How Many More?

I will always wonder this: How many more women could have found happiness with the barbell?

How many women went through this life with no adequate avenue of expression for their frustration, their malaise, their anger?

How many women bit their lips and took what was handed to them?

How many cried alone at the kitchen table?

How many locked themselves in the bathroom when the little hands became too much, sticky in their sweet but unyielding almost suffocating need for love and attention?

How many women simply tried to eat themselves into happiness, grateful for the first rush of the carbs, masking the bitter pain of this world for just a moment and then plunging into the darkness again, now heavier and unhappier than before?

How many drank themselves into another existence?

How many scheduled themselves into oblivion?

Too many. Far too many.

But it didn't have to be that way, and it doesn't have to be that way now.

Not every woman will find happiness with the barbell.

Not every woman will channel her frustrations into the steel and the iron. Not every woman will feel her soul rise with the fall of bumpers.

But some women will.

And if they tell the others, at least that's a start.

And maybe that number of unhappy women grows smaller.

We can always dream.