Author: rrs905

Here’s a thing about me that I’ve learned to be essential and true: I require downtime. And honestly, that downtime needs to be about me. Me. Just me. Bubble. If I don’t get said downtime, I start to wind tighter and tighter and tighter. I’m a pressure cooker, personification of Charles’  Law, a popped corn kernel sizzling in oil (delightful, sure, but not very comfortable and a little unpredictable).

Today, I read about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s announcement of her current pregnancy (twins!) and her plan to take a 2-week working maternity leave, as she did with her first child. I’ll leave others to debate whether her example is or is not helpful to the cause of working mothers and work/family balance. If she’s happy and fulfilled, I’m happy for her. But I just thought, How? How is it that some people are wired to climb mountains, and some are inclined to build cozy bungalows in the valleys? As a Virgo, I’m supposed to be driven by a perfectionistic, analytical streak, but my idea of achieving order is making it to the school before the morning bell rings. There are days that I can barely make it out of the house with a 7-and-9 year old who can, ostensibly, feed and dress themselves…(it’s supposed to be 85 degrees today; why are you in flannel?… If you want to wear your hiking boots, I suppose, but…)  In the weeks after I gave birth to those children, there were days I didn’t dress, shower or leave the house. That everyone was fed seemed like enough. Dressed? Optional. Marissa Mayer may have a housekeeper, a nanny and a stylist, but she’s also a hardwired mountain climber. I am not.

About 50% of the time, my morning includes someone in a modified time out before 8am. I often wish it was me. Can I go to my room for 5 minutes to take some deep breaths? Sometimes, my eyes dry and my neck aching at work, I’ll talk to my husband who will say, “What’s for dinner tonight?” “There’s chicken and ground turkey in the fridge,” I’ll say, “And we should probably use the avocados.” And when I get home, and it smells appreciably delicious outside, it somehow always surprises me that the smell stops at our front door. “You said you were making something with chicken.”  Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that, particularly. I’m going to my room for a timeout. Or, fine, to take my contacts out. But you can bet I’m going to be slow about it!

So, I’m a valley-type. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s a different view, not a lesser one. Every now and then, it’s fun to day-trip into the mountains. It’s a spectacular view. Sometimes stark and contrast-y, but striking. But do you remember the childhood song, The Bear Went Over the Mountain? On the other side of the mountain, there was always another mountain, back the way he’d come. Even as a child, I felt a little bad for him. I’m thankful for the Marissa Mayers of the world. There are so many advances in technology, healthcare, education, science and politics because of the mountains they’ve climbed. I have nothing but respect for that, as well as a little envy for that sort of innate drive.

But here’s what I noticed down here in my valley, where I have time for late night reading, and perusing fashion magazines (while wearing Target jeans and Old Navy t-shirts), time for extended happy hours and delightfully chaotic U7 soccer games: I noticed at night, the shamrocks on my windowsill close right up. They will themselves to sleep so that in the morning, they can spread their cheerful faces:

And there are these flowers that I definitely ought to know the name of, except that I don’t, that line the edge of the footpath that is Maximus Trail Park, giving it all the dignity of its larger park brethren. These sunny flowers know that there’s a time to rise, a time to shine, and a time to dream.

And so whatever our view, may all our dreams be as sweet as they are — as we are — different. And may we wake up refreshed and recharged.

 

Have you seen the phrase/meme/t-shirt/coffee cup, “You have the same number of hours in the day as Beyoncé”? It’s been around for awhile now, but it’s still making the rounds.

This is supposed to be somehow motivating, but I’m sure I’m not the first to call bullshit on this. I can’t help but surmise that Beyoncé is probably not assisting with second grade sight word homework while knuckle-deep in steel wool in a frying pan where she burned the peppers and onions as she watches the sun set, literally, on what will be the last daylight opportunity for a quick run. For the record, I’m sure she works incredibly hard, and if I had to choose between a 90-minute aerobic stage performance in 4-inch heels and scrubbing up some dishes, I’m honestly going to choose the latter, whatever that may say about me. But the point is, Beyoncé’s 24-hour cycle runs differently from mine.

Summer vacation ended three weeks ago, but this was our last week “off”, when all we had to do was get ourselves to school (and work) and back. Technically, we still had places to be most nights, but not regularly scheduled places. (Granted, one night was a philanthropic trip to Yogurtini to support our school for restaurant night… the noble things we do for education…)

Next week, summer is officially over. Next week, soccer starts on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Dance on Tuesdays from 5:30-8, and there’s Girl Scouts, and on Wednesdays there’s other Girl Scouts. With the time that’s left, Sam wants to find an archery class and Eva wants to play basketball. I’m just saying, Beyoncé probably doesn’t have to pull down the crock-pot recipes cookbook that she got while standing in line at the grocery store, to try to figure out how to get everyone fed.

