Detour

someone saved my life

I grew up fat.  

Actually, not really.  But I grew up not skinny in an era when Twiggy was an icon.   I had a lavender vinyl Twiggy lunch box.  Thin was in.

I remember evaluating the shape of my arms in Kindergarten and understanding that they were too thick and shapeless to be acceptable.  I had pale skin, freckles, thunder thighs and a big butt. Kids were mean.  I remember every single nasty comment I ever heard from the thin brown girls. I felt unacceptable.

I was born in 1961, so my formative years passed in a world that hadn't yet enacted Title IX. There were no girls' soccer leagues.  Our mothers didn't exercise.  There wasn't women's college or pro basketball. We had gymnasts, figure skaters and Billy Jean King.  But even those sports were not for every girl.  The only girls I knew who participated in those sports had Olympic dreams.   

Our health classes focused on menstruation and VD (venereal disease).  That's what we called STD's before HIV took sexually transmitted diseases beyond the venereal. We didn't talk about nutrition, lifestyle related diseases, the relationship between stress and exercise.  Our parents still smoked and had cocktails every night.  In my house we had  "hors d'oeuvres"  before dinner. Potato chips and clam dip.  

In my family, intelligence and creativity was revered.  The subject of athletic prowess just didn't come up. Every four years we watched the Olympics and we understood that those people, that level of discipline and aggression, lived a world apart from normal people.

I woke up one morning when I was twenty three choking on the certainty that I was going to die. Too soon.  I don't know where it came from but lying there with the four walls of my bedroom closing in on me, I couldn't see a future.  Any future.   My self loathing had grown so much there wasn't room for anything else inside of me.  The drugs and alcohol were no longer working.  I had no education, no skills, and no future.  My life was beyond chaotic and I felt insane.

And I was fat.  We can argue about how fat I was, but it was the thing that I hated the most about myself. I'm ashamed to admit this.  I was not depressed abut the state of my mental and physical health, which was abysmal, but rather about how I looked.

I'd made attempts to "get in shape" before.  By now it was the early eighties and even normal people jogged and did par course calisthenics, the seventies brought us that.  I tried to jog for the first time  when I was about 18.  I drove down to the junior high school (3 blocks away) and tried to run around the hockey field.  I went around once (probably 1/10 of a mile) and I thought I was going to DIE.   I had to lie down in the muddy grass and concentrate on not losing my lunch. Of course I had asthma and I smoked, but I really couldn't imagine how anyone actually could do that sport.  I developed a respect bordering on awe for joggers.  I went home and had a beer.

I didn't try it again until I was 21 or so.  That time, I actually bought some expensive running shoes, blue New Balances.  I thought I looked pretty cool in them.  I put on some sweats and left the house early in the morning. I made it about half a block, then I walked a bit.  When I was coming back down my street, some young guys drove by and one of them yelled out the window "You ain't gonna get all that off just walking."  I slunk home and stashed the shoes in the back of my closet.  

When I found myself at the bottom of a pit that morning two years later I had NO idea what to do to change my life. There was so much wrong. I had didn't know how to live a good life or where to start.  I was so bereft of self love that I had no idea how to treat other people.  I didn't know how to reach out or who to reach out to. I felt completely alone in the world.  I didn't know how to achieve goals or even understand the need to set them.  I was 23 and I had been abusing drugs and alcohol for ten years.

But I knew what I hated the most on that day was how I looked.  I was invisible.  I felt people's eyes slide over me when I went out. I wasn't someone they wanted to know.  My entire life felt like junior high.  I was unacceptable.

There was this kernel of pride and arrogance inside me.  I knew I was smart. I'd read a bunch of classic novels, all of Shakespeare's plays.  I was good with words.  I had good taste.  But people looked at me and saw something else. Lazy. Slovenly.  I was really pissed about it.  But I was also miserable, so tired of having men want to date my friends and never me.  So tired of the unrequited love that seemed to be my lot in life.  I understood even then that those things were more about my perception of myself than they were about the shape of my body or my uneducated status.  I just didn't know how to fix it.

