Chelsey Clammer is the award-winning author of the essay collections Human Heartbeat Detected (Red Hen Press, 2022), Circadian (Red Hen Press, 2017), and BodyHome (Hopewell Publications, 2015). Her work has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Brevity, andMcSweeney’s, among many others. She teaches online writing classes with WOW! Women On Writing and is a freelance editor. www.chelseyclammer.com

Survival of the Fittest

T-shirt my dad wore around the house when I was growing up:

“Why do men die before their wives? Because they want to.”

My father had a fancy corporate job for a decade and then some but got fired from it, which made him all depressed and feeling like a failure, which resulted in him staying in bed all day, drunk or about to be, watching football and golf and the History Channel, becoming a suicidal lump lying in bed, quilt tangled around his legs, trying not to act drunk.

Conversely, my mother was a Jazzercise instructor. An upbeat, active, manically smiling housewife who was just trying to keep everything together as my father fissured post-firing. In the context of him, Jazzercise was her savior. A reprieve. A way out of the house. A tool she used in the fight for her survival.

What my mother had to survive: an unreliable, lying, hiding, caught-drinking-at-his-desk, unemployed, relapsing alcoholic who was legit mentally ill, physically ill, and basically just drowning in his abysmal self-made situation.

Yup. Time to go teach a Jazzercise class.

Up on the stage, my mom could get into her zone and not have to think about how she:

• Pawned his gun so he wouldn’t make a dumb, drunk decision.

• Called the cops in Dallas to check on him while he was out of town on some business prospect thingy and he sounded drunk and was threatening suicide and so she called the cops and they arrived and then reported back to her that, yes, he was drunk. Very drunk. They also found him trying to twist the bedsheets into a rope.

• Took him to the ER one night when he got drunk, again, and she just couldn’t handle him.

  • (He walked out of the ER after she left, staggered straight toward the liquor store across the street but ended up passed out on a slab of grass in the parking lot, which earned him a police escort to detox.)

• Asked her 14-year-old daughter (that’s me) to go talk to him because he was drunk and suicidal again and she just couldn’t handle him.

• Just couldn’t handle him.

o   (Like how he couldn’t handle his liquor.)

• Said “till death do us part” and didn’t know how to break that promise.

Even though she also didn’t know how to break my father’s cyclical self-sabotaging approach to life that each relapse re-incited, my mother could resist his struggle for existence dragging her down. Jazzercise picked her up. Perked her up. It was her survival.

Judi Sheppard Missett started Jazzercise in 1969. Originally a jazz dancer, she wanted to create a way for people to get in shape while having fun. Mixing peppy dance moves with popular music, Jazzercise became the way to exercise. What started as a fun informal class would eventually turn into a $93 million corporation with staff and participants spanning the globe in thirty-two countries.  

To be a Jazzercise instructor, you have to pass a number of tests and classes—practice routines, leading your own routine, and of course the required CPR certification. Before you can have your own franchise and begin teaching Jazzercise, you have to master each move. Jazzercise steps look simple, but aren’t. It takes a good instructor to make them look easy. Each move works some muscle group. Marching in place sounds simple enough, but in Jazzercise, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do each step. Like life. Most people can bend their knees up toward their chests, but only the fit ones trained by Judi Sheppard Missett’s monthly instructional videos and notes can put in the true spunk and energy that keeps them smiling throughout a class, keeps marching looking exciting, keeps moving as they help others to move their way toward a new body—one dance step at a time.

Before he relapsed, before his depression settled in and festered within him, before the cluster headaches started attacking his brain, and before insomnia tsunamied through his body, my dad was a great businessman. Vice President of Sales, actually, for Kraft Foods. Having worked his way up the corporate ladder, starting as a salesminion, my hard-working father went from living paycheck-to-paycheck and renting out the basement of our house because he couldn’t afford the mortgage payment to graduating into a six-figure salary. While my mom stayed at home to take care of her daughters, my dad was out in the world, giving firm handshakes and saying just what it was that prospective clients needed to hear so he could seal whatever deal he was working on. I imagine he had stellar eye contact.

Thirteen years of this sober stellar-ness until a pain started creeping in behind his left eye. First a twinge, then a stab, then a sharp searing through his temple and jaw as the cluster headaches wreaked havoc through his head. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get to work. Couldn’t function with the pain and the fatigue, and so he did what he could to survive. He relapsed—drank when the pain started so he could just pass out, just get to work the next day to continue providing for his family.