I was running in the mornings, and I thought I was loving running in the mornings. It turns out, I love running in the sunlight. It was confusing because, with the sun rising and shining at 5am, I wanted to rise and shine, too. But now the sun isn’t coming up til almost 6:30, which makes snuggling into a snooze or two all too tempting. But being the flexible person I am, the last few weeks I’ve been running in the evenings during the week, which worked through the first week of school, the no-homework, we’re just getting back into the groove week. It worked through the next week when we were still in the middle of the summer-activity into fall-activity hiatus. This week, though, has been a taste of what sticking with a routine means when the routine gets all shot to pieces by your other routine.

“I was hoping to run today,” I said as my husband came into the kitchen.

“So, go run,” he said. Men tend to simplify things. It’s beautiful and frustrating.

“Now? It’s almost 7:30. We just finished dinner. It’s getting dark. The girls still have homework to finish.”

“Go run,” he repeated.

And so I did. It wasn’t the best run I’ve ever had, in part because this is the state of my laundry, since laundry is on the  list of things I’ve been meaning to get to, and so I had to wear my least-favorite, but nearly always clean workout sweats:

And running in the gloaming isn’t quite the same as running in the dawn. There’s a day-is-done vibe instead of an up-and-at-em vibe. There’s more reflection on what came before the run – the morning rush to pack lunches (will be more on top of that tomorrow), the emails that didn’t get responses, and the ones that did, wondering if the temper tantrum brewing when I left the house hit flash point since I’ve been gone (odds are good) – whereas a morning run feels like more of a clean slate.

But there’s something to be said for cataloguing the day’s thoughts before my head hits the pillow. And wow, who knew where we were in the moon’s cycle?

“Go run.”

I missed the sunset, but I caught some perspective.

 

My nutritionist is adorably, professionally pulled together. For an 8am appointment, earlier than I usually get to work, I have compromised with dry shampoo and flipflops, because I’m not stepping on a scale wearing real shoes. She apparently stopped somewhere for a blowout before work, and is wearing heeled ankle boots that somehow pull her whole look together. She’s in that small minority of society for whom the skinny jean trend is working. Basically, I want to trust her because it seems like she has her life together.

The first visit, she asked me about my goals. Can I be you? I say, but thankfully only in my head. I want to feel better, I said out loud. And then, with a self-effacing half-smile shrug, said what I assumed was pretty obvious. “And I need to lose weight.” She waved that aside. If your goal is to feel better, that will take care of itself, she assured me. I’d never question someone so obviously proficient at life, but from experience in my actual life, I know that it’s never taken care of itself before.  She never asked me to step on a scale, but recommended that I go gluten-free and limit all grains and sugar. (She will eventually take all three away completely for awhile, but it’s day one and I don’t know that yet.) She gives me a folder of recipes with free-range, hormone-free meats, unsweetened almond butter and coconut flour and other things not in my kitchen, but which I will discover are about double the price of traditional groceries.

I dreaded telling people. I was a pretty reliable good-time eater. And sympathy eater. Many of my favorite memories of my favorite people revolve around that time we … food. When we had that tradition where we … with the eating and the laughing and the love. I felt a little like I was letting down this key group of people in my life by turning down cupcakes. This was all in my head. For the most part, no one blinked an eye, except sometimes in sympathy. But gluten is delicious, they would say. So true.

So while everyone around me ate cupcakes and pasta and French bread dipped in vinegar and oil, I learned that coconut flour is really, really absorbent — that takes some getting used to — and that you can make buffalo “wings” out of cauliflower. And that you can’t compare grain-free pancakes and cauliflower wings to pancakes and wings. They’re different and your expectation has to be different. But they aren’t bad. And I learned that actually, there are lots of people who are making similar choices. My neighbor sent over a file of recipes she said were “tried and true,” which meant… it wasn’t just me on this path. And at soccer practice, two other mothers mentioned their own medical issues and the dietary changes they were working on. At work, it turned out that my co-worker’s husband was fighting the same battle the same way. No one mentioned weight, except that everyone was losing it, as a by-product. Everyone seemed to think that what you put in your body had an affect on how you felt.

For my entire life, I’ve had a weight issue. I don’t even mean that for my entire life I’ve been overweight. Because while that’s been true for much of it, what I’m talking about goes deeper than that. I’ve had a psychological complication in which I question my self-worth because of my weight. Even knowing that what I eat in private will show up on the scale, which will show up on my soft upper arms, popping belly and brushing thighs, I will make that third trip to the pantry. I truly believe it’s an addiction. My husband has struggled to quit smoking for most of his adult life, and I admit thinking to myself, You have children who are seeing you as either an example or a warning, children who need you around for as long as possible, well after they’re adults, and you know this is killing you! How can you just keep smoking? And then I remember … Pot. Kettle. Stern warnings to myself that I will absolutely not enter the kitchen one more time tonight. After this one last trip. I will have tea as a nightly ritual. Soothing, comforting, sort of. I will… develop an insane mixed nut and salted peanut habit, since I’m not eating gluten, dairy or corn but still pretty much an addict teetering on the edge, regardless of what foods, specifically, I am and am not putting into my body.

