everyday life

I am a runner from Boston

There are a very few things that I am deep in the marrow of my bones.  One of them is a Bostonian (I was born here, my parents live here, I met my husband here, my babies were born here, this is my home in the most essential sense of the word).  Another of them is a runner.

I am a runner from Boston.

I have been running in Boston for 30 years (part of why the photograph of Grace’s first road race so moved me is because when I was her age I was running regularly in 10K road races; the echoes and flashbacks are powerful).  I have run two halves but never a full marathon.  I’m not sure if my iffy knee could take it, unfortunately.  But if I ever do run a marathon, you know there’s no question which it would be.

On Tuesday morning, when I drove to school with Grace and Whit, we had had a conversation about fear.  We didn’t listen to the radio, because I knew what we’d hear, so I turned on a CD.  Immediately, Phillip Phillips’ Home flooded the car and tears filled my eyes.  So I turned it off and we talked.  Grace told me that she was scared.  I said I understood that.  But, I went on, to be scared and to cower is to let them – whoever they are – win.  I caught her eye in the rearview mirror and saw that she understood.  And, when I got home, I laced up my sneakers and went out for a run.

That day, and yesterday morning as I ran along the Charles River at dawn, I sensed that I was asserting something, claiming something, refusing to give something up.  I have run for as long as I can remember.  When I searched the archives of my blog for “running,” 10 pages of posts came up.  In many of them, my memories of running are braided so tightly around my memories of Boston and Cambridge as to be indistinguishable.

Running is as natural to me as breathing.  This week, my runs felt suddenly like an act laden with meaning as powerful as it is inchoate.  They felt like a statement of defiance and of optimism.  This is a running town, this is a proud town, this is a brave town.  We won’t stop running.

I’ve never run a marathon before.  Maybe next year is the year to do it.

 

City of my heart

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On Sunday, the day before Patriot’s Day and the Boston marathon, Grace ran her first road race.  On the marathon course.  I was in New York for work, so I missed it, but I was sent this fantastic picture.  My heart swelled with both pride and shock, because really, how can my baby be that old?  That tall?

On Monday, Patriot’s Day, as you know, there was an explosion at the Boston marathon.  That tall, lanky girl, for whom I think the word coltish may have been coined, dissolved into a puddle of anxiety.  I told both she and Whit what had happened the minute I heard (they were home from school, sitting in the room next to my office), mostly because I was so startled by the news.  She hovered around my office all afternoon, lurking, asking constant questions, reading over my shoulder.

Right before the explosions, we had been talking about groups of people from the Marines (or Army, I admit I don’t know) who ran the course in their uniforms with backpacks.  Grace’s first reaction to the events, and to the few pictures she saw of the devastation (before I turned the TV off), was: “But those poor people just came home from war, where they saw this all the time.  They weren’t supposed to see it at home.”

Indeed, they weren’t.

I spent the afternoon toggling between bewilderment at this world that we live in, trying to understand what feels like a relentless wave of violence, and hugely heartened by it, as I received more texts and emails than I can count from people from all corners of my life (and the world) checking that we were okay.

But most of all, this: the city of my heart, my home, is bleeding and broken, under attack.

On our day of celebration, which starts at dawn with reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends with the last runners limping across the finish line long after the sun has gone down.  Our day of inspiration and striving, of humanity at its finest: I am always moved equally by the runners who push themselves past all reason and by the spectators who come out to watch the river of dedication and devotion.  Marathon Monday is a pure celebration of our beating hearts and of our feet walking on this earth.  This day, this Patriot’s Day, our day, is now forever marked by explosions, lost limbs, dead children (my GOD – an eight year old – Whit is eight – how is this possible?), senseless death and hurt.

I hate that it happened on our day, on Patriot’s Day, on Marathon day.  I hate that this happened at all.

I ache for my city, the city I was born in, the city I’ve lived in since I graduated from college, the city I love, my home.

I know that many other cities in our country have been visited by tremendous pain and brutality over the last several years.  I feel a sense of “it’s our turn,” followed immediately by outrage that I could ever say that. What world do we live in where that’s the deal?

 

Leaning in, doing it all, and packing lunches the night before

I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.  I know her work is controversial (though I’m not totally sure why, to be honest, after reading her book), and my goal is not to review the book.  But I will say I loved Lean In.  I found it supportive and inspiring, and while I agree there are big problems with the “system,” I was personally motivated by Sandberg’s focus on what we can do within the constraints of today’s reality.

Accepting the reality of right now, and embracing what is, is, of course, a big theme of my writing – and of my life.  Where that begins to bleed into capitulating to things that are unacceptable is a topic for another day.

People ask me a lot how I “do it all.”  The truth is, of course, that I don’t.  None of us does.  I’m not the only person who has written extensively on this topic, nor am I the only one to conclude that the definition of “it all” is both an intensely personal and a vitally important thing.

Lean In triggered a cascade of thoughts and reflections for me.  One was that discussion of “work-life balance” (a term I personally dislike) tends to fall into two categories: big picture theorizing and granular advice.  The former is complicated, and all I can say for sure is that any discussion of the topic of working and mothering touches some deep ocean of feeling buried deep inside me, as enormous as it inchoate.  Within a page or two of any book or article on the subject, I am in tears.  I need to spend more time thinking about what those feelings are.

It is the latter category that I want to talk about today.  No matter what it is that each of us juggles – and while I know that that assortment looks different for each of us, I also know that almost everyone’s plate feels hugely full – we all have tricks for minimizing dropped balls.

