Internet Time Machine
Moms Anonymous
Learning to love 25,000 strangers in an online birth club
This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
I took two months off spinning class because of first-trimester nausea, so when I showed up this week at my regular Monday 6 p.m. class at the Y, everyone was very excited to see me. There was a lot of exclaiming over my new bump, and in the first few minutes of warm-up everyone chimed in about how many kids they had, or wanted to have, and when, and how old they were then, and how old they are now.
I mean it perfectly sincerely when I say I love the members of the YMCA Monday 6 p.m. spinning class. The class has around two dozen regular members. Most are middle-aged women, but there are also teenagers and elderly members, as well as half a dozen men. Some appear very fit, from the outside anyway, while others do not. Some wear slick prismatic cycling unitards and others, cotton T-shirts they got for free from fun runs in the early ’90s. About half have those clip-in cycling shoes. They work in a variety of professions, with a tendency toward below-the-line studio workers (I live in Los Angeles). The instructor’s husband is a camera operator; another member is a stunt person.