Though, relapsing eventually only made everything worse.

Shocker.

Before my dad got sucked into his own downward spiral, he was on top of his game, sober, owning his own world and not being dragged around by it. His world of working and golfing and winning vacations to Jamaica where he would take his peppy little wife on cruise ships and tell people with pride, “This is my wife, Mindy. She’s a Jazzercise instructor and owns her own franchise.” Because although she was “just” a housewife, she was building a life for herself, building an admirable body, building a business within a corporation like my father was doing, and he was proud of her and sober enough to realize it, even though she was all about fitness more than business.

Judi Sheppard Missett wasn’t just teaching dance moves, she wanted Jazzercise to be a way of life, to be part of a thing that inspired people to change their lives.

“The more physical movement you have, the more your whole life will move.” –Judi Sheppard Missett

My mom the body mover, the Jazzercise instructor, Zone Diet guru and busybody epitome would nag at my father the binge eater, the smoker, the lounger.

For instance:

“You don’t need more than two cookies.”

“Slow down when you eat.”

“You have food on your mustache.”

“That’s enough mashed potatoes.”

Yet despite the nagging, there was a spark there at some point. A common interest. A strong bond that led to tying the knot—a knot my mother refused to undo, even when twenty years later he was tangled in his own self-destruction, drenched in vodka and threatening suicide, she would never un-knot herself from him.

Small crates of single-song cassette tapes. Rewound. Ready to go. Lined up in order: warm-up, cardio, muscle toning, cooldown, stretching. Church basement chairs folded up and leaned against the walls to make room for all the dancing that was about to happen. Full water bottle, stage left. Sweat towel, stage right, near the boom box. Wireless mic attached to her headband—check. She’s ready.

As the instructor’s daughter, I tagged along to classes enough to know how to do the setup. Sometimes I came dressed in a T-shirt and mesh basketball shorts to fumble around on the floor, attempting to follow my mother’s steps. Or, I sat in the side room and babysat the kids her Jazzercise students couldn’t leave at home—$1/head for the hour. I’d hear the steady, peppy beat of the songs that often inundated our house as Mom practiced the routines at home.

Being a Jazzercise instructor’s daughter means you grow up with organization. Closets full of labeled shoeboxes packed with cassette tapes and slouchy socks and neon spandex (and other questionable fashion choices—a floral leotard just doesn’t look the same in hindsight). It means highlighters are always nearby—a necessity for reading notes and learning new routines.

It also means getting excited each month for the big Jazzercise box to be delivered to your doorstep. The new VHS tape that went through the routines. The cassette singles of all the new songs. And also in that box, the printed-out notes for the new moves. My mother took her highlighters to those notes—a color-coded process she created to learn the new step combinations. Sitting on her floor in her office, back against the daybed, a clipboard holding the instructions, highlighters ready, she watched the VHS making notes, memorizing the steps, practicing them, and then watching her body in the mirror do lunges, the kick ball change, chasse, and the like. The names I know, their associated movements I’m not so sure of. Either way, when you’re a Jazzercise instructor’s daughter, you watch your mom watching herself in the mirror and you see learned perfection—a master at work. Her body all crisp curvature of muscles. Each bit of her 5-foot-2 bite-sized body exuding strength. The sweat that glistened on her chest after each class. The heavily moving ribcage, though always an exuberant smile on her face.

When I picture my mother during those 15 years that she taught Jazzercise, I focus back on one night, after some class, when she was all sweaty and wiping herself off with the little frozen hand towels she brought with her and one of her students was standing with her in front of the stage. The student was chatting her up, and my mother was smiling and gesticulating, her shining skin flushed with the red hues of excitement, engagement. She was in her zone—her element.

