Anatomy of a Run

See Helena run.

“Helena runs fast,” says Dick.

“Yes,” replies Jane. “Why is that bitch so fast, Dick?”

“She’s trying to outrun her demons,” laughs Dick, belching brimstone.

Run, Helena, run!

I do love to run, although nowadays I rarely experience that pure exhilaration I used to feel about 5 years ago when I first took it up again, trying to jump back on the exercise bandwagon that I had abandoned altogether during 7-odd years of back-to-back pregnancy and nursing. Once I started getting out there regularly, the Mommy-weight began to drop away and my body seemed to remember all those high school and college years when I was actually an athlete with a purpose, a competitive warrior wielding a basketball, a field-hockey stick, a bat, an oar (remind me to put up a post sometime explaining how I coulda been a contenda in the New York Marathon).

Suffice it to say that I have spent the past couple of years struggling against the type of nagging injuries that inevitably occur when middle-aged former athletes try to outrun their mortality. My nemesis turned out to be a strained IT band that forced me to stop running altogether for several months, during which time I tried to make myself REALLY LIKE yoga like everyone else. But a benched Road Warrior does not a good yogi make. I fairly quickly reached the threshold where one more Vinyasa class would have resulted in my children seeing me on the 6 o’clock news with my hands cuffed behind my back, getting showed into a squad car with the officer talking about “watch your head.” So I reached a sort of détente with my body: if I could run regularly I’d to do away with the crazy 15-mile runs and keep my total mileage under 30 miles per week.

So far that’s worked out pretty well: as that fabulous runner’s high has diminished over the years and mortality continues to bitch-slap me annually, I’m usually satisfied with a few modest 6-9 mile runs. Sometimes I still get that Wild Warrior hair across my ass, though.

Like today.

Since work had kept me from the usual Tuesday run I knew I wanted to make this a longer outing. The weather was perfect when I grabbed my iPod and started out: sunny and warm but not too hot, with a perfect summer breeze. The run, however, was not a breeze. In fact, it went something like this:

Mile 1: Why am I doing this again? I really should be home working on that article. I should just turn back around right now and get to work [which is in fact what happened on Wednesday].

Mile 2: What a beautiful day!

Mile 3: Shit, that light’s about to change. If I sprint I can make it…sweet. This feels great, glad I didn’t turn around and call it quits.

Mile 4: I love this song!

Mile 5: Okay, about halfway through, I should ease up a little. Hey, how long has that guy been ahead of me? This won’t do, won’t do at all…

Mile 6: Yeah, that’s right baby, Meep motherfucking Meep! Oh wait, I passed my turnoff…must be a sign! I’m just going to keep going and do my old long route…why not?

Mile 7: Oh shit, I never sent homeboy back that last section he revised and re-sent me. Shitshitshit, need him to write a review for my website. I’d better wrap this up because I have that article waiting for me, too.

Mile 8: WHAT IS MY FUCKING PROBLEM? Why didn’t I turn down Walker and head home? Why am I still out here? I should be getting new front tires for the car at Costco, when the hell am I going to get that in now?

Mile 9: Yes IT band, I know I’ve broken my promise but…oh, knee pain now, too, really? I haven’t had knee pain in years, that’s a pretty low fucking blow.

Mile 10: I can do this, almost there! Pull with the core, pump with the arms, I don’t need no stinking right knee anyway.

Mile 11: Ooh, I forgot I put this on the playlist, sweet. “Open up your eyes, then you’ll realize, here I stand with my, EVALASTING LOOOOOVE…” What a beautiful day! Hey, is that a unicorn with a dwarf on its back?

Mile 12: Almost…there…oh, was I in the middle of the road? Sorry, ma’am, right side of my body not functioning…can see my house…there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…

Be sure to stay tuned for the next fitness update about the yoga class that gets me hauled off to jail.

The Picture Worth a Thousand Words

This is going to be an uncharacteristically short post, but I wanted to put up something that reflects the spirit of Independence Day for me. Frankly, this is a holiday about which I’ve always had mixed emotions.

