the Mother Runner

I ran across a description of the kind of writer/woman I want to be as I was reading “An Album Quilt” by John McPhee in In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (edited by Lee Gutkind). McPhee is describing a woman who lived over a hundred years ago in Wyoming ranchland. Her journals were given to him by her son, whom McPhee had been doing some research with.

He writes: ” . . . the admiration and affection I came to feel toward her is probably matched by no one I’ve encountered in my professional life. This was not merely because she had the courage to venture as a young teach into a very distant country, or because she later educated her own bright children, or because she was more than equal to the considerable difficulties of ranch subsistence, but also because she recorded these things — in her journals and later writings — with such wit, insight, grace, irony, compassion, sarcasm, stylistic elegance, and embracing humor that I could not resist her.”

Micah’s Father of the Year Award moment: accidentally teaching Squish that shovels = monsters. And not just any monsters, scary monsters. We’re suddenly even more glad there hasn’t been much snow this year.

How is it that my sons are totally into mermaids and ballerinas? I do not have any idea where they were exposed to mermaids. I think I can credit Angelina with the ballerina thing, but it was one book! That we read, like, twice. I suppose it could be worse. It could be Lady Gaga. (And not that I have anything against my sons being into such things . . . I’m just surprised.)

Manchild has suddenly been showing signs of patience with his little brother. The other day Squish knocked down his castle four times in a row and each time the boy explained to his brother how sad it made him that all his hard work had been ruined and that he had to start again. Of course, this was after he had tackled Squish away from the blocks. But I was impressed by how quickly he recomposed himself.

It is totally worth it to get up at 6:30 to go running with a friend once in a while. Even if you could get up at 8:00 and go by yourself.

Seriously?

I am growing my hair out a little bit and every time I get used to doing it a certain way, it is suddenly too long for that, or it bends the wrong way, or it generally seems to have it in for me.

This morning when the boys woke up, the first thing I heard was yelling. Followed by a thud. Followed by another yell, this time from the other one. I’m still trying to put together the pieces, but I think that Squish woke his brother up by jumping on him. Manchild was none too pleased.

I have two new cooking goals: street meat and homemade ramen. I’ll let you know how they go, whenever it is that I get around to it.

Micah knows someone who doesn’t eat peanut butter sandwiches simply because she has never eaten a peanut butter sandwich. And really, why start now? Does anybody else have anything like that? Something they do or don’t do simply because they’ve always (or never) done it?

At 7:00 my alarm goes off. I’ve already been up several times. At 3:00, at 5:00, maybe even at 6:00. I consider rolling over and claiming another few hours of sleep. But I’m awake and I might as well get used to the idea. So I grab the clothes I piled at the foot of the bed last night, fish around in my backpack for the watch, sneak out the door without turning the light on. I assume my sisters are asleep in their beds, but I don’t take the time to check.

Instead I go upstairs, change my clothes in the bathroom, put in my contacts. It’s still dark. I wasn’t anticipating that. I’ll wait until the sun rises. It’s raining. I don’t need to compound the rain with darkness. Especially since I am no longer very familiar with the route I’m taking. I sit on the couch, check my e-mail on my laptop, peek between the curtain cracks for hints of daylight. I chat with my brother as he passes through. My sister walks by on her way to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast.

Finally, a little past 8:00. There is no sun, but the sky is gray instead of black. “I should be back around 9:00,” I tell my sister as I slip out the door. I don’t wait for my watch to find the satellites. The ground is cold and wet and before I am even out of the driveway my toes are cold in my FiveFingers and toe socks. I love running in the rain, I tell myself. This is partially true. I love having run in the rain. And I love being outside. And I love running. But it always takes some mind tricks to put all the pieces together in the moment.

Within half a mile I’m to the hills. The big ones, that is. In my head I imagined steep, short rises followed by plenty of flat for recovery. My head imagined wrong. Steep rise follows steep rise. I am tired and gasping. You’re not at sea level anymore, I tell myself. I try not to think I’m making excuses. You’re tired, you haven’t slept well, I tell myself. And I try not to think I’m making excuses. My contacts seem to be broken. I can’t see the street signs. I let myself walk so I can get close enough to one to see where I am. I start running again. Turn a corner. See the length of the hill. Feel defeated. Feel the burning in my calves and lungs. I squint to see if that is really the top. I slow down so I can get a view without bouncing. A car passes at the top of the hill.  I can make that, I think. And I do. I turn the corner. And die. Another hill. No, I tell myself. It’s short. It’s gentle. You can do this. I do my best. And then I am home free. A mile and a half down, three and a half to go.