I looked myself in the mirror and decided I had to do SOMETHING.  I had to stop hating myself. I either had to accept myself as I was or I had to change.  I didn't know what I could change. The mountain of problems in my life seemed insurmountable.  I thought about working on accepting my size, but I didn't feel strong enough to eradicate the years and years of messages that taught me it wasn't ok to be fat.  And physically, I felt like shit.

I decided that maybe, just maybe, if I got a little bit healthier physically, it would be like picking up a corner of my crazy life.  Maybe I could just do that one thing.

There was this aerobics studio up the street from me. The shades were always closed so you couldn't see inside from the street.  I only ever saw women going in there.  It seemed like a place to start.  I dug out those still new running shoes and pulled on my big over-sized 50% polyester bright green sweat pants, took a deep breath, and walked up the street.

It was a midday class, I think there were only about 10 women in the class. The woman who taught the class was a lithe beauty named Andrea.  I will never forget her. She was kind and welcoming.  I searched her eyes for judgment when I shook her hand and I couldn't find any. She started the music and gave cues. The class went right and I went left. I didn't know what a grapevine or the charleston step was.  I was all over the place.

But, Oh! Was it fun.  The music was groovin and I felt like I was out dancing.  The hour went by in a flash.  I felt amazing.  I walked home with my head held high.  I was full of hope for a different life.  

And it was the beginning of a different life.  I was 23 and it was the first time I had taken care of myself in any way.  I was still a child, an unformed person in so many ways.  I hadn't had the ordinary experiences of a passage into adulthood, I hadn't gone off to college or traveled the world.  I hadn't had a lot of guidance in "how to live."  That day, I knew something big had happened.  I didn't realize until years later that I had taken my first real step towards growing up.

the ground beneath her feet

I’m sitting in a large conference room at the Four Seasons breathing in the smell of expensive coffee.  There are a lot of suits in the room.  White faces.  Mostly male.

I feel a thin sheath of alienation slide over my body.  As usual.  I wonder for a moment what the room would look like if I were wearing true color glasses. Magic spectacles that would make people’s appearance match their true character and secret life.  Who would be the wife beater, a looming, oversized ogre? Who would be the binge eater, a 500 pound woman sitting in the corner, furtively stuffing twinkies and hohos into her mouth?  Who would be the alcoholic sitting on the ground against the wall clutching his paper bag, slack jawed and toothless?  What twisted fetishes and shameful secrets would be revealed?

Every woman in the room is wearing expensive clothes and is well put together.  So am I.  I imagine myself through the true color lenses.  I imagine that my polished, professional, persona would be fractured: my features off, like a Picasso portrait.  Or I would be held together with duct tape and baling wire, missing a piece of my ear, an eye, some teeth.  Every misstep, wrong turn, bad decision, shameful secret, detour, would show up as crack, a fissure, a break.  You would be able to see it on the outside instead of just in my eyes. My past.

I am afraid of heights.  I am afraid of standing on ledges, bridges, roofs.  I am afraid that gravity will stop working just long enough for me to float several feet up in the air and out over the abyss. Then I will plunge to my death because it is working after all.  It only stopped because I looked away, stopped concentrating

Professional success feels the same to me.  I am afraid that I will look away and it will stop working, stop holding me fast to the ground. 

I know so many women who talk of their inner bag lady.  How they feel like imposters.  Do the male boardrooms and glass ceilings do that to us?  Is it because it was only yesterday that we burned our bras?

Maybe men feel this way, too? 

Or is it something else.  Is it that a dope fiend looks back at me from the mirror? An alcoholic?  A fuck-up?  I can't shake them, they are part of me forever.

Trauma victims are always waiting for the next traumatic event, sitting with their backs against the wall, watching the door.  Hyper-vigilance.

I am acutely aware of my lack of backup in the world.  A single parent with no siblings. Parents who would prefer I never needed them at all.  I am one slip away from ruin.   No room for accidents.  No room for mental illness. 