• Fireworks and nice weather, yay! Oh, except for the part about jackass neighbors setting off firecrackers a full week before and after the holiday, which used to scare the kids when they were littler but now just turns my dogs into skittering, panting, irritatingly underfoot nervous wrecks.
• Long weekend and cookouts, hooray! Unfortunately, this also presents the opportunity to engage in my favorite pastime of self-sabotage, basically triggering a doom-spiral of face-stuffing that undoes an entire winter’s worth of eating healthily and working out–just in time for bikini season!
• I grew up in towns where the earliest battles of the Revolutionary War took place: “the shot heard ’round the world,” etc. I love that stuff. The Declaration of Independence is a brilliantly crafted piece of Enlightenment thinking and definitely worth celebrating on those grounds alone. However, as I’m somewhat of a stickler for historical details, the fact that 1/3 of the rebels signing the Declaration of Independence and 2 out of its 3 writers were slave owners kind of spoils it for me a little bit. The bottom line is that that celebrating July 4th, 1776 as some kind of benchmark of “freedom from tyranny” seems pretty hypocritical.

So imagine my surprise when my youngest, The Diva, brings home this cartoon she drew in school:

"I stand for the United States of America. See, I'm an eagle."

I’m assuming that the upside-down American flag isn’t a political statement, but a result of the fact that she’s in first grade and occasionally writes things backwards. So in case you’re not Da Vinci and can’t read the  mirror-text (with a 6-year-old’s phonetic spelling) over the characters’ heads, here’s the translation: While the girl on the left exclaims, “Cool, an eagle,” the avian symbol of the United States shits on her head: “Plop!” Her reaction is, understandably, “Ew,” though her friend comments, “Cool.”

Is it significant that the recipient of the U.S.-eagle-poop has the dark hair and stands next to the upside-down flag while her poop-free friend, who thinks the whole thing is funny, is drawn as blonde? Probably not, but of course that’s how I read the picture: yeah, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is pretty cool unless the whole charade is “flying” at your expense. But this is just a child’s cartoon! I have no idea what inspired it, since I certainly haven’t discussed the contradictions and complexities of our country’s history with The Diva, who, ironically, is the only blonde in our mixed-race family. Just a fortuitous coincidence, or another one of those weird, telepathic parent-child overlaps?

At any rate, this picture (out of the literally THOUSANDS she produced this year) is a keeper. Hope everyone had a nice holiday!

The Mommy Time Warp

So I seriously overestimated the content of my character and the depth of my maternal devotion when I decided that the kids didn’t need to start camp before July 11th. I just kind of figured the last week of school is so chaotic they’d want time to relax afterwards, then the big holiday weekend would eat into the following week, during which I’d plan some educational excursions to the Museum of Natural History and the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, the latter which I have always wanted to visit.

Please don’t let me forget what I solemnly swear to you RIGHT NOW: next year those mofos are not starting camp July 11th or even the 5th, but on June twenty-last-day-of-school-th. Theoretically July 11th is right around the corner, but this week-and-a-half of not getting any work done and spending each day doing nothing more meaningful than grocery shopping and endlessly driving the kids around seems to have warped time to such an extent that I have no idea of what day or hour it is.

And then today, one simple tweet suddenly made me realize how freakin’ good I have it, driving children who can read and play computer games and get themselves food and drink to playdates/swim practice where I can drop them off and not see them for [sometimes] hours!  By contrast, Anna at Random Handprints told her kids they had to nap until a certain hour  in order to get that sacred block of mommy-time when you can simply exhale and be a person again, and then fantasized about moving the clock hands forward so they would have to “sleep” longer. Moving the clock hands forward to maximize your time spent without children–who would do such a horrible thing?

Why, me, of course. Except I didn’t just do it to my kids–I did it to an entire classroom.

