How this shlubby, un-athletic kid ended up being a runner

I earned this finishers’ medal at the Dexter-Ann Arbor 10 K this past weekend. Yay!

The other day, I thought about why I run – while running, of course – and my thoughts splintered off in myriad directions.

Initially, this frustrated me. Why couldn’t I define running’s pull on me more definitively? There’s a good reason for this, though: my reasons for running, and what I get out of it, have evolved and changed in the same way that I have over the course of 42 years of life.

My first brush with running came in fifth grade – a hard year for me. I sprouted large breasts I didn’t want; began menstruating (and had no idea what the brown stain in my underwear was or meant); had acne on my back; stank from body odor; had no friends, and thus wandered the playground alone at recess; and while I my school shuttled me to a “gifted” program once a week, what I really wanted was to be athletic, despite being painfully uncoordinated and slow. Though everyone seems to remember being picked last for teams in gym class, I really was – and I couldn’t even blame my classmates. They didn’t want to lose.

Neither did I, of course. And I tried my hardest, whatever the sport. But whether the game of the moment was softball, kickball, relays, dodgeball or basketball, I sucked.

Then my gym teacher announced a program with a hopelessly square title: Run for Fun and Fitness. With each mile you ran on your own, outside of school, she’d place a small sticker dot next to your name – which was on a long, green-and-white printout list of students, taped on the gym’s cinder block wall.

At that age, I loved visual symbols of achievement (I was that girl who earned 10 badges during my one year of Girl Scouts). They helped counter my lack of self-esteem in every area but academics. And besides, I told myself, unlike the gym class games that invited my classmates to despise me even more, because I failed to perform at a certain level, running was something I could do by myself. I wouldn’t let anyone down, no matter how slow I was.

So, at my request, my father measured out a half mile marker from our house that I could jog to, and then run back. Though my pace could be categorized as “plodding,” I ritualistically stopped at that halfway mark to catch my breath, and I even stopped once between that point and home, too. So I struggled. This was not something that was going to come easily. (It still doesn’t, after all these years and miles logged.)

But not being scrutinized by my peers, or even adults, while I clumsily ventured into running freed me. I got to experience an endorphin rush (though I couldn’t identify it), and feel kind of athletic and virtuous (albeit temporarily). Though all the other things happening to my body made me feel powerless, running made me feel strong.

Shopping for trouble

We often see lists of what people fear most, and some old mainstays are public speaking, death, flying, vomiting – but I bet if there was a subsection of mothers with young kids taking that survey, “spoiling my child” would be on there somewhere.

Because no one wants that. It’s not good for mommy and daddy, not good for the kid, not good for other humans. Everybody loses, right?

So nearly every parenting decision is haunted by this anxiety. Your every instinct drives you to want to see your child happy all the time – but you’ve got to teach her, too, that sometimes, you don’t get what you want, and that’s just how the world works. Period.

Then there’s that temptation to just avoid the “store showdown” all together.

This is why, when I need to buy birthday presents for other kids, I usually bend over backwards to do it on my own – on the way home from work, or on a day I’m working from home and running errands.

Today, though, as a means of getting Lily to preschool without a fight (this was one of those very occasional “but I don’t WANT to go to preschool” mornings), I told her I’d pick her and Neve up a bit early and take them shopping to pick up gifts for two little cousins’ upcoming birthdays.

In a way, this was a good thing. It got me what I wanted – a battle-free morning – and it would take care of a task that needed to happen before tomorrow afternoon.

The down-side?

On the drive there – we weren’t even in the store yet – Lily says, from the backseat, “Can I get something too, Mommy?”

Oof.

“Putting the tree in the garage”

The enormous tree limb that’s now taken residency in our garage.

On Monday, while I was at work, I got an email from a neighbor who was concerned about some gigantic tree limbs and branches that had fallen from our old cottonwood on Saturday, shortly after we’d hosted a big backyard birthday party for (now five year old) Lily.

The unwieldy limbs had fallen onto a section of my neighbor’s garden, near the big bounce house we’d rented for the weekend. And right when it happened, my neighbor came to let me know (I’d been inside the house, doing post-party clean-up), and then she helped me lug the biggest limbs onto the grass, a few feet from her garden.

Since then, though, I’d just left them there, assuming Joe and I would get around to breaking them down when we got the time. Ha, ha.

But Monday’s evening forecast called for rain, so my neighbor was afraid – probably justifiably – that a truckload of little cottonwood saplings would spring forth in both our yards if I didn’t take action right away.

“OK,” I thought, still seated at my work desk. “Change of plans.”

I called Joe and asked if he could come home a bit early, before I got the girls from preschool. The answer was “no.” But he insisted that I wouldn’t be able to do the job myself, and that it would take me at least an hour.

But never underestimate the determination of a mommy willing to cut corners.

Yes, I proved my husband wrong on both counts. I arrived home from my commute at about 4:30, and because I usually get to the girls’ preschool at about 5 p.m., I went to work immediately.

Whirring with activity while still in my work clothes, and breaking off branches while holding limbs to the ground with my foot, I packed three yard waste bags as a cloud of cottony fluff funneled around me. When I’d broken down all I could – in a half-assed manner, naturally, with big branches sticking out over the tops of the bags – I dragged the paper sacks into the garage, leaving an enormous, 15 foot, stripped hunk of tree on the ground.

Though it had taken the strength of both me and my neighbor to move it two days before, I thought it worth trying to move by myself, now that it was a leaner version of itself.