I can’t look away.

angels

There are single moments I can point to in my past that changed the entire course of my life.

I was 25 and at a party. I was uncomfortable in my outfit; my "dress" World Gym sweatshirt, the pink one that was still new looking.  I was acutely aware of my gym rat status in a roomful of larger lives. Somehow my single biggest accomplishment, becoming an athlete after a lifetime of sloth and crappy eating habits, seemed threadbare in a roomful of genius grad students.

I admired my friend Terry very much. He was a medical student and he took good care of himself. He was thinking about doing a triathlon. He ran along the crest of he Berkeley hills in the mornings and spent an hour on the bike in the afternoons.  That was our common ground. He was studying for his boards. I peppered him with questions about science and medicine.  I took in what he had to say like a sponge.  He was everything I thought I could never be.

I thought those decisions had already been made.

I glibly mentioned that “if I had it to do all over again” I would study molecular biology. As a high school dropout barely subsisting, I was pretty confident that ship had sailed.

Growing up in Berkeley, in the shadow of a world class University, I remember lounging at the UC pool in the summers of my late teens and early twenties. Overhearing the casual conversations of the college students around me made me unbearably sad. I could taste the envy. Did they know how lucky they were?

That first “C” in the seventh grade was the start of a slide down a slippery slope to  my own version of Loserhood. I dropped out of high school as a Junior with a gpa of 1.9…after repeating the ninth grade. 

I did not think of myself as college material.

There was never a college fund for me.  There were recriminations and punishment. No one reached for me. My high school counselors had me firmly slotted in the “juvenile delinquent” category.  No one talked to me about college.

I was an angry kid.

My phone rang early the next morning.  It was Terry. He reminded me of what I said. He told me he had been thinking about it all night. He said, “you know, it’s never too late.”

And just because he said that thing at that moment, I decided to go out and find out if he was right.

custodial bliss

Twenty ought nine was not an easy time in our house.  I had to seriously consider  the option of walking away from my spiraling mortgage, I worried about losing my job, my available credit shrunk, and life looked very scary for a while.

My son's father moved away...only a few miles in real distance but a continent's width in emotional distance from his kid.  Hard to watch.

Big Love had (very expensive) surgery and the heartbreaking, baleful look he greeted me with when I picked him up is burned into my brain forever.  The recovery was hard and it took a toll on us.  He became an adolescent.  His fears, which are numerous and include things like cell phones and brooms, manifested themselves in some....ahem...behaviors.  (You should see him go after the broom: pure menace.)

And my son became a teenager in earnest.  There was cutting class, grade slippage, drug and alcohol use, lying,  and stealing.  Two school suspensions in one semester.  There was the fact that I became the sole parent in the equation. I have a stressful, demanding job and there were weeks where EVERY DAY I got a call from the high school or the doggy daycare about a problem with one of them. 

So basically I felt like every other working mother out there: as if I wasn't giving anything in my life the attention it needed, and as if I was doing a bad job everywhere.

But I can't really think of it as a horrible year because there was also so much to celebrate about my kid and my own growth as a parent. When 2009 started if you asked me how my son was doing I probably would have rolled my eyes and regaled you with stories of "how checked out" he was in school or how he was lying all the time and I was ready to send him off to live with his dad.

See, I've always been a bit of a tough love and clear limits kind of parent.  If you don't do what's expected, there are consequences and the consequences will be applied consistently.  I was raised with a lot of rigidity myself, in an era where parents didn't think much about where their kids were developmentally or that there might be something behind their kid's bad behavior besides laziness, stubbornness, and that general hatefulness that creeps into the teen personality.

Here's the thing: I went completely off the rails in the ninth grade.  I rebelled with a vengeance to the rigidity in my house. I was extremely angry and depressed.  The more angry my parents got: the more irrelevant they became.  I didn't think about the future, I didn't think about other people, I didn't think about anything except avoiding the pain.  I dropped out of high school halfway through my junior year.  For the next several years, I lived at a subsistence level, with very little education and very few skills.