It’s easy. Flat, straight. I’m in my groove. I know my way. And when I turn the corner to go down the hill, I don’t have to play mind games to know that I love running in the rain. Even the cold rain. But more hills are waiting. More burning in the cold rain. More squinty-eyed stares at street signs and intersections and approaching vehicles. When I get home, my watch doesn’t say 5 miles, so I keep running. A little bit down the hill, a little bit up. I watch the watch. 4.97. 4.98. 4.99. 5. I’m in the driveway, up the stairs, through the door.

My sister is rolling out cinnamon rolls when I walk in. “How was it?” she asks.

“Probably the most miserable run I’ve ever been on,” I say. But I’m laughing.

This weekend I missed two connecting flights.

I spent approximately 15 extra hours at San Francisco International Airport.

I slept on a bench. Or, more accurately, four seats lined up together without armrests. My wool coat kept me warm.

I ate 5 1/2 slices of Costco pizza, one slice of birthday cake, and one slice of wedding cake. Both cakes were in celebration of the same girl (and her new husband).

I did not get in a car accident. But two of my sisters (including the birthday girl/bride) did. No injuries, minor damage to cars. Snow was to blame.

I completed, more or less, four crossword puzzles.

I read a half dozen essays.

I slept in a twin bed for the first time in seven years.

I wore a little black dress. And maroon tights.

I called Micah a half dozen times. Or more.

I took 123 pictures.

I ran seven miles.

I helped make a dinner in which 20 packages of ramen were cooked in one pot.

I didn’t wash a single dish.

I said about a thousand prayers that I would get onto the redeye flight.

I came home at 8:00am, slept for four hours, took a two hour nap, slept for ten hours last night, and took another 90 minute nap this afternoon.

I should be ready to be a real person by tomorrow morning.

I hope.

Here are the first few paragraphs of an essay I started writing a while ago but have gotten somewhat hung up on. I like the way it starts, but I think that I might be getting off track by the end of this excerpt. (There are more problems later on, but we’ll start here.) What do you think? What do you like or dislike? Any questions or comments? Thanks in advance for any feedback you may have. And if you don’t have anything to say, I hope you enjoy reading it anyway!

–lizzie

I walk down this street several times a weeks, sometimes several times a day. The stores and sights and sounds and smells are all familiar. But something is different, something that leaves me feeling slightly unhinged, afraid that I might do something rash. Run into the street, trip over a cat, get myself maimed in some unimaginable way. It’s an eight minute walk from my apartment to the train station, but it feels much longer this evening. I feel like I’m bumping along, clumsily bouncing down the sidewalk, driven by a silent wind, uncertain of what will happen next.

It isn’t until I’m on the train, or perhaps until after I’ve arrived at my destination that I figure out why I am so unsettled, untethered, undone. It’s because I am alone. My two sidekicks, both less than four feet high, are at home with their dad, taking baths, being put to bed, read to, sung to, without me. I’m used to having them so close, to holding my older son’s hand, to wearing my younger son on my back. The weight of their bodies holds me down, steadies and focuses me.

That night as I walked down the street without them, without my husband, I felt almost as if I were a decade or so younger, a high school student with vague, but high ambitions, few friends, and a penchant for keeping myself from being “tied down” – to one set of friends, or a particular subject, or even an idea of a career goal. At the time, I thought I was free to do whatever I wanted, to hang out with those I felt most comfortable around – or no one at all. I was free to explore the range of human knowledge with out getting too involved in any one area before I was ready. I would, I was sure, stumble upon the career path that suited me as long as I kept my options wide open.

What happened instead was that I spent a lot of weekend nights alone in my room, waiting for the phone to ring or trying to muster the courage to call someone else. I spent a lot of time fretting that I wasn’t good at anything, that I had no talents to develop, that I was doomed to watch as those around me found happiness, success, and fulfillment while being unable to partake of it myself. But such, I thought, was the price of freedom, of being open-minded and adventurous, of hoping that, through all this stumbling, I would one day find the golden fleece and my ambitions – no matter how vague they were — would be realized.

I find this excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s article on late bloomers both encouraging and grounding.

“On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?”

We’ve decided that “What am I doing in a pteranadon nest?” is a pertinent question for all situations.

The boys may one day curse me for calling them “chickadudes” but I sure am glad they let me get away with it right now.

Even if small talk with construction workers about the warmth and comfort of my Vibram FiveFingers were the only thing I got out of them, it would still probably be worth wearing them. (That and they are cheaper than normal running shoes and give me fewer blisters.)

I realized this week that I’ve lost faith that God will provide me a quarter in the street when I’m a little short on my laundry money. Apparently I’ve got to clean my clothes all by myself.

There is nothing quite as amusing as hearing yourself in the voice of a two-year-old. “Boy howdy?” he’ll ask in his little voice, making sure he’s heard it right. “That’s right! Boy howdy!” (“Say it again, Son, say it again!”)