I think any mother who has ever struggled with weight, not just in pregnancy but in general life, has a horror of being a poor example to her children. It seems like this is especially true with daughters, though I can’t say for sure, since I only have daughters. But for all the world has changed since I was young, I still know exactly what it feels like to be a child on the upper curve of the growth chart. What it feels like to know that none of your friends’ clothes will fit if there’s a sleepover at their house and someone says, Let’s have a fashion show! I don’t want my children to feel that dread, and yet at my 9-year-old’s sleepover, I overheard the girls talking about how much they each weighed. It wasn’t a judgmental discussion. There was no meanness in it. Just factual, because they were creating a crazy complicated hello handshake dance that involved one person being lifted. Well, how much do you weigh? But I thought, No, no no. I’m not ready! I haven’t been a good enough example for long enough yet. I haven’t taught them enough body-confidence, because I’ve been so long without it.

We keep being told that culture loves curves. Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé. Love those curves. Both size 6, though Queen Bey was a size 2/4 at the 2014 Grammy awards, says her stylist via the internets. That icon of female empowerment, Katniss, played by “curvy” Jennifer Lawrence? 5’9″ and also a size 6. These aren’t rail thin women, and I’m grateful for that, as my daughters begin to arrive at an age where shopping at Justice is cool, and they’re cognizant of what Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift wear to awards shows. But let’s not go so far as to say a size 6, 5’9″ woman is all curves.

Since January, I’ve been making healthier choices. Techically mid-December, but there was still some self-negotiation going on through the holidays. I was sort of painted into a corner, what with the waking up with hives day after day. Drugs upon drugs weren’t working (just the antihistamine kind, though there were days I considered the relative merits of something stronger). I felt like, if 6x the recommended dose of antihistamine coursing through my system wasn’t helping, maybe this wasn’t the solution. Also, I felt like hell. And that didn’t begin to touch on the constant stomach issues that I just assumed was my genetic predisposition as a Strunk. So I changed some things. And since January, I’ve felt better.

The funny thing about feeling better is that you want to keep feeling better. It’s not actually as tempting to slide backwards as you anticipate, given a life-long addiction to the food-is-love/food-is-comfort/food-is-fun endorphin rush. My diet is still pretty modified. It’s sometimes a pain at happy hour, but otherwise, not really that big of a deal. And it’s not *a diet*, it’s simply what I eat and don’t eat. I’m not sure that consuming a tin of nuts a week is ideal, but it’s my system, and it seems to be holding me steady.

And the weight? For the most part, it’s taken care of itself, just as my nutritionist prophesized that first appointment. I’ve lost 22 pounds. 20 pounds January – May, and about 2 pounds since. I started running in June, but it hasn’t budged the scale. Perhaps because I’m eating more peanuts than a pachyderm. People have begun to notice, and I’ve begun to get better about saying, “Yes, I have. Thank you.” Rather than trying to explain that it’s a surprise to me, too, and I wasn’t really trying to lose weight, per se, exactly, I just was trying to feel better, and this is what happened. I mount a defense, where no one is asking me to. It’s perplexing. I think I’ve figured out that the defense isn’t so much about judgments from others… for the most part, people are just making small talk while waiting out the last two minutes at the break room microwave. I noticed you lost weight. It’s sure been hot this week. Did you notice the smoke from those New Mexico fires? It’s a passing kudos, appreciated, but not really about me. So why the defensive, self-deprecating knee-jerk? I think I’m still defending the me that was told in 4th grade that if you could “pinch an inch” on your stomach, you were fat. Now, from a place that feels like stable wellness, I want to tell the other me, You aren’t less when you weigh more. But you can feel better and you’re worth that.

In fact, at this snapshot in my life, I am still, by one classic indicator, overweight. Anyone who has ever had a weight concern knows that the BMI calculator is a jerk. My problem wasn’t so much what I weighed, but that I am so short! That’s not my fault! Erm… anyway. Many people will say that the BMI calculator is a poor tool. One of my brother’s friends has something like 8% body fat. It might even be less. And, because of his impressive muscle mass, the BMI calculator lumps him in the yellow zone of overweight but not yet obese. My mother has told me several times that she wouldn’t think of *me* as nearing the red zone. I look just fine. Which is part of the reason I love my mother, but I can admit that the closer I inched to the red zone, the more uncomfortable I was about how my body was navigating through my life. Today, I still technically need to lose about 1.5 pounds to hit green. I could probably buckle down and do it, but I feel like it’ll either take care of itself, or it won’t.

The yellow-zone person that I am today can debate these two pairs of running shoes with legitimacy, because I actually use running shoes regularly. I can go back to Runner’s Roost a week later and say, I tried these on trail and pavement and they aren’t working, and feel like a legitimate running shoe customer.

 These made me want to cry.

 

These restored my faith.

 

 

 

And 1.5 pounds or no, I get to see things like teenaged coyote pups playing like… well, puppies on my route. This is mildly concerning from a protective mama standpoint, but we’ve managed to share the road so far.

  

Lots of room for all of us. I hope.

And I finally figured out coconut flour. Sometimes the grain-free thing goes better than others. It’s happened where my oldest daughter has said about my breakfast, Doesn’t seem like that’s  working out for you.   … and she’s been right. But my initial stab at sweet potato waffles? Drizzled with honey? Not waffles. Different than waffles. But good.