But I was also the daughter of the VP of Sales at Kraft Foods, which meant we had a lot of cheese in the house. And cheesecakes. And those awesome Kraft caramels. We went to trade shows where we got to sample every assortment of cheese imaginable and take pictures with a Cher impersonator and chill in the daycare room where my sister and I made necklaces out of yarn and Fruit Loops. It meant company Christmas parties at hotels where we daughters stayed in our room that adjoined that of my parents while they were downstairs and the hotel chef—who my dad knew personally—would bring us fancy meals and check in on us. It meant company picnics with killer prizes for the hula-hoop contest like the Walkman my mother got when she won. A Kraft Foods employee for a dad meant we never had Hidden Valley in our house. True to his brand, my father took pride in his work. Along with “Kraft” labeled on just about every food item we ate, it was also emblazoned on the businessman-essential fancy day planners and briefcases and specialized pens my proud father also had engraved with his initials—JRC.

There were, of course, the monetary benefits too. Nice houses. Nice neighborhoods. Pool in the backyard. A company car.

There were, of course, not benefits: a father who was never home. A father who golfed on weekends instead of going to his daughter’s softball games. A father who moved his family around the United States as he worked his way up that corporate ladder. Granted, the company always paid for the moving truck and moving men and we never had to pack our stuff ourselves, but with each move, another sense of losing something. Like how my father lost his family time as he traded his father role for that of VP of Sales.

I consider him now. Consider how I would snag glances of him when he was home. Usually, he kept to his room, only to take hourly cigarette breaks in the backyard. His smoking looked like an act of contemplation. A mess of black curly hair on his head, his lip sporting a mustache long after they became unpopular, his wire-rimmed glasses held high with his pointy nose, his dark eyes gazing out from behind them, considering. I never asked what he was thinking about when I would run into him out there or peek at him through the window. But he was always looking off into the distance, beyond the fence of our perfectly manicured lawn, looking out at something, smoking and contemplating something I’ll never know.

What I do know, though, is that being the daughter of a heavy smoker meant we grew up with Joe Camel jackets, keychains, and even an inflatable lounger for our pool bought with Camel Cash. It also meant I could steal cigarettes from my father. Whenever I could sneak one out of his closet, I would change into workout clothes, hide the cigarette and a lighter in my sports bra, tell my mom I was going out for a run, then jog down the street to an empty lot and smoke the cigarette.

I am indeed a combination of my parents. Genetics never fails.

A lot of Jazzercise instructor applicants fail at hip walks. They sink their hip into the movement when they should be picking up the foot and pushing it down as they move to the side. It’s about utilizing those obliques. About using the core muscles to stabilize your body so you move your foot and place it back down. Sinking the hip makes this move ineffective. The core unengaged, the step builds nothing for your strength.

My mother started taking Jazzercise because of this kind of move. The oblique muscles—the core engagement. A strong core needed to help relieve her lower back pain after giving birth a few times.

Also, metaphor: How the hip walk is like my mother’s resistance to just succumbing to life’s movements. To just let her husband sink into his own unhealthy life that led to his depression. She worked on trying to change that for him. Encouraged diets and walking and good-intentioned nagging, to be the core strength of his life—pick him up, encourage him to engage his own resilience instead of submitting to the depression.

But the hip walk is a hard move to get right. And the person with whom you walk down the aisle can be hard to help move toward a sense of persistence. That is, just because the instructor is an excellent hip walker, doesn’t mean those who are watching can match her resistance to the sinking.

Though my father did at times try to rise. Survive.

Memory: Pre-sunrise. Dark outside. I was in high school, training for my first marathon. My feet were pounding down the sidewalk close to home, the streetlights just a dim, globelike hue in lighting up a small circumference of the sidewalk. I almost didn’t see him. A larger man walking my way, the darkness swallowing his would-be shadows. It was only in the split-second before passing that recognition settled in.

“Hey, Chels.”

“Oh. Hey, Dad.” He knew I was me before I knew he was he. But in our passing, I saw him. Dark pants. Windbreaker. That dumb golf hat.

A father–daughter pair making a brief, non-event passing. Me, training for a marathon. He, just trying to walk off a few pounds and get more in shape in the hopes that healthiness will cure his cluster headaches.

This was a moment of his attempt to change his life.

This was a moment when I felt some pride. Even a little relief. My father was doing something good for himself. It felt odd because I never considered him as a man capable of turning around some part of his life. But there he was, just like me, moving his body for a greater purpose in the pre-dawn darkness.

This moment was just months before another relapse.

How the temporary changes in his life left him unchanged.