Give a 4-year-old a joke and he can laugh himself silly for the better part of a day. That includes, of course, the silly, nonsensical derivatives he comes up with on his own. It’s enough to make doing the laundry the preferred chore of 100% of mothers in this household.

I probably should have been supervising more closely when I allowed my toddler to place a cardboard box of pasta right next to the open flame that was boiling the water that would eventually cook the pasta. Tragedy averted, but lesson probably not actually learned.

I’m still trying to figure out how 20 degrees could be a perfectly acceptable temperature for running some years but this year anything lower than 35 seems like a really, really bad idea.

Can we talk about “The Little Match Girl”? Like, who decided it would be a good idea to turn that story into a picture book? And why must my children continue to torture me by picking it as a bedtime story? Not that I don’t think it’s a powerful story, and well told . . . but the girl dies. Freezes to death. On the streets of a busy city. I feel culpable.

And, finally, here’s some more fuel for my Olympic dreams.

The man at the front of the room wears canvas shoes that are worn through on top where his toes bend and a gray beard that, while neatly trimmed, reminds me of various breeds of terriers. His voice is a gentle tenor, but he does not make much of an attempt to sing as he leads us in a round of “Open, Shut Them” or, later, “Where is Thumbkin?” He is the only man in the room full of babies, toddlers, preschoolers and young moms. His age, his shabby shoes and matching cardigan, and his reserved demeanor make him seem an odd choice for the library’s storytime leader. I wonder, How did he get here? Does he even know how to talk to a child? Where is the spitfire little lady with exaggerated facial expressions whose impersonations leave the kids in stitches? But none of the children seem to notice that the man looks out of place, or even that he looks like he feels out of place.

And that may be why he is actually the perfect choice for such a position. Noise and tantrums do not ruffle him. He does not excite the children with voices or silly games. He is constant, unflappable, and, it seems, nearly invisible to the children. They sit or stand in rapt attention as he reads from the day’s selection of books, their eyes never leaving the pages. When he breaks between for a “song” (or chant) the children remain mesmerized, possibly unaware that the story has ended. It is mostly because of the mothers’ encouragement that they do not stay seated in a hypnotic daze when he leads us in “The Hokey Pokey.”

The daze is only broken when the books are put away and the cabinet that houses the toys is opened. The storytime man moves to the opposite side of the room, and while the kids pull out the blocks and puzzles and cars and begin building towers and trains to be torn apart by the plastic dinosaurs that inhabit the top shelf of the cabinet, the moms look on and listen for the storytime man’s voice again as he takes attendance, and notes whose turn it is to pick a free book. Occasionally there will be polite corrections if he’s forgotten the names of a particular family, or anxious waiting as he cycles through the filebox where his attendance cards are kept.

But once the filebox is put away, and the free books are all spread out on the table for the taking, he slips out. The room, with its rows of blue plastic chairs strewn with coats and diaper bags and moms chatting and feeding babies, and blue low-pile rug strewn with blocks and dinosaurs and cars and puzzle pieces and children talking to themselves, seems indifferent to the little terrier man who, in his humble, reserved way, tamed and dominated it while somehow remaining virtually invisible.

When I started this blog a year and half ago, the idea was to keep myself writing, and thinking about writing, while I was mostly consumed with raising my little boys. I thought forcing myself to write something once a day, something that I could feel comfortable publishing for a wider audience, would be a great way to keep my saw sharp for the day when I could go out and do some real work with it.

I imagined, and hoped, that it would eventually lead to other writing jobs or prepare me for the kind of writing I always wanted to do — creative non-fiction and essays. And I also remembered something one of my professors told me when he found out I was a mom: “Take good notes.” He knew it would be hard for me to get the writing in while I was wiping noses and taming tantrums, but the stories would always be there if I took the time to record them. So that is what I had planned for this blog: a repository for my “notes,” a place to practice my creative non-fiction writing, and a motivation to work on becoming an essayist.

To give me a little bit more focus, and because I had recently discovered that I both loved running and was decently good at it, I added that as another component of the blog. Running would give me something more to write about, and it would also serve to help me gather my thoughts and spark some creativity when I was feeling particularly flat. (Although I didn’t really know that at the time.)

At first it seemed like writing a post every day was getting in the way of raising the boys more than anything. I would stress all day about what I was going to write, I would ignore the boys when I had something I didn’t want to lose before it got written, and it was generally a struggle to balance the two goals. But as time has gone on, I’ve gotten better at writing, at planning things out in my mind throughout the day, and at trusting myself to come up with something at night. I’m able to spend the day focusing on the boys and know that even if I sit down to a blank screen with a blank brain at 10:00 at night, I can fill both of them up before bedtime, sometimes with things I’m really pleased with, and sometimes with things I’m merely satisfied with.

