Bulging Calves

My mother despised physical exercise.

She found it distasteful.

I remember watching TV ballet with her. As delightful ballerinas in soft bell-shaped tutus danced on pointe, Mom said, "Look at her calf, the way it bulges. That's disgusting!"

Mother also picked at her food, eating much less than I did, keeping herself femininely slender with a narrow waist and calves that dared not bulge. 

In her eighties, mother developed osteoporosis, that disease of porous and brittle bones. 

Her fragility made her fall. She broke bones. After a hospital stay, she returned to the Home where she lived, to do physical therapy—exercises to strengthen her body.

Exercises!  

How she hated them. 

She did them grudgingly. 

When she became stronger, she returned to her room. Predictably after a  week or two passed, she fell again. Once more the hospital and the loathsome exercises.

Repeatedly she fell.

She saw that the rest of her life would continue like this, and she couldn't stand it. 

She stopped eating. That was easy enough for a picky eater like herself; she just looked at her food to remember where it would take her:  fall, hospital, those horrid exercises. That quelled her already finicky appetite.

The doctor called me. "She has stopped eating." He paused. "Now we can feed her intravenously, but I really wouldn't recommend it." He paused longer. "She really doesn't want to live, but it's your call."

I slept on it, then I let her go.  

Did I kill her? Or was it suicide? Or just a strong case of will.

From the example of my mother's life, I learned to eat well, with plenty of calcium, and to exercise. 

Unlike my mother, every morning I voluntarily work through a sequence of 15 exercises: squats, twists, tucks, stretches and the like. Then and only then do I allow myself to eat breakfast, a hearty meal for me.

I'm almost as old now as my mother was when she died, and I'm used to nurses telling me what good physical condition I'm in. Periodically, my doctor tests my bones. They're fine, sturdy.

I don't tell Mother about this. I don't want her turning over in her grave at the thought that her daughter might have actually chosen calves that bulge.