 

Today, I took three 9-year-olds on a hike. I gave them their space intentionally, keeping about 20 feet ahead of them. At one point, I could hear them wonder aloud if they ought to be keeping up. Your mother’s getting ahead of us, one of them said. “Of course she is,” my daughter responded, “She runs every day.” Though this is technically not true, it eased a little of the parental guilt pressure around my heart. I’m far from perfect. I still have one foot in the yellow-zone. I try to binge eat cucumbers and watermelon more often than chocolate, but I don’t always succeed, and I like to eat at least two-thirds of my daily calories after dinner. Not a great strategy. But I hope in this moment, I’m more example than I am warning. “If your goal is to feel better, the rest will take care of itself.” I’ll never be a 5’9″ size 6. But I’m feeling better about being just where I am.

 

 

I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired. Sometimes I’m merely tired, and not exhausted, which is always welcome. Sometimes I think that if I could just close my eyes right now, I could sleep for the next 12 hours. Maybe longer. Throughout the week, I’m certain I could sleep hours past my alarm. And yet, Saturday morning, I’m wide awake at 6am. It’s unfair. Now that I have children who sleep past dawn, I myself am unable to do so? What kind of sick joke is that?

At work today, I thought about a nap, out loud. It was met with equally enthusiastic response from nearly every adult in proximity. I’m actually not a nap-taker. I think people are born into one camp or the other on that front. But they always sound like the best idea ever, and I think maybe I could be a nap taker if I just applied myself.

My ears are tired, because at any one time, there are at least two people talking to me.

My legs are tired, because last night I thought I could change seamlessly from jogging to biking. Turns out those are very different muscles. Respect to every tri-athlete out there.

My eyes are tired, because they’ve been staring all day at black text marching across a white screen and I never think to take my contacts out until they’ve been in for 15 hours and are stabbing me in the eyes.

My college roommate and I were huge Barenaked Ladies fans in college. They have one song called Who Needs Sleep. If you haven’t heard it, I recommend listening. It’s fun, and it’s been dead on accurate for me across decades. (Decades. Because I somehow keep getting older). Who needs sleep? (well you’re never gonna get it) Who needs sleep? (tell me what’s that for) I think as a human race we’ve done amazing things. But how tired are we? We’ve been to the moon, and good for us. But we may have explored galaxies by now if we were all just a little more rested. We may have already been visited by alien races who said, right before they moved on, “It’s a cute planet, but there seems to be some sort of sleeping sickness here.” They may be right.

Our war with sleep starts early. I can remember as a child, I was supposed to be in my room napping, but I’d be up. And our postman, Mr. Mahoney, would come by, and I’d call out to him from my second floor window, which my mother would never be able to hear, because I was so very sneaky, and he’d say with mock sternness, It’s naptime! Go to sleep! It actually may not have been mock sternness. If he was a father himself, he probably felt pretty strongly about it. Just another kid on his route who had no respect for the amazing schedule that somehow gifted them with an hour’s nap every afternoon.

Now, with kids of my own, I realize that there are volumes, tomes, dedicated to child sleep habits. And there is a booming industry of sleep aids for exhausted adults. I think the reason Sleeping Beauty is such a timeless fairy tale is that we’re all secretly jealous. Really? And then she just slept? FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS? That’s amazing. But back to children… I understand now that the number one rule of early parenting is that you do everything in your power to tire them out so that they’ll “sleep well.” This really has very little to do with their sleep cycle. I mean, if they get a good night’s sleep, so much the better. It’s better for everyone that way. But really, this is about the tired adults. If we can just get these little balls of energy into their beds (before we miss the window and they cycle into manic crazy), we have it made! And yet, it’s a ridiculously difficult task. Just this week, way past bedtime, my youngest came downstairs (again), wanting to read in her bed. No, I said. You need your sleep. It’s a school night (and mommy needs to watch John Oliver on DVR with his HBO-sanctioned language). I turned off her light. “Fine! I can’t read in the dark! I won’t learn to read! I’ll never learn anything!” she yelled down the stairs after me. At that moment, her illiteracy was the least of my concerns. We can tell when our children don’t get enough sleep. It affects them just like it does us. And yet, what I really mean when I say, “Why don’t you take a deep breath and think about what you just said… I don’t think you got enough sleep”, is, Mommy didn’t get enough sleep to deal with this tantrum and so help me, if you keep pushing, I’m going to dive into that bag of M&Ms like there’s no tomorrow and pair it with a side of rosé and do you really want that on your conscience?

As school starts again for the year, we’re balancing a new rush of activities with a new year of a little more homework, and a little more independence, a little more testing of waters and boundaries and limits. A new year of growing up, for all of us. The sensible thing to do would be to go to bed earlier, count sheep and get a white noise machine. But those hours when the house is finally quiet and my time is my own are too precious to give up to sleep. We’ve all heard Plato’s famous quote, Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Perhaps, adapted, we just need to remember, Be kind. Everyone you meet is at least a little tired, and quite probably exhausted.