My appetite for talk about these particular, specific strategies is almost endless.  I love to hear about the ways that others make it all happen, and always learn something when the conversation turns to this topic.  I wanted to share some of the tactics that make life work for me right now.  None of these are rocket science.  But they help me.  I’d love to hear your tricks and strategies:

  • Living close to both my kids’ school and my office.  Limiting my commute has made being engaged in Grace and Whit’s school lives (drop off every day, occasional pick up, conferences) feasible.  It has had costs, of course: we live in a small house and do not have a yard.  But every time we talk about it, Matt and I conclude that this is the right choice for now.
  • Pack lunches the night before.  Always, without exception.
  • Early bedtimes.  For the children and for me.
  • Pick your battles.  Grace goes to school every single day in black leggings.  She loves them and has 5 pairs.  Do I love the look?  No.  Is it easy, and – more importantly – does it make her happy to have control over this choice?  Yes.  It also simplifies and smoothes the morning routine.
  • If you have a spare 5 minutes (early to an appointment, finished with grocery shopping faster than planned) fill up the car even if it doesn’t need it or get cash at the ATM even if you don’t need it.  You will be glad you did.
  • Treat your babysitters extremely well.  I don’t ever cancel within a few days without offering to pay, and I usually round up when settling.  I’m never late.  I over-communicate.  And as a result: I have hugely loyal babysitters who go out of their way to help.  It makes a big, big difference.

What are some of your particular pieces of advice for managing a very full life?

 

The physicality of them

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Every night, when I put Grace and Whit to bed, I whisper, “I’ll see you in the morning.”  That sentence is, as I wrote a few months ago, the distillation of parenthood.  I will be here in the morning.  You can go to sleep, safe, sound, trusting.  I’m not the only mother who finds bedtime, and the hushed hours after the children go to sleep, to be among the sweetest parts of the parenting day.  If I search my archives for bedtime posts, pages and pages come up.  Good night, Whit is among my favorites; I can’t read it without crying.  That’s especially true now, as I read through the scrim of years, with the awareness of all that has irrevocably changed.

Often, I go back in to see Grace and Whit before I go to sleep.  And sometimes I sit next to them on their beds, watching their sleeping faces, observing the shadows that their eyelashes cast across their cheeks.  Sometimes I put my hand on their chests, feeling their breath rise and fall.  There is a tangible grace in the rooms of my sleeping children, a magic that hovers in the dim, nightlight-lit air.

I love these moments, when I watch them, listening to the quiet of the room, the soft thrum of their breathing.  I stare at the length of their bodies under the covers, tumbling down the hall of mirrors that is my memory, remembering their baby selves in their cribs in these very same rooms.  It is such a cliche, but many cliches grow out of truth, don’t they?  How did these children, simultaneously sturdy and fragile, long and angular and lean, come out of my body?  Where did my babies go?

The expanse of Whit’s back, as he stands up to his ankles in the ocean, or the shadows Grace’s eyelashes cast on her cheeks when she’s looking down, reading: these are as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror.  They came from me and they are still intimately known; this is the private geography of motherhood.

As I write this I’m away from Grace and Whit, and I’m heading home today.  I can close my eyes and imagine their bodies barrelling into mine when I walk in the door, the smiling faces and mile-a-minute talking and hugs.  The hug that will remind me that Grace’s head now falls pretty close to right under my chin, and that Whit is the height I still delusionally think that his sister is.  And tonight, you can be sure, after I tuck them in, I’ll go back into their dusky rooms to watch them sleep, to be reminded of their beating hearts and breathing lungs, of their sturdy and fragile bodies, of them.  My daughter and my son.

 

How many greater things

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We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.  How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!  How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.   – Thoreau

For as long as I can remember, I have been literal.  I have almost always wanted with a fervor bordering on desperation to control, categorize, and to understand.  I am the child of a physicist and engineer, remember.

And yet that has been changing.  Years have given me perspective, and now I can look back through the lens of time.  The arc of my life is loftier, but also less clear.  I understand so much less than I used to.  But I also see so much more.  This can’t be a coincidence.  And the things that really capture my imagination are those which I understand the least: the sky, the passage of time, the capricious, unpredictable nature of memory.

A few years ago I asked my readers what this blog was about.  I still don’t have a good answer, when people ask me.  I hem and haw, stutter and stumble, coughing out some inarticulate paragraph about what it is to be in the world, to pay attention, to parent and live in a mindful way.  A succinct elevator speech it isn’t.

But I was fascinated by the answers I received from you.  One word came up over and over again, far more than any other: wonder.  And I do think that wonder is at the center of what it is I want – for myself but perhaps more importantly, for my children – in this life.  I want to help protect Grace and Whit’s capacity for wonder.  And isn’t wonder, at its core, the absolute opposite of logic and understanding?  At the very least, I am certain that true wonder requires the willingness to suspend our often-frantic need to comprehend and intellectualize our experience.

This must be connected to the fact that I am more and more intimate with doubt.  As I get older, I move further away from a ravenous desire to understand.  The not knowing at the center of our lives is immutable, I’m coming to see.  What we need to do is inhabit it, enfold it, learn to live with it.  Our human lives flow around some essential, unknowable truths, like a river around jagged rocks.  We can’t change the existence of those rocks.  So instead I am learning to love the glitter of the water’s drops as they bounce off of it.