Here's my idea of a living nightmare: watching your teenager make the same mistakes that you did at his age, knowing the pain those mistakes can lead to, and finding yourself reacting in EXACTLY the same ineffective ways your parents did. 

The thing is, the clear limits (grounding, taking things away) didn't work. They did not result in changed behavior.  What was happening instead was that the punishments increased his alienation and isolation, made him more likely to act out.  He kept ratcheting up his behavior ANYWAY. 

It's a lonely feeling, being a single parent, knowing your parenting style isn't working, and having no freaking idea how to turn it around.  I mean, really the books are all over the map.  There isn't that much info on the Internet (are there mommy bloggers who blog about parenting teens? I couldn't find them.)  I talked to other parents.  They were all as bewildered as me.  

I thought the toddler years were going to be the hard ones.

Finding myself in this position, stripped of the tools in my parenting arsenal, with a kid getting deeper into trouble everyday, I had to re-evaluate.  So, first I asked myself; what do I know?  I know that my son is gifted intellectually.  I know he is engaged with the world and interested in learning.  I know that he is deeply, genuinely a good person who feels empathy for others and who would rather step on his tongue than hurt someone's feelings.  I know he is generous, funny and outgoing.  He is a talented writer and photographer.  He has friends who truly love him and he truly loves them back.

I also know that he cannot manage a docket of homework.  That system you use with your kids that you want to tell me about?  We tried it. It doesn't work for us.  His grades are poor, not because he hasn't mastered the subjects (he has), but because he can't manage homework. I know that the pressure mounted as his grades slipped. I know that he felt the weight of my disappointment.  I know that when he cut school it was because he was miserable.  I know that his anxiety and depression increased.  He isn't into high school sports.  He isn't on the yearbook committee. He's not one of those kids who will have a high school "career" that seamlessly glides into a college "career" at an ivy league school.  He's a skater, he identifies with the outsiders; the slackers.

And so this is who he is: a bright, interesting, nice kid who is not doing well in school.  I believe all of his other self-destructive behavior flows from that.  In my position I cannot avoid being absolutely honest in answering the question: what do I really want for my kid?  He is at a very good public high school that sends kids to ivy league schools and to the UCs.  It takes an assembly line, pen to paper approach. Decent grades at this high school will get him into a good college after which he can get a decent job and...

...and life will be easy.  He will avoid the heartache I felt in my early twenties watching the college kids pass me by, being poor, feeling I had no future.   

But I have been talking to people, teachers who know him, experts, counselors. Guess what?  The assembly line approach doesn't work for everyone.  There are scads of bright kids, especially boys, who are failing in those systems.  His grades started slipping the year mandated class sizes went away.  When classes went from 20 students to 40, he started falling behind. He simply can't hear what the homework is, what's going to be on the test, what the teacher is trying to teach, in a class with 40 kids. His teachers acknowledge that the system doesn't work for everyone, and often doesn't work for 15 year old boys.

There are kids who need something different.  They are bright and curious, but they need more of a connection with their teacher, they need someone to reach for them if they disengage.  My son could do better in public school, maybe with more support, maybe with more discipline, maybe with Ritalin, but it will be so much harder for him than it is for some of his classmates.

He is not lazy.  He is not indifferent.  He learns differently than others.  I am ashamed that it took so long for me to see this.

He has been taking one class at a small school that offers a one-to-one student teacher ratio. He is getting a high A in a class he is taking from the hardest teacher in the school. He doesn't cut that class.  He does his homework. It's private and costly, it's like outsourcing homeschooling.  I am going to do whatever it takes to send him there full time.

