestication, which, smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves.” Speaking of wild, I want my boys to run free. I want to run free. (Currently, my two-year-old is much more familiar with the vacuum and collecting “fuzzies” (dust balls) than the beach and collecting rocks/shells.)

I want to strive, strive, strive, push, push, push. And yet, I also want to suddenly come to a screeching halt in order to get those eight hours of sleep everyone is always reporting are so important to your health (read: not looking haggard).

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Gymnastics has evolved in many ways over the generations. In the past, Bela Karolyi along with his wife, Martha, personally coached the majority of America’s top gymnasts. It was a notoriously strict, unsmiling atmosphere; O’Rourke speaks to this: “[The Karolyis], some former gymnasts have alleged, searched their bags for food and micromanaged what they ate in order to get them “in shape”; others felt they pushed them to train through damaging injuries.”

These days, Bela has long since retired. His wife Martha is not a personal coach; she’s the team coordinator—overseeing our nation’s best gymnasts at the once-monthly national training camps. This allows for the gymnasts to spend the majority of their training time at home with their own coaches. One of these top coaches is Kim Zmeskal, a former star pupil of the Karolyis, who in a recent interview, compared her coaching style to that of the Karolyis. “The environment, I think, is lighter than what it was for me growing up,” she says before relaying a story of how she and her fellow gymnasts—women she spent hours upon hours with almost daily—were not supposed to talk to one another while chalking up.

And perhaps time has softened Martha as well. According to O’Rourke: “Allegedly, [Martha] even ordered pizza for the national team once.” (Similarly, in a rare and radical act of self-kindness, one month after Isaac was born, I purchased myself a new pair of jeans that actually fit me!)

And yet, even with these improvements, O’Rourke reports to still finding herself “worried for tiny 19-year-old Madison Kocian” who seemed to her particularly fragile.

Likewise, even with the progress women have made over these same generations (I may hate pumping milk, but, hey, at least my health insurance covered the cost of my breast pump!), I’ve found myself worried not only for myself and the pressure I feel to do it all, but for young pregnant women everywhere.

In the words of acclaimed chef and owner of Tartine Bakery, Liz Prueitt: “Women in their early twenties don’t see it coming. It’s going to hit them… They think they’re hot shit in the workplace, and they’re going to suddenly discover that when they have a baby, everything comes to a screeching halt. The thing that these young women are going to find out is that it just keeps rolling along to the same conversation: How do women have it all? And it’s going to be in every magazine forever and it’s the wrong question.”

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Referencing the sport’s inherent femininity and its simultaneous physical demand on the body, O’Rourke writes: “In being both those things at once, it speaks to all that remains unresolved in our ideas about the female body and its power.”

And while I agree that our ideas about the female body and its power are, indeed, unresolved, perhaps the gymnasts themselves have it figured out. Aly Raisman is performing world-class gymnastics; she looks good doing it; and (bonus points?) seems to have a really strong sense of self. As for me, as confused as I am—as torn between appreciating my body and criticizing it, between feeling endlessly grateful for motherhood and feeling trapped by it, between wanting to appear effortlessly pretty and wanting to literally put no time or effort into that aim—I remain hopeful for the future.

I don’t have any daughters, per se, but I’m hopeful for them to become mothers or to choose not to in a better, more evolved world; one with all sorts of women in all different sizes, ages, and colors, to look up to; a world with the option to be able to take time off from work to care for their babies as well as the option to be able to return to work the instant they want to. I wish for them partners who are able to help. I wish for them more affordable and better childcare. And of course, I also wish for them a future where all gymnastics competitions are given prime-time, NFL-style broadcast treatment.