 

Let them sleep, for when they wake, they will move mountains.

 

Amy Adams was in Julie & Julia with Meryl Streep who was in The River Wild with Kevin Bacon. 2 degrees of Kevin Bacon. And who is Amy Adams but another Douglas County, Colorado girl who made her mark, who graduated from high school just down the road (and then was nominated for 5 Academy Awards). As you watch Enchanted, my daughters, be assured that dreams do come true, but sometimes the story takes a couple drafts.

Sitting in a comfortable after-dinner food coma, my husband and brother and I were talking about the ways of the world, as one does. Did you know, and this is a real statistic, that between 60-80 percent of jobs are gained through connections? At our table, in our current jobs? 66% of us had a connection working for us. My husband’s industry is a little smaller, and while he got his current job the traditional way – a Craigslist ad – his industry reputation could be verified within one degree of separation because, as anyone can tell you, it’s all about who you know. And yet, even with such daunting odds, only 30% of us, according to a Gallup poll, would actively claim to like our jobs, leaving 70% of American workers on the spectrum from “disengaged,” all the way to “dislike.”

Personally, there are a lot of aspects of my job that I appreciate, but as a parent, this seems like pretty heavy stuff. My daughters are bright and funny and wonderfully and endearingly idealistic. I wish they could live in that realm forever. I want my daughters not just to know that they can do what they want, but to believe in it. I don’t want to say, tritely, with hackneyed optimism, Reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars (at a job you’re pleasantly disengaged from), but, Go out and own that blasted moon if you want it! And yet I know that they’re already beginning to learn lessons that are at odds with their idealism. They already know that you can work hard but not get your turn. It’s hard to watch their disappointments, hard to know that no amount of careful planning, hard work or even innate talent can protect them from frustration or disillusionment. Even knowing that these experiences also teach them resilience and empathy, a parent’s heart is bound to shed tears for the lessons ahead.

It’s hard to be sure of how prepare our children for life. Certainly not all of our advice will be embraced, as hard won as it has been for us. It’s such good advice, too. It’s a user’s manual, a brilliant one, just tossed aside. It’s hard, when we can see the danger, to remember that they don’t step in our footsteps, but beside them, and then ahead of them. But still, before you turn away, sweet child, if I could impress upon you just one pearl: Don’t rush. Through life, to judgment, into hurried promises… getting there first doesn’t matter if you’re at the wrong rendezvous and missed the view. Take your time.

At the dinner table, we discussed what we would do if we could… flip houses, write novels, manage a greenhouse (that last one is mine, despite the fact that I have a proven track record against keeping plants alive… I just think the division of admin and physical labor would be ideal). In little ways, we’ve made our “what ifs” come true. The Becks have a tiny little stake of real estate, and my brother has written multiple novels that I’ve read for pure pleasure. I, admittedly, have not even planted anything lately (probably for the best), but I did bring an orchid back to life this year – it was literally in the outside trash can when I had second thoughts and promised it another chance – and I’ve found ways to add a little more activity to my days. And even as our stories unfold in ways we didn’t fully expect, we’re all someone whom someone else knows; the more invested we are in our own pursuits, the more faceted we become, and the more connections we develop. As we develop, as we do more of the things we love, our network grows, and it reflects the life we’ve created. We’re all only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but how we build that bridge of connections is about how we commit our time, and not rushing the process.

“It’s the weight that you carry from the things you think you want.” I love this lyric. Sometimes we’re so focused on our path, we forget to look up. We forget to shake off the weight. 80% of us know people who know people. Is that depressing or is that comforting? We struggle under the apprehension that we’re the 20% left out in the cold, and yet by nature we’re all born with a wonderful and endearing idealism, if we can just try not to lose it. If we can just dig deep to find it again. We reach out to help others because someone reached out to help us. Maybe that’s not such heavy subject matter for parenting after all.

 

I definitely swallowed a bug tonight while I was running. I run less often at night than in the morning, and the whole bug situation is very different at night. In that there are far more of them out and about. It was at the end of my run, so I was breathing in a little more deeply than I might be ordinarily and, wwhup! There it was. Definitely a bug. Some cultures may get their protein from the insect world, but it made me remember that change comes with rewards and drawbacks. I have to point out that I very rarely inhale a bug as I’m sitting in my reading chair, paging through a novel. Points awarded: reading.

Change has been on my mind a lot the last couple weeks as we’ve gotten ready for back-to-school and then, this week, tried to jump into the old routine. Except that the old routine is just that — last year’s. This year, both girls are showering in the morning, meaning a line in the mornings, with a lot of “I went first last time!” and “Mom! I need a towel!” The latter explains why we generally wash about 25 towels a week. And this year they say they want to scooter to school, rather than our usual drop-off. We haven’t done it yet, and the desire may only last til the first cold morning, but it’s more planning, more time management, and more proof that my children are growing up and that it’s happening quickly. For the first few days, though, my youngest still wanted to hold my hand until the bell rang, which eased the wistful pang that the scootering request had wrought.