And here's the thing: trying to protect him from being the 15 year old me because he might become the twenty year old me is parenting from a place of fear. Accepting that he is entitled to the same journey of self-discovery that I took and supporting him in who he is right now, instead of punishing him, that's parenting from a place of love.  Because at the end of the day, helping him be happy and feel good about who his is now, at 15, is so much more important to me than where he will go to college.  It will work out. He will be ok, because he is ok in all the ways that really matter.

shenanigins

When I was a kid, my parents had to rush me to the ER several times.  I was asthmatic and the drugs sucked back then, there was really no "prevention."  Here's how I hear the routine went:  1) I stopped breathing and turned blue, 2) my mother fainted, 3) they gave me a shot of adrenaline and I promptly hurled in my father's lap.  I felt guilty about this for years, until I made the connection between my hypoxia and my dad's chain smoking.  Not so guilty anymore.

While I now know I was set-up for asthma by the exposure to second hand smoke (which hadn't occured to anyone in the sixties.  Really.  Watch Mad Men), the white coats discovered that I was very allergic to animal dander.  It would start with sneezing and itchy eyes, and end up in a full blown asthma attack when I was exposed to anything furry.  So, my mother had to give up her cat when I was two (after a couple of these trips to the ER had already happened).  Which she is still pissed about.

Even less guilt.

Add to that the fact that I had eczema, which the doctors said was aggravated by chocolate, citrus, exposure to wool of any kind or anything with feathers in it like pillows or warm sleeping bags.

And I was allergic to Christmas trees.

So yeah, bit of a deprived childhood, right? (I do recognize that is a ridiculous statement for any middle class white kid growing up in the hyper prosperity of the US in the sixties and seventies)  Of course, all I wanted was all those things I wasn't allowed to have.  I remember the night before my 7th birthday a cat climbed in my window and curled up on my bed for the night.   Of course I didn't shoo her away or tell my parents.

I spent the morning of my 7th birthday in the ER.

Over the years, I missed out on enough things because of asthma that I eventually started pretty much avoiding animals.  I had a brief stint where I adopted cats, but my doctor convinced me that was beyond stupid when I got pregnant with A.  Both my kitties went to live on an acquaintance's farm where one immediately disappeared and the other lived a long and prosperous rodent filled life.

However, when I bought my house in 2005, I decided that my small family of two needed pets.  We started by adopting two feral cats (in Berkeley they are trapped and fixed instead of euthanized, then re-released, which keeps the overall population under control).  They live outside and have been doing great for 5 years.

But I really, really wanted a dog.  My grandparents always had dogs and I lived with them for a while in Mexico with two German Shepherds that I loved as only a homesick 13 year old girl can.  I still remember the adolescent Heike providing hours of entertainment on those long afternoons when everyone else in the entire town was having their siesta.

So in the fall of 2005 we adopted two adult female mutts from the animal shelter.  They were both on death row and the German Shorthair Pointer mutt, Ute to us (pronounced "Uta"), was literally going to be put down the next day.  I'll tell the story another time of how we went to get a dog and came home with two, but really, I knew we'd be gone most of the day and two seemed better than one.  They are pack animals after all.

It worked out great to adopt adult dogs as our "first" dogs.  A was 11 and it was just the right time for him to have the responsibility for walking them and feeding them, etc.  They are good dogs, though they have some shelter issues (not so much dog park material).  We basically lucked out with Phoebe and Ute.

So, I really, really don't know what demon was in possession of my good sense when I caught myself longing for a puppy in early 2009.  We had two dogs.  Oh.  And two cats.

And yet.

I had a month long sabbatical in April and a part of me always wanted to raise a dog from puppyhood.  I had two sets of friends that were getting puppies.  And then I saw a picture of this guy:
 
 Check out the size of those paws.

   

Seriously.  The cutest boy I had ever seen.  

So we adopted Omar.  Now, here is what you need to know about American Bulldogs.  In jurisdictions where pitbulls are outlawed, these guys often are too.   They are not terriers, they are mastiffs, but they are a"bully breed." They were bred for guarding and working.  These are the dogs that were bred with pugs to make the shorter English Bulldogs, so they are a very old breed. These dogs do weight pull competitions and can pull 30x their bodyweight.  They can be very aggressive and many AB owners don't take them to dog parks; the problem is that it is very hard to get these dogs to stop (playing or fighting) if their excitement gets to a certain level.

