Dancing with Mom

I remember those early mornings as a kid, shuffling into the living room half awake to find the day already in full swing. The sun coming through the curtains, laying warm bars of light across the carpet. And there, right in the middle of it, was Mom, moving to the music on our old television.

It was Richard Simmons. Sweatin' to the Oldies, on VHS, and to my young eyes the whole thing was magic. Mom in her leg warmers with her big hair, a total eighties queen, dancing and laughing and sweating along with him.

Sometimes she would notice me watching and reach out a hand to pull me in. I would laugh and try to copy her and get it hilariously wrong, which is more or less what happens now when my daughters try to teach me a TikTok dance. I still do not get it.

What stayed with me was not the footwork or the songs. It was the look on her face. The laughing. The fact that she was clearly enjoying herself at seven in the morning in her own living room, and that none of it was about how she looked.

Those mornings taught me something early that took me another twenty years to be able to say properly. It was not about perfection and it was not about a body. It was about moving, laughing, and being glad to be alive on a Tuesday.

The world outside our house was often difficult in those years. That living room was not. For half an hour it was a room where a woman danced badly and joyfully with her kid, and where the point of exercise was that it felt good.

I think about that a lot now, doing the work I do. Almost every man who comes to me has a version of fitness in his head that runs on suffering, discipline and a target. He has never once considered that it might be allowed to be fun, and that if it were fun he would still be doing it in ten years.

My mom never read a word about adherence or intrinsic motivation. She put a tape on and had a nice time, for years, and it worked.

That old VHS with its worn edges is probably in a bin at the back of a thrift store somewhere. The lesson made it out.

I wrote this in October 2023 and I ended it, at the time, with something about the speculation around Richard Simmons stepping away from public life. That ending does not belong here any more.

Richard Simmons died on 13 July 2024, at 76. The Los Angeles medical examiner ruled the death accidental, from complications of falls, with heart disease a contributing factor.

I never met him, and it does not matter. For a few years he was a voice out of a television in Ontario that got my mother dancing in her own living room at seven in the morning, badly and happily, in front of her kid.

Forty years of telling frightened people they were allowed to enjoy this. That is the whole job, and he did it without a shred of cynicism, which is more than most of us in this industry can claim.

Thanks, Richard.