Talk about change. This was Samantha’s first day of preschool. You can’t tell here, but her backpack is on upside down. Adorable:

And her first day of kindergarten. Still adorable but obviously ready for anything:

I admit I don’t have a photo of Eva’s first day of preschool. Sam started her childcare years at an in-home daycare, and then transitioned to preschool. Eva was in a more traditional setting the whole time, so she’s down a transition photo. But her first day of kindergarten photos make me want to wake her up from her current slumber and hug her. Dream big, little girl.

And now I have a 4th grader and a 2nd grader, and they want to scooter to school, after they drain all the hot water and fight about earrings. It’s amazing and it’s sad and it’s wonderful. The 12 years between 1st grade and senior year take forever while you’re living through them. But I’ve now lived in Colorado for 13 years, and I’ve been married for 10, and none of that took much time at all, in retrospect. It’s amazing and it’s sad and it’s wonderful, how time just keeps moving.

Back-to-school is a good time to take stock. It’s perhaps even more natural than the New Year. The New Year, after all, is the middle of winter and there is no light past 5pm, but there’s still a ton of holiday candy around, and as soon as you get rid of the chocolate santas, there are chocolate hearts and then jelly beans and chocolate eggs. What are we really supposed to do in January, February and March besides watch movies, make fires and eat leftover chocolate? Resolutions during this time are ludicrous, clearly.

But by August… the days aren’t quite as long as in June, but we’ve gotten into the habit of maximizing them. When the sun doesn’t set until 8:30 or 9pm, we get to cheat time a little. All summer, we say yes a little more. Yes to concerts on work nights and to one last bike ride, even in the gloaming hour. We say yes to running out specifically for a watermelon after dinner, just because a small child thinks it sounds good.  Yes. Sure. Why not? It does sound good.

As school starts and we form new routines, I challenge myself to remember that there are still the same number of hours in a day at the twilight of the year as there are in the summer. Granted, children must to bed, homework must be done. But in addition to stocking up on rainbow colored folders, and the specific sized mini white board and that one new, unpaired sock as eraser, I resolve to steal some of those summer hours and sneak them into autumn. To remember that bears hibernate, not people. And if my children can embrace change in the fall, so can I. Maybe we can dispense with New Years resolutions altogether, and promise ourselves a bit of summer living no matter the month, after homework is done.

 

 When I was about the age my children are now, we lived hours away from our closest blood relatives, so we had one of those extended families that grow out of common experience. There were people to whom we went, or who came to us, for birthdays, for Easter egg dying, for slumber parties so that our respective parents could get away. I didn’t realize it at the time, because to me it was all about backyard zip lines and lighting our eyebrows on fire in the birthday candles (that wasn’t me, by the way; I waited til high school chemistry for that), but they were our village. We moved away from Boston when I was about 8, but I have a lot of memories of Pleasant Street Congregational Church, of the close friendships that my parents made there. I looked up to those young couples who were my parents’ age, but were other kids’ parents, or even more curiously, no one’s parents, but who took the time to talk to us. In the way of easy childhood acceptance of our own importance, my childhood was filled with people who cared. They were our village.

It takes a village, they say. They say it a lot. And I’m about to say it a lot. It’s almost cliché. But it’s more truism than it is trite, more proverb than platitude.  I now realize completely the importance of a family’s village. Those other mothers that I grew up with, from a small child to a teenager and beyond… I realize as I see my daughters run to my friends with stories and misadventures to tell… these are their other mothers, this is community. This is the village.

Not only is it important to for children to know that someone else is available to open that juice box, to watch the newly improvised dance routine, it’s important for the adults. The herd makes different decisions than the individual, because the herd knows it can keep its young safe by the sheer beauty of numbers. In the herd, children can venture a little farther afield and get the experiences that help them grow independent. Alone, our child asks to use the bathroom, which is across the ballpark, and we see a dozen America’s Most Wanted scenarios playing out within 25 yards. Better not. Hold my hand. Be careful. But in the herd, we can let them go. Well… go straight there and come straight back, we say. Look out for each other. And their world becomes a little bigger.

The modern village has expanded, even as it has contracted. We’re less likely to know our neighbors around the corner (unless you have cul de sac real estate; those Facebook photos always look like a giant party), but we’re more likely to keep strong ties with the people with whom we’ve connected along the way. The high school and college friend, the co-worker from that awful first job, the woman who also chose the back of yoga class and those invaluable other mothers. These are the people to whom you can say, I’m worried. I think I’m screwing this up. I’m fed up, and I’m tired. The beauty of having someone to go to when you’re feeling weak is they remind you that you’re strong. And strong again, you remember you can take on mountains. Or at least those double-booked Tuesday nights when you have to be two places at once.

