WERE WE BAD GIRLS THIS T-DAY? A TEXT-FEST BETWEEN FRIENDS

“If you do something physically active tomorrow (60mins or longer) you can write off Thanksgiving dinner as a zero. Yup...you read that right! A big fat zero!!” –said our coaches to us via email, before T-day.

So we wrote off Thanksgiving dinner. I totally did. As if it were a tax “write off.” Nothing deducted. Nothing gained. My girls did too. We all exercised. We all felt good. Like we earned the meal. For almost two weeks of conscientious eating and exercising. It was all good. We were being good. And we felt good.

Until it felt bad.

Until we realized Thanksgiving, or “Turkey Day” or “T-Day” was more than one meal. Or one day. It was like, like, two days, a weekend, a three-day weekend even, a season. Oy vey.

So it started with texts:

Me: Um, I am baking…with a beer. Shit. Well so much for coaching.

Partner: LOL

Partner: It’s the season, what you making me?

Me: I am gonna complain, where are our coaches, HAHAH (as if a call, email or text from one of them would save me from the urge to bake or finish the beer I reluctantly opened.)

So I text the girls a picture of the bars I am baking.

Partner: Yum

Partner: What is it?

Me: Make-shift magic bars. I was missing ingredients so I was getting creative. Graham. Butter. Condensed milk. Chocolate chips and coconut. I didn’t have coconut or chocolate chips. So I used dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses and granola.

Friend (new on the thread, but also in the Challenge): Just got back from 2hr bike ride with the family…think I should eat one.

Me: Come get’ em, hahaha.

Friend: Save my fat ass one (P.S. her ass is hardly fat!!!)

Me: Will bring to “Power Hour”…if they are good.

Friend: Yeah!!! We will have to be incognito (at this point I am in tears laughing as I imagine handing a bag of baked goods to my friends in the Challenge—in the parking lot of the Function Factory—as if it were a drug deal or something.)

The texting went on for days (the whole weekend actually) on the topic of wine and beer, mint liquor hot chocolate, and Phil’s BBQ. And how we needed our coaches. Or how the challenge was on hiatus. Or how the challenge just got off the rails. Or went. The challenge, a looming concept that sort of hung over us, or me, as I relished the cheese from my friend’s store, or the chocolate cookies I chose to nosh on over “pumpkin pie.” The choices we made, or I made, that made me feel a tickle of that age-old guilt I felt as kid—sneaking candy from the freezer per say. The choices that made me feel like a bad girl. Ugh.

But then I let it go.

I let it go when I recalled a book I lent to my partner many years back, “The Good Girls Guide to Bad Girl…” the last word to remain absent. The book and specifically the topic of  “a good girl gone bad” and I thought to myself, “This is the Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Girl T-DAY.” And I smiled. I laughed. And, I stopped feeling badly. Because I don’t like feeling badly. I am not sure anyone does. And to be quite frank, it might just be OK to be “bad” on occasion. Good girls deserve to be bad sometimes, at least I think.

In a squelching hot 75 minute yoga class on Sunday night my instructor with the fittest body ever, said, “I love pizza, I ate a whole one last night, by myself. Pizza gets a bad rap.” And in that moment, I sealed my practice with a message to myself.

Maybe we were bad girls? Maybe we were just girls. Maybe a little badness is good. Maybe to be good, to be truly good, you have to know what it means, what it feels like, to be bad. To be a little deviant. To be naughty. Good, bad, naughty, nice. Oy, the holidays…talk about messing with our minds. And this Challenge. Namaste.