Before learning the chasse ball change, you first need to master the chasse. It’s all about shifting your weight onto the leading foot with each step. Beginners often get it wrong. It’s not a hop and tap, but a shift of focus and energy. A physical attention on the torso centered and one foot leading the other. The movement consists of a specific rhythm: Not 1 and 2 and 3, 4 like many beginners will do. Rather, it’s 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. But the foot that follows might lose its energy. The importance of its rhythmic existence.

My mom tried to lead my father through his health and well-being. But each movement, the weight of depression kept his feet dragging on the floor. It’s a hard fall when you get knocked off the corporate ladder one rung from its top.

Although my mother was making some money with Jazzercise, a year after her husband was fired, she had to take the financial lead. My dad became the one who followed, losing his energy, losing his health benefits as he lost his job. He stayed stuck.

So, after teaching Jazzercise for fifteen years, my mother had to quit her franchise, quit what sustained her, quit instructing classes to work at a grocery store so she could get health insurance.

For my father, the rhythm of life was eventually too hard to keep up with, even with my mother leading.

1 and 2 and 3, floor.

She found him on the floor.

Two years and too many relapses after he was fired, his gray cold body pretzeled on the bedroom floor.

This was the morning after a huge fight the night before. My dad drunk, putting rocks in his pockets and saying he was going to drown himself in the pond out back. She told him to sleep on it. To sleep it off. To wake up and decide to be sober and live in this house or be drunk and live somewhere else. Then she went to sleep.

A handful of hours later, she woke up, heard an eerie silence, went into his room and found him on the floor. Alcohol poisoning.

This was the moment my mother’s hands have been trained for. Informed hands. Hands that never had to employ what they knew—had known for over a decade, for fifteen years’ worth of CPR re-certifications—until my mother finds my father gray and cold on his bedroom floor. She knew what to do, but never did she imagine what her husband’s ribs would feel like crackling underneath the weight of her clenched, pumping palms. Nothing could have prepared her for this moment. Still, she persisted. Pumped his chest with a purpose until EMS arrived.

It takes a lot of strength to live beyond that moment.

Her hands didn’t pump life back into my father, but the paramedics who arrived did. They left mud prints on the floor. It was raining heavily that morning like how it did the day of his memorial service a week later. Because even though the paramedics found his heartbeat (as if it was hiding somewhere deep within him, a life-altering game of hide-and- go-seek), the nun still came into the small waiting room in the hospital thirty minutes later to deliver my mother the news that she was now a widow.

Now she would have to survive the husband who didn’t.

Judi tells you, “Most importantly…be persistent. It’s your challenge to grow!”

My father couldn’t take that challenge. Perhaps he was trying to chase down the motivation to be the husband and father my family desired. If so, he couldn’t get the movements right. After he died, we found a stash of donuts hidden in a cupboard in the garage above his pegboard wall of tools. He hid so much of himself, must have stuffed down so many emotions and regrets and just tried to hold on. My mother held on, came out on top. Alone. The (chasse ball) change just another movement she mastered.

A year or so after my father died, my mother made her final move. She picked up her life, drove back to the state she never wanted to move away from in the first place—Colorado. Here, instead of headbands and spandex, she wears insulated hats and hardcore hiking tights as she marches around the trails that the Rocky Mountains have to offer.

Those mountains mean something to me. Something like strength and independence. Exploring the rocky terrain with body. With breath. They mean something like space and freedom. And her survival.

Her body and breath are always in movement. Motions like a prayer, full of gratitude. A thankfulness because of the life she has survived. And for the one she now lives.

I want to capture my mother here, to calm her spirit into something I can sink into. I want words more meditative for her than fast and spunky. Maybe because she is fast and spunky and so I want to slow her down in narrative time. But she’s always moving—always in motion. A mother whose freedom from work and marriage—now retired, now widowed—means a woman who is no longer held down. And so she moves. Marches on trails. Discovers the mountains of Colorado as a place to explore her new, free self.

She sends me pictures of herself hiking. Gorgeous mountain terrain unfurling behind her. Though these photos look odd to me because there is my mother standing still. Her body on pause. The flittering suspended so an image can be captured.

There she is among the mountains—more vibrant and alive than I have ever seen her.  Her movements no longer memorized routines, but freely moving, winding around the trails of the Colorado Rockies. She’s still the fittest woman I know. Which is to say the strongest survivor I’ve ever witnessed.

Why did my mother outlive my father?

Because she wanted to.