Trust me: anytime I do yoga it’s hot yoga

I was introduced to yoga at a young age. My mother wavered between being a passionate practitioner and a happy hobbyist. She yoga-d in fits and starts as interest, time, and mood dictated. I remember coming home from high school one fateful day to find her on the kitchen floor, madly twisted on her mat like the plot of a Dickens’ novel. Not to make this all about me, but… what I really remember is having to awkwardly step over her to reach the cookies. 

We were fairly vanilla folk in a hugely vanilla town, existing a country mile behind the zeitgeist of the times and even farther from any kind of cutting edge. To find one’s mother doing yoga in those days only made a kid feel confused, rattled, a little queasy in the stomach. Honestly, it made a kid wonder: what next? Dad abandoning his job as a realtor to fly off to India to mingle with the Maharishi? Siblings smoking weed and taking up the sitar? The hound, looking like an old bag of bones, meditating in the Lotus Position.

God, I fretted, what if my friends were to unexpectedly drop in and find the family like this, decked out in sarongs, our home transformed into an ashram. All I could take solace in was the fact that at least mom was not (yet) pulling a Shirley – a family friend and relative newcomer to the craft of making rugs -- who proudly, giddily flitted about town introducing herself as The Happy Hooker.

Ah, the lengths parents will go to mortify their offspring.