I was ready for a big tough guy.  I live ghetto adjacent and I wanted a dog that sent a message.

What we got was Omar.

When we got him home, it took 2 weeks before he would cross the street.  He was afraid of the street. And the cars. And the garbage can.

I learned that American Bulldogs do things in their own time.  Not yours, or mine, or any say REASONABLE time scale.  

I am a very fast and efficient person.  The universe has sent me this big lump of slow moving love to teach me a life lesson.

Have any of you EVER met a puppy that you have to pull on the leash?  I shit you not.

He is now 100# of solid muscle.  Dogs hump him. Phoebe, our 12 year old female, humps him. (which reminds me, the girls' first meeting with Omar was hilarious,  Phoebe sniffed between his legs and whipped her head around to Ute as if to say "Looky what we got here!"  She humped him CONSTANTLY those first few weeks.  Cougar.)

He squats to pee.

He trips over his own feet.

Also?  Not so much with the intelligence.  Or the spidey senses.  When I yell from my bedroom to the back yard, the other two look up, excitedly wagging their tails.  Omar crouches and looks wildly around, you can see the wheels turning "Holy Shit!  Voice of God!"  

It's ok, he was hired for his looks, not his brains.

He also, unfortunately, had hip dysplasia on both sides and so had surgery at 6 months.  I won't bore you with the details.  It was hard on us all and he missed a big chunk of his puppyhood.  

Which he is reclaiming now, in his adolescence.  Ok, so I hadn't totally thought through what it would be like to have a 100 POUND puppy.  When he plays, furniture moves.  Ute is completely freaked out by his playing (she hasn't really accepted that he lives here) and she starts barking, which makes him do that thing puppies do where they jump straight up in the air in front of you?  Which COMPLETELY freaks Ute out since he weighs twice as much as she does.

And the Christmas tree (which I get every year now that I am an adult and the drugs are better): not a good idea.  First I got the toddler play yard and circled the tree with that.  We came home to finely shredded glass and glitter all over the couch and also the shattered remains of the "baby's first christmas ornament." So the next day we also placed the dining room chairs around in front of the toddler gate.

Which made it easier for him to reach the higher ornaments.

So the next day we upended the coffee table in front of the chairs in front of the gate.  That worked.

But he chewed up one of the chairs and my christmas tree was not the joyous symbol of the season I had envisioned.  Our living room looked like Fred Sanford's front yard.

But still, oh this dog.  He is my heart.  He is hilarious to watch.  He is the sweetest, most gentle dog I've ever had.  He wakes me by placing his chin on the side of my bed while wagging the entire rest of his body.  If I am home he is always within ten feet of me.  When he has to go out he gives one bark and then sits and waits for me to come.  His wiggle when I get home form work is the best part of my day.  He nuzzles my ear when I hug him.  He likes to hug.

And anyway, I just can't be mad at this

 

Here's one where he is backing away from the camera.  That he is afraid of.

 

 And here's one of him with the long suffering Ute

 
 

 

 Big Love.

the thrill of victory

The debate I wrote about in my last post ruffled all kinds of feathers and caused some serious soul searching.  I want to write more about that later, but in the meantime I thought I would lighten the mood by posting my race report from the San Francisco Nike Women's Marathon I ran with my son in 2007 (he was 13 at the time).

Race Report

A and I woke up before sunrise and, after running around like headless chickens yelling at each other a relaxing cup of coffee, we headed over to the City. We found my friend Christine and headed up to the start. Union Square was packed with runners including many, many annoying inspiring “Team in Training” runners who really, really annoyingly, touchingly held hands to form human chains to stay together while moving through the crowd. We smiled and threw an elbow our good mornings and grew faint with anxiety soaked up the energy of the crowd.

We cried during the national anthem, whoever sang it was very good and all eyes were lifted to the flags atop the hotels surrounding the square. It was an emotional moment in which we could almost forget we were all participating in something really stupid really feel the community spirit.

