Three months after giving birth, my body finally felt like mine again. I could bend, lift, walk, without that careful, guarded feeling. So I did what I always do at the start of a new season. I made a plan. One hour of exercise, every day, nothing intense, just movement, written down, the kind that looks responsible on paper.
I missed it almost immediately.
Not because I didn’t want to move. I did. But between feeding my baby, cooking, and trying to remember if I’d eaten lunch, that one hour sat on my list like a stranger. Something I owed my body, not something we were doing together. Most days I never touched it. I’d tell myself tomorrow, and tomorrow would show up looking exactly like today.
Here’s what I didn’t understand back then. I wasn’t missing exercise. I was missing a rhythm my day could actually hold.
So I started noticing the movement that was already there, unnamed. Walking to the sari-sari store, baby strapped to me, because we’d run out of something for dinner. Morning and afternoon stroller walks, not for fitness, just because a fussy baby settles when the world moves past her. Squatting for toys. Standing at the sink. Folding laundry, hips shifting, because standing still has never suited me. Once in a while, on a morning she slept a little longer, a YouTube walking video, sneakers still on from the school run.
None of it looked like the hour I’d planned. All of it was movement. I just hadn’t been counting it.
I wasn’t missing exercise. I was missing a rhythm my day could actually hold.
I needed a word for what I was noticing, and I kept coming back to alaga, gentle, patient care. Discipline had turned movement into a routine, an hour, no exceptions, something my day had to bend around. Alaga turned it into a rhythm instead, moving with my day rather than against it, the way a walk fits between breastfeeding and breakfast, the way laundry becomes its own small stretch.
That’s the real difference. A routine breaks the first time your day doesn’t cooperate, and with a newborn, it never does. A rhythm just adjusts. It was never separate from my day to begin with. It was already inside it, once I stopped treating movement as a debt and started treating it as one way of caring for the body I actually live in, my katawan.
I still start most mornings the same way, a glass of water, my vitamins, before anyone else needs anything from me. That part hasn’t changed. What changed is everything after it. I stopped asking my body to earn its rest through one perfect hour, and let the small, ordinary work of caring for my child count as care for myself too.
If a habit’s been sitting on your list, Mom, I’m not going to tell you to try harder. I’ll ask something smaller instead. Where is it already hiding inside the day you’re living right now? It might be closer than the hour you keep failing to find.
With love,
Kristen
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