My village began growing before I realized it was there. I am beyond blessed with a network of friends and family who were foundational before I realized I was in the business of building. My village is connected by phone calls, hundreds of texts across hundreds of miles, Happy Hours (the capital letter kind with 2-for-1 specials), photos of joyful children on beaches and mountaintops on social media, and then the stories behind what it took to get those photos taken. (It took us almost an hour to get everyone fed and into the car, and then the youngest got car sick, and the oldest had a bloody nose and we didn’t have a single tissue, because we’re those parents, so we had to stop at McDonald’s for a small fry and NAPKINS but it was too late to save the shirt, so we just put it on backwards for the photo…)

Now that my children are getting older, our village is partially prescribed by a complicated chicken and egg formula of playdates for mothers during playdates for children. You might say that by default, this is a village of common experience. We’ve arrived within the same geography, with children the same ages. But the village has nothing to do with defaults. We choose our neighbors, create our cul de sac. Experiences knit us together, but we search for kindred spirits, as the feisty heroine of childhood, Anne Shirley, named such friends. People who get us, get what we’re going through, and can remind us that we’re strong, or at least remind us that we’re not alone. Outside the village, we can smile and say the right thing at the right time. We can agree that organic is best and shake our heads over corn syrup and screen time. And, I mean, I do feel good about buying local when I can and leery of a shelf life of multiple years. But we need spaces where we can be real about who we are, what we’re thinking and what we’re going through. Someone to whom to say, I was so tired last night when I got home from work, I gave the children ice cream for dinner and let them watch Descendants on Disney until their eyes glazed while I read People StyleWatch and imagined what it would be like to own teal velvet ankle booties instead of Keds.

Our village gets it.

To my person who trades trenches of parenthood stories with me via text on days that start and end with tantrums, thanks for being my village. To my person who understands my crazy hypochondria and anxiety, to my person who will say out loud what we are all thinking. To my person who knows the middle names of our family cats, and to my person who calls as soon as teacher assignments come out. To my person to whom nothing needs to be said at all, just a look, and to my person who understands why peaceful quiet at midnight is worth the alarm just six hours later, thanks for being my village. Every child needs one, they say. And their mothers, too.

Summer is the perfect time to change to healthier eating habits. Fresh fruits, vegetables straight from the garden. Which explained not at all why I was shoving the fifth mini Reese’s cup into my mouth. I poked a little at the trash so that the pile of gold metallic wrappers wasn’t quite so obvious.

For all my strides forward in health and wellness, those wrappers don’t lie. It’s not really even my fault. They were purchased for fancy camping s’mores at the advice of the grocery store clerk who swore we’d never go back to Hershey bar s’mores after trying the Reese’s cup version. Because I have a healthy respect for people who make hyperbolic statements about dessert, we picked up a bag. And used two of them camping; it turns out we’re s’more traditionalists. However, in no way am I immune to the peanut butter chocolate combination. Or really, any variety of chocolate combination. Those red boxes of Queen Anne’s chocolate covered cherries? Love. Them. York Peppermint Patties? Delicious and also refreshing. But it’s the pb and chocolate combo that’s sitting on my kitchen counter.

I’m still checking the sugar content of spaghetti sauce and salad dressing and lunch meats, and choosing the option with the least amount possible, and choosing Heinz Simply Ketchup, even though it adds sugar, but because it doesn’t add corn syrup. I believe those things add up needlessly, and why not choose better when you can. And yet, I definitely didn’t check the sugar content of those Reese’s cups before popping them like candy corn the first quart of summer blueberries. (Okay, I just checked out of curiosity… 23g of sugar for 5 mini cups. That’s literally half the sugar of a soda and it turns out 5 is actually a serving size. I feel somewhat redeemed, even if my redemption is accidental).

And so despite the healthy strides I’ve taken of late, I don’t check the sugar content of Reese’s cups. A Reese’s cup doesn’t have extra sugar just to preserve it to an extra-ordinarily long shelf-life, or to bulk it up because it’s fat free and otherwise tasteless. A Reese’s cup exists for sheer gustatory happiness, and there’s no point in taking that and turning into a stick with which to beat yourself. It’s delicious. Enjoy it. And then move on, and go running in the morning.

When I came in from a morning run one day this week, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hangs in our front room, and in it was me, and behind me, the mess of arts and crafts and American Girl dolls and piled books of the previous night (or few days, whatever).

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go (~Rumi). Too much holding on, and you’re trapped in a shrinking box of your own making, feeling the air get thinner as it gradually disappears. Too much letting go and you’re in an untethered freefall. Certainly Rumi meant this at levels far deeper than Reese’s cups and messy living rooms. But if you start with holding on to a delicious treat, but letting go of a messy house so you can get outside on a beautiful morning, and lose the guilt about both, I think we’re getting somewhere.

When I first met with a nutritionist last year, feeling pretty miserable and defeated, she asked me what I wanted to get out of changing my habits. I said that I wanted to be able to hike a mountain with my family without bowing out at the last minute for fear of a rolling stomach, without holding everyone else back because I was busy manifesting a ball of white hot fear in my gut. This summer, my family took a road trip through rural, this-exit-no-services America. We went camping and hiking, hiking with the plan of being gone most of the day, just us and nature and all the other hikers. It might not be a literal summit at fourteen thousand feet, but it’s my mountain and it turns out you can eat Reese’s at the top.

 

“With black bears, you make lots of noise. With brown bears, you play dead,” my daughters told me as we drove away from the campground’s check-in booth.