We found our pace leader, a 54 year old woman named Deb who has obviously been a customer of BALCO taken really good care of herself. After running with her for about 3 miles I dropped back to avoid sudden death from cardiac arrest see how A was doing. I didn’t really NEED to finish in 4:20 and anyway, I could catch her later if she sprained an ankle or something I felt like losing my breakfast in front of 23,000 runners taking the pace back up a little. We started our climb up through the Presidio and I smiled as the runners around me turned up their ipods to drown out the exceedingly loud and disturbing sound of my labored breathing began to really focus.

We cruised up Clement Street to the really loud and obnoxious encouraging sounds of all the supporters. We heard “Go Team” so many times the phrase will always make me want to hurl smile.

At mile 8, I started to cramp excruciatingly felt a little depleted so I had a shot blok. A shot blok is a little like a soft gummy bear that contains electrolytes. Imagine my surprise when I bit into it and broke a tooth! I stealthily stashed the disembodied tooth in my fuel belt and thought about how God hates me the tooth fairy. I was having a good day.

By mile 11 my legs were cramped knots of pain warming up. As I approached the turnaround for the half marathoners I thought I could just turn around and lie to everyone about running the full marathon happily of those who were about to finish their first long race and remembered that all race results would be published. I pressed on because I have a ridiculous ego and could not admit to the world that I couldn’t finish the full marathon.

The 4:30 pace leader passed me as I was dry heaving in the bushes taking in the beauty of the park. I tried to trip her smiled and waved. So neat how Nike had them carry those cute little signs so you could watch your increasingly diminishing goals float out of your reach!

I have to admit, the next several miles were something of a blur of tears and self recrimination excitement. I remember the smiling face of the 4:40 pace leader and trying to remember that move where you can kill someone by hitting their nose into their skull at just the right angle how lucky I was to be out there. Running around the Godforsaken desolate place that is Lake Merced and hearing the sounds of those freaks shooting, actually shooting, at clay plates in the middle of the city while we were dying out there nature was an experience I’ll not soon repeat, I’m sure.

The last three miles I was struck by how like labor and delivery the peak experience of childbirth this was. Just like then, there were many people happily telling me I was almost there which I was NOT because when it sucks that much one more minute is an ETERNITY cheering me on. I picked up my stride to approximately the stride of a demented pigeon with a broken leg. My death march marathon was coming to a pathetic and really ugly triumphant end. I looked at the hot fireman in the tux who handed me my finisher’s necklace and burst into tears before leaning over to dry heave some more smiled graciously before hobbling strolling away to a quiet corner where I could concentrate and, hopefully, remember my name.

A and Christine had equally horrifying successful experiences. We are glad it is OVER we did this. The race raised 18.5 MILLION dollars for leukemia and lymphoma research, which is amazing.

Now I am enjoying hobbling around like a 90 year old woman my recovery. I am resting a lot and learning to plan my trips to the kitchen and bathroom carefully because it takes some time to get there and enjoying my meds downtime.

Really, each and every one of you should consider doing an event like this.

it's complicated

There's been a debate raging at Swistle's and at Kristin's fitness blog 
Aquafit that touches on what I think of as fat politics.  Here's a a comment I wrote on Kristin's blog (more about this journey of mine later):

"I've looked at fat from both sides now..."

I was a pretty fat kid into my early twenties.  Getting fit saved my life.  It taught me things about how to live that my parents should have.  I learned discipline, how to achieve goals and to respect myself.  

But.

But, the ugly underbelly of my journey was the body image piece.  When I first got fit, the reward was in the improved body image.  I was no longer invisible to the world.  I got attention.  I got on stage in a bikini at 9% bodyfat for a bodybuilding competition.  It was powerful to be thin.  I thought about it all the time.

I discovered that I always saw flaws, even at 9% body fat.  I discovered that my moods were negatively affected by the strict dieting I had to do.  I discovered that I wasn't meant to be that lean.  It took such an effort.  I was very close to developing an eating disorder.  I was boring as hell.