So I squatted down, grabbed hold of the thickest part of its circumference, and stood with it in my arms, pulling it into the garage.

And at about that moment, the clock in downtown Farmington chimed five o’clock.

Ka-BAM.

I tell this story not to underline what a fierce bad-ass I am – though that would be an awesome bonus – but rather to explain how this experience is emblematic of my day-to-day life since becoming a parent.

Most parents’ worst travel nightmare? Check.

It’s painfully fitting that Joe and I flew too close to the sun, metaphorically speaking, and flapped our waxen, melting (parenting) wings for dear life, while sitting on an airplane.

Yes, we recently experienced every parent’s worst nightmare while trapped in a claustrophobic, man-made aluminum bird, and felt the discomfort and disapproval of a couple of hundred people that suddenly fell dead silent.

Better yet, my mother- and father-in-law were seated just a few rows back.

Ohhhhhh, yes. It happened, people. And – fortunately? unfortunately? – I lived to tell the tale.

The curative power of little girls, ducks, and evening walks

I love working in a newsroom. I really do. The people who work there are generally quick-witted, articulate and intellectually curious, and when news big and small (and sometimes absurd) comes over the transom, the place pulses with a vibrant electricity. It’s a fun place to be.

But on days of national heartbreak – which have become too common lately, with the Newtown shootings in December, and the Boston Marathon explosions on Monday – it becomes a place where these same great people must work to do something productive with the harrowing news that we’re all receiving simultaneously. And while there’s something inspiring and impressive about this act, the consequence is that there’s no escaping the story, on our screens or in our minds, since we’re all constantly tuned in for updates and information.

So days like Monday are hard. You feel angry and frustrated, because even though the statistics still stand wildly in favor of your family’s safety, you can’t rid your mind of that infinitesimal possibility of sudden destruction and loss. (You reflexively want to gather your family in your basement and only occasionally come out for food.) Such thoughts consumed me when walking my little daughters to preschool three days after Newtown. And now I’ll feel this during my next run through our neighborhood, and my next 10K race.

Right now, people are pledging to run to honor today’s victims, wearing old race T-shirts, changing their profile pictures on Facebook, and giving (online) voice to a collective sense of sadness and fear – all of which reflects a populace struggling mightily to find a way to respond in a positive way to the violence.

And while the cynical part of me thinks these symbolic gestures will do nothing to prevent these tragedies from happening again, I have to remind myself that there’s really nothing substantive any of us can do – writing my Congressman with a request to “get Americans off the crazy-train of violence” doesn’t seem particularly useful or effective, either – and that these small acts aren’t necessarily about solving the problem, but about grieving the loss, honoring the victims and survivors, and reflecting on the value of life. And most of us would rather do something than nothing – so we run, we pull on a shirt, we update our status, we virtually rend garments.

Still, as the clock inched toward five o’clock on Monday, I locked up the house, as I do every day, and I walked down the sidewalk toward the girls’ preschool.

Once I got there, things were chaotic, as usual – Neve was crying and desperately pulling me toward the door that leads to the playground, while Lily was throwing every item from her cubby onto the ground and obsessing over some “bracelet” she said her teacher was supposed to put there – but as unpleasant as this push-and-pull phase of multi-child parenting can be, the girls’ micro-drama nonetheless forced me to focus solely on them, solve (or at least distract them from) their problems, and exist only in the exact time and place I was occupying.

That’s something you hear a lot about if you practice yoga – being present and all that – but there really is something to it. In yoga, it’s because if you’re not focused on what you’re trying to do, and how you’re approaching it, it won’t happen. You have to focus on various parts of your body and the teacher’s voice. And that’s one of the main things I’ve always loved about the practice: it gets me out of my neurotic little head for an hour here, an hour there, and then everything else that worries me doesn’t seem quite as tragic or awful.

Our ludicrously late Easter Bunny

A fitting image, given how late our Easter Bunny was with the eggs this year.

This past Monday, the day after Easter, just before walking to pick up the kids from preschool, I shoved chocolate kisses and eggs into plastic eggs and walked around our front- and backyard, hurriedly placing them near just-blooming flowers, trees, the trampoline – everywhere.

Why? Because even though I’d been patting myself on the back Saturday evening – I’d picked up a few dollar items from Target days earlier in order to make modest Easter baskets for both Lily and Neve – the girls awoke on Sunday morning, and after seeing the baskets, Lily excitedly said, “We have to find the eggs the Easter Bunny hid!”

A stomach-plummeting, “oh, sh*t” parenting moment, to say the least.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, looking across the kitchen at Joe, who grimaced. “I don’t think I’ve seen any eggs this morning. Maybe the Easter Bunny hasn’t had the chance to hide eggs here yet. He’s got lots and lots of baskets to deliver.”

Lily looked puzzled, and I understood why. Not the best quick-on-your-feet explanation, Mom.

Taking a moment to celebrate my mom’s, and Billy Collins’, birthday

Yesterday would have been my mom’s 71st birthday – and by strange coincidence, I discovered, for the first time, that poet Billy Collins shares the same birthday. I sent Collins’ poem, “The Lanyard,” inside the last Mother’s Day card I ever sent, and I read it at my mother’s funeral. Seemed fitting, given that the poem is funny (which my mom would have appreciated at her funeral) and says something very true: any meager attempt we might make to say “thank you” to our mothers will fall laughably short.

Here’s Collins reading the poem. Happy birthday, Mom – and Billy.