The ranger had warned us that bears had been active in the campground throughout the week. Make a lot of noise, the children said. How do they know these things? Maybe it comes from being a native Coloradan, something that sings in their blood, something I can never be, though I’ve lived here more than a dozen years. When I read the information signs, they were absolutely right. Make noise, clap your hands, yell. I’m glad the Rockies are black bear country, because relying on playing dead seems less than ideal.

When I was little, we went to Vermont annually to stretch our legs and fill our souls, a get away from suburban Boston. I have memory vignettes from those trips. A specific apple tree, laden with fruit, at the bottom of a hill. The wood beams of a cabin. Those memories are sweet because they’re a little faded around the edges, full of vintage appeal. It’s a reminder that when our family packs up for a weekend of mountain camping, when we escape suburban Denver for the idyllic appeal of the mountains, it matters.

More and more, I’m faced with reminders that my children are growing up and that the decisions we make now are teaching them lessons and priorities in ways that feel alarmingly real sometimes. (And even more alarming, it is real. Life has no dress rehearsal). While children are sponges for knowledge from the moment they’re born, there’s something about the age where suddenly your child, still very much a child, true, but older every day, has learned facts that you didn’t teach them. Even if it’s just from 8:35 to 3:30 weekdays, you begin to realize that they’re on their own out there in the world, and they’re doing just fine. Suddenly, they know what to do if they see a black bear, and you realize that you have to defer to their greater knowledge. The day rapidly approaches where, just as your restaurant dinner is served, your child announces they have to use the bathroom. You sigh a little, look fondly at your just delivered, currently hot dinner, fold your napkin and begin to scoot out of the booth when that child says, “I know where it is, Mom.” Not Mama, not Mommy. But, “I know where it is, Mom.”

Part of camping in the mountains is hiking in the mountains. Visually, you can’t go wrong any direction you turn and what’s better when you’re camping than coming back ravenous to a campfire dinner of THE BEST FOOD YOU’VE EVER EATEN. While our family rambles around Denver and calls it hiking, we planned a fairly ambitious hike for the mountains. An alpine lake was 2.8 miles away from the trailhead, which also made it 2.8 miles back. We were prepared to take all day if we needed it; the goal was the hike, not a timed event.

Going to Rocky Mountain National Park is about escaping into the wilderness. It’s about seeing deer and elk and dozens of chipmunks in their home, while you are just a visitor. It’s about wildflowers and giant boulders as old as the mountains in the middle of your path. Potentially, it’s about bears, though we didn’t see one. Rocky Mountain National Park is the quintessential model of the park system. It’s stepping into an Ansel Adams photograph, in color. A photograph that 3.8 million people visit a year. Wilderness it may still be, when the people go home at night, but it’s not exactly a lonely planet sojourn. As we hiked, we passed people, and people passed us. Groups of high school students, other young families, couples who had been hiking for fifty years more than we had. There were some amazing moments, when we saw clearly the complex artistry of spiderwebs, marveled at sun blanched, uprooted tree roots taller than a child, and jumped from rock to rock downstream of a thundering waterfall. And there were some lackluster moments. Tired legs and aching feet, how-much-farthers and flaring tempers. We made it to the lake, though, and for an hour and a half, all the aches were forgotten, splashing in the cold ice-melt waters, warming back up on the sun-soaked rocks. On the way back down, still energized from the lake, we passed another family with children still hiking up and the parents said, “Look at these children, hiking without complaining!” We all smiled knowingly at each other, members of the same club. Parents of children who were toddling just yesterday, and hiking today.

What will become my children’s wild Vermont apple tree? The nostalgic trigger for a childhood we’re currently defining? I wish I could know, to be able to stop in that rose-colored moment and indulge in it, delighted in the foreknowledge of their wistful reminiscence. I wish I could know what will shape them the most, what will define their memories. As parents, the not knowing keeps us up at night, hoping we’re getting it right, but also means we also get to live childhood again, with the knowledge of how fleeting it really is.

It’s Tuesday night, but it feels like it should already be Friday, or maybe even next Tuesday, as far as the weight of the week. Such is life, sometimes. Because Tuesdays are the night that both our children have dance, plus our youngest has soccer, I ended up geographically at the Rec Center, waiting for dance class. And you know what the Rec Center has? An entire complex devoted to sweating it out. And so I did. For what it’s worth, treadmill running is so much harder than outside running. I thought it would be the opposite, so that was a surprise.

Tomorrow is still going to be a slog. Thursday promises to be a little worse. But the end of this long day still saw family dinner, even if it was at 8pm, the last of the leftover cheesecake, for which I’ve compromised my dairy-free stance, and a little time for snuggles. Running — changing clothes, listening to music a little too loud, and watching at once a Sepp Blatter documentary, HGTV’s Flip This House and the Big Bang Theory (treadmills are truly always as metaphoric as they are literal)– was a definitive line between “the day” and “the life.” And after crossing that definitive line, the day was just a collection of Office-esque vignettes and life was flowing on, as it does.

Not every day lends itself to balance, but we can still tip the scales a little more in our favor.