My youngest daughter started in her big sister’s former co-op nursery school when she was 2-and-a-half years old, the absolute youngest age at which one could enroll a child. The director was a stickler about the 2-and-a-half cutoff, but since I’d started working again and we were talking about kid #3, so was I: the Diva began her school career on Tuesday, February 10th. Suddenly 2.5 hours twice a week (during which her older sisters were in elementary school) were mine to drink a cup of coffee and blissfully work at my computer in an empty house, even sneak in a kickboxing class now and again at the gym I finally joined. After having 3 kids in 5 years, during most of which I stayed at home, I felt like I’d won the lottery…until that sneaky Mommy Time Warp caught up with me.

Mommy Time Warp: I am pushing a double-stroller full of chunky baby and enormous toddler with one hand while trying to hold the hand of the active preschooler with the other so she does not get run over by a car. Huffing and puffing and feeling overwhelmed and fat and exhausted, I am stopped by an attractive woman slightly older than me who is carrying a delicious-looking and sophisticated latte instead of offspring-appendages. “How adorable!” she exclaims, “ENJOY this time, it goes so FAST!” and I want to punch her. When you are in the thick of the Mommy Years time does NOT go fast; in fact, each day seems to last an eternity, the hours melting into one continuous morass of milk and tears and sweat and delicious fat little bums and dirty diapers and sleepless nights and kids’ shows with horrendous ear-worm songs that make you wish you still had the bandwith to smoke as much weed as you used to.

Oh, and guess what? The Mommy Time Warp inverts when you reach “half-day” nursery school and you soon realize that in that whopping “half a day” you have time to either work out, have your Morning Constitutional, check your email, do a tiny bit of work (if you are lucky enough to have that), or go grocery shopping, but no more than a combination of 2 of these at the very best: Oh my god I just dropped her off and wiped my ass and now it’s time to go back and get her again??? Where did the time go?  Yet insidiously, if your kid is in a co-op nursery school and you are scheduled to be the Helping Parent  once a month, you really are dealing with a Dali-esque situation where each minute is 2.5 hours unto itself. Your own kid is one thing; your relationship is such that you have managed to convey that a variety of behaviors are acceptable as long as we don’t do certain things mommy just can’t deal with. Other people’s kids, strangely, never got this memo, and after approximately 2 hrs. of high-pitched whines and snotty noses that don’t like to be blown and toys that cannot be shared and graham crackers that are smacked open-mouthed, crumbs a-flyin’, a certain parent volunteer might just decide that enough’s enough.

In my defense, I do believe that the particular Melting Clock Time Warp Parent Helper day in question also included crapped pants, but I couldn’t swear to it at this point. The teacher had left the room to get the kids’ art projects and I was supposed to be reading them a story for what she presented as the last few minutes before 11:30 dismissal. Wearily I sat in the chair above the class assembled on the carpet and dutifully tried to read from some large storybook while simultaneously displaying the pictures outward to the inevitable clamor of “I can’t SEE!” Glancing upward at the clock over my head, I noticed it read 11:15. NO FUCKING WAY that could be right!!! I seriously had been in that classroom for a year, the teacher wasn’t back yet but the smell of coffee wafted suspiciously down the hall, and I was almost done with the story that no one could see. So I did what any reasonable person in a cell whose jailer has fallen asleep and dropped the big fat ring of keys through the bars would do: I reached up and moved the clock hands to read 11:30.

When the teacher came back she looked at the clock and exclaimed guiltily: “Oh my,” (because of course nursery school teachers actually talk like that). “I guess we’d better get ready for pick-up!”

The Diva’s pictures were assembled, her hat and coat on in record time. “Need me to stay and help with…no? Oh, great, well, it was fun, see you next month!” When we blew through the front door the first of the parents, the ones who were always the earliest, had just started to arrive and and looked perplexed at the sight of the entire class in their coats ready to go a full 10 minutes earlier than usual. Sorry guys, I thought as I gunned the engine of our minivan, just a little Mommy-Time Revenge….