That was 22 years ago, Since then?  I've run marathons, done triathlons, raced bikes (road and mountain) and competed in weightlifting competitions.  I eat and train for performance.  I look pretty good for a 48 year old mom when I have my clothes on.

I don't look like Linda or Kristen.  And the voice that tells me I should is still inside my head and it bugs the f&*@k out of me.  So when I hear Kristen and Linda talk about the effect of exercise on their bodies it does make me uncomfortable. I feel like it's dangerously close to becoming part of the "you should exercise to be hot" chorus that I wish would just go away...please don't flame me for saying that I know it's not what either of them intend, but there it is.

But when they talk about what it feels like to achieve goals, I get it.  I am always training for something.  I push myself very hard to be better, stronger, faster.  See, I've discovered that training hard makes me happy and balanced, and keeps my depression at bay.  I wish we talked about these elements of fitness more.  

I catch myself feeling superior all the time, for being the only one at the track at dawn doing intervals, for ordering meat and veggies at dinner and eschewing the bread, for running a 5k in under 24 minutes...And it is NOT ok.  I am not better than other people because I can always find the time and because I do it even though it's hard.  Fitness is a  closely held value of mine, I need it as part of my life and it makes me happy.  
I'm lucky.  I found that.  But I really believe that other people can feel happy and balanced without it.  And I've met people who really, truly, loathe exercise.  Far be it from me to tell them they should do it. Even if they want to lose weight. ( Recent studies show that NEAT, non exercise activity thermogenesis, the time you spend house cleaning, gardening, running after your kids can be much more important to weight loss than "exercise").

But Im sure there are a lot of people out there  suffering like I was, people who don't know yet that exercise can bring you joy just in the act of doing it.  It can help with depression, anxiety, insomnia.  Those are the people I wish we fitness mavens would spend time trying to reach.  I don't really care about the message that everyone can change their body for the better, what I do care about is the message that everyone can surprise themselves by finding the limits of what they are capable of.   Really.  I promise.

don't let the door hit you, 2009

I seem to have a life that runs on seven year cycles. 2002 was what I call my "country song" year: I had a bad break-up, wrecked my (new) truck, lost my job. I didn't have a dog, but if I had I'm sure he would have died. The stuff country songs are made of.

2009 has been another hard one. There has been conflict at home and conflict at work. I almost lost my house, I went backwards in my fitness goals and I had way too little fun.

But we got a new puppy, Omar (aka "Big Love" because he is a big gentle goofball of an American Bulldog), who is my heart. And I didn't lose my house. And I'm way, way better at Olympic lifting than I was a year ago.

I didn't drink.

So there's that.

But really, here's hoping 2010 is a way better year.

crooked dreams

Trying to remember the stuff of my childhood dreams always brings me up short. It usually starts with: how did I get here?

I remember lying in bed on the sun porch of our big Berkeley house. It was still light and I was seething with resentment because my mother sent me to bed. The party was still going full tilt in the backyard, strains of Janis Joplin reached me in my bedroom of windows. I wanted desperately to be out there with the drunken adults. My three uncles were up on the roof of our garage and the neighboring house. They were playing frisbee from their perches, lobbing the dented tin lids of our trash cans over the heads of the revelers in the back yard.

I must have been seven, since that's the summer we had a full house, two pregnant aunts, one uncle and my two year old cousin. That's why I slept on the porch. It was 1968. Berkeley was alive with riots and tear gas, brimming with the energy of youthful righteousness.

My parents, at 28, were the patriarchs of our family. They hosted the bridge games: big bottles of Hearty Burgundy passed around the table. There was cigarette smoke and swearing. I wanted all of that. Deep political discussions, wine, cigarettes, the houseful of people, demonstrations in the streets. I wanted to wear full length gloves like my mother wore to the Governor's ball with her off the shoulder gown.

It was the sixties, but it was also still the fifties in many ways. It was such a time of upheaval, everything was changing. What did the future look like for girls? College? Maybe, not for sure. Marriage? Maybe, no longer a requirement.

My biggest aspiration was to become a flower girl as soon as I was old enough.