Mom Sent My Fat Ass a Treadmill Desk

Dreyfusses are good at a lot of things. Talking. Gesticulating. Interrupting. Relating to the news. Making everything about us. Eating. Relaxing. And giving gifts.

Last year I sent someone a bar of soap for Christmas. It wasn’t a very kind present, but it was useful.

For my birthday in 2013, my mom sent me a box full of canned beans. She bought them in an overpriced grocery store in Idaho and shipped them UPS to me in Massachusetts because she was worried I did not have enough fiber in my diet.

This year she sent me a treadmill desk.

Hint: taken.

“It’s my fault you have Dreyfuss genes, and it’s my job to make sure they never catch up to you,” she told me in her kitchen over Thanksgiving. “I’m going to do something about it.”

My mother is a shiksa, a blond bombshell who tempted my father away from his own people with her irreverence and adorable inability to wink. She has the sinewy genes of scots-irish farmers. I didn’t get those. My father has fought the battle against the Dreyfuss genes as long as I remember knowing him, sweating on a treadmill every morning of my childhood and swearing the whole time.

Last year he and I went on walks together once a week to encourage health and togetherness. Granted, he lives in California and I in Boston, but he strapped on a bluetooth headset and I called him from my phone while walking around the neighborhood. OK, yes, I am not sure he was actually walking. I should have Facetimed him. But then he would have known that once I said I was walking but I was really sitting on my kitchen floor with my cat.

It’s hard to move. Especially when you work from home and are addicted to your computer. I have noticed my ass expanding to match the size of my couch. And instead of doing anything about it, I bought a completely inappropriate stretch onesie.

So thank god for mothers. I’m typing this while walking .5 miles an hour, and actually, it’s pretty easy. Fewer typos so far than when I’m sitting! Miracles!

Thanks, Mama.