But in the past few months I’ve realized that I’ve kind of gotten off base. I’ve realized that even though I don’t think of myself as a “blogger” (I generally tell people that I “write a blog”), I’ve started to want “bloggy” things. And I’ve become discouraged sometimes when I don’t get those “bloggy” things — even though I really don’t want to be a “blogger.” I lost sight of the real purpose of the blog and sacrificed some opportunities because of it.

You see, in the past several months I’ve had some really great essay ideas that I have wanted to pursue, or have tried to pursue, but then the blog got in the way. Instead of using my writing time to work on an essay, I’ve used it to write something unrelated for the blog. I think posting something every day has been really good for me — I’ve proven to myself that I can write every day, I’ve seen my writing improve, and I’ve felt myself becoming more confident as a writer — but I also mourn the loss of the essay ideas that I didn’t get around to because the blog deadline was staring me down.

So I’ve decided it is time for me to re-focus, to test some new things, and to push things forward a little bit. This may mean that I cut down my posting to 3 or 4 days a week, but the immediate plan is to stick with the 5-days-a-week format. I like writing every day and worry that if I start loosening up, it’ll all fall apart. And, actually, if all goes well, you, my lovely readers, will not notice much of a change. But I thought I would share my new “schedule” with you, so you know what to expect from me, so I have some accountability, and also so you know that you are welcome to give me feedback and criticism (both supportive and constructive) on anything.

Here’s the plan:

Mondays I will post an excerpt or other evidence of work I’ve done on a larger writing project — whether that be an essay or something else. (This could turn into an essay, or maybe this or this.)

Tuesdays . . . I haven’t quite decided. This day may be open for recipes, book reviews, or random thoughts.

Wednesdays I’ll be writing a “story,” describing a scene, relaying an incident, replaying some dialogue. Something fairly discrete and focused.

Thursdays I’ll post the weeks’ “notes.” Basically, it will be a collection of interesting/funny/emotional/whatever occurrences — things that I want to remember for later material. (It could look something like this, or this.)

Fridays I’ll post something I found somewhere else — someone else’s inspirational thought/picture/article/video, etc. I hope these things will be as fun and helpful for you as they are for me.

I hope I haven’t scared any of you away. Like I said, if all goes well, you may not notice much of a difference. I still plan to run and write about running, to be a mom and write about mothering. I hope to capture moments that ring true to you. But I also hope to refocus my energies a little bit and I hope that in doing that, this will not only become a place you like coming to even more, but will lead me to where I want to be as well. It may take me a several weeks to get into a rhythm with it, so please be patient with me.

Also, there may also be some visual changes to the blog that go along with this as I strip down and try to stay focused on what is most important to me, but since I don’t pay my graphic designer (except in tasty meals, child wrangling, and various other odd jobs around the house) and he is a very busy man, it may take some time for those changes to come about.

Now, I know I’m not the only one who dreamt of Dathan Ritzenheim Saturday night, right? I mean certainly the rest of you kept waking just before he pulled ahead of Abdi for 3rd place in the marathon and a spot on the US Olympic Marathon team? No? Hmmm. That’s odd.

I tell you, watch these people run for a couple of hours and you grow attached them. I didn’t care a whit for Abdi at the beginning of the race, but after he’d held on so long I was almost rooting for him. Right up until I realized Ritzenheim wasn’t actually going to pull ahead, and then I changed my mind and wished Ritz had made the team. But Ritz is young. He’s got another couple of Olympics in him. No worries. I’ll be rooting for him for to make the team in the 10,000 meters.

Oh, and I had no qualms with way the women’s race went. No, Desi didn’t win, but she made the Olympic team, so hooray for her.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, the US Olympic Marathon trials were run in Houston on Saturday. The top three finishers in the men’s and women’s races get to run in London this summer. In the women’s race Shalane Flanagan, who ran her first marathon in New York in 2010 and came in 2nd, won. Desiree Davila, who rocked the running world by coming in 2nd at Boston last year, took 2nd, and Kara Goucher, a favorite in just about every race she runs, came in 3rd. For the men it was Meb Keflezighi, Ryan Hall and Abdi Abdirahman going 1-2-3.

Watching them run for a spot on the Olympic team gave me just a little taste of what we’re in for this summer and I’m practically counting down the days until July. It’s funny how the Olympic stage can make just about any sport exciting, and get you cheering for people you’d never heard of before just because they’re wearing your country’s flag.

I have a feeling I’ll be dreaming a lot more about the Olympics in the coming months. (I think there’s probably another Olympic cake in my future as well.)

(photo from USATF.org)