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Back to It

When we were on vacation, I packed my running shoes, as I have for many other vacations, and — for a change — I used them. Running in rural Minnesota is truly ideal. It was a surprise to me, but I’ve found that my favorite time of day to run is early morning. 6am or so. This might be because it’s summer, and I don’t particularly like the idea of running in the heat of the afternoon, and it might be because this is the time that’s available to me, so I love it out of necessity. But there’s something about the whole brand-new-day factor. “Fresh, with no mistakes in it.” I find that you meet fewer people, which I like, because I become a little proprietary about where I run, and the people you do meet are friendly in a non-intrusive, 6am, we’re all in this together sort of way. On a Saturday at 6am in rural Minnesota, you’ve pretty much got the roads to yourself, which is ideal in my opinion. John Muir said, “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” There’s just something about a dirt road that sings to the soul. Minnesota at 6am on a dirt road is a beautiful thing, for the eyes and for the soul.

Western South Dakota is also a gorgeously beautiful, mostly rural place to run. Unless, of course, you’re staying at a hotel with an attached water park in the business loop of Rapid City. I asked the front desk how to get out of the overflowing parking lot and into the neighborhood behind us. The answer was, You can’t, on foot. And while I could have gone back to our room, retrieved the car keys, driven to a neighborhood, or driven to somewhere beyond the neighborhood, I took the front desk’s advice to use the frontage road next to the hotel. Having just come from my nearly poetic Minnesota run, the frontage road of I-90 wasn’t quite as ideal. In Minnesota at 6am, the only sounds were birds, and roosters, and the dogs I woke up by running by (oops). I-90 isn’t crazy busy at 6am, but there’s still the sound of traffic. Really, I’m listening to music anyway, so I have no business complaining about ambient noise. But there is a definite difference. And the I-90 frontage road was fine. Paved. Safe. It’s sort of motivating to mark time by billboards. They seem close together when you’re driving by, but there are actually quite a few steps between them. There’s certainly no proprietary sense of owning the 6am morning, or owning the road, with interstate traffic speeding by beside you. But as you run by the stark black and white Who Is Jesus billboard, next to the Smoking Gun Indoor Range, you definitely have things to think about. And beyond both of those things, there’s a very pretty view of rolling green hills. You just have to work a little harder for it.

Returning to Colorado, pretty proud of myself for having kept up on running, even on vacation, I promptly got the kind of summer cold that makes you question every healthy thing you’re doing for your body, because obviously your body is a traitor who hates you, and why are you even attempting to make life better for that jerk? And so, for a week, when my alarm went off at 6am, I fought off the Nyquil haze only long enough to push aside the fluffy white pile of tissues beside me to hit snooze, and went back to bed. By Friday evening, I probably could have run but I opted for a phone call, sushi and a glass (and a half) of wine instead. Which I still think was a good choice. But Saturday is a new week, and 6am found me tying up my running shoes. “I probably won’t be gone long,” I told my husband. “It’s been a week, so I’m probably back to zero again.” But you know? I wasn’t. I was maybe an 8 out of 10, if you generously put where I was before the backstabbing summer cold as a 10. But beyond being a bit more expectorant-y, a little more out of breath, my body carried me through. Maybe it doesn’t hate me after all. Sorry I called you a traitor.

When the Stars Align

Months ago, a Vedic astrologist told me that July 13, 2015 would be important for me. “Big,” she said, as she starred the date. “Big.”

Why was I at a Vedic astrologist, might be your next question. And the answer, really, is — why not? Life is confusing, and sometimes hard, and full of amazing moments that we hesitate to believe in because expectation begets disappointment, we’ve learned, and we think that if we can just “figure it out,” we’ll be … happy, content, better. We’re untapped potential, if only we knew how to secure it. We’re Mozart with a paint brush. If only someone had thought to give us an orchestra. Who are we; what does it all mean? Is this it? Am I doing it right? These questions have given us George Bailey running through town, realizing that life is worth living. It’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s 42, and Curly’s “one thing.” Kafka said the meaning of life is that it stops. Frost said that the meaning of life is that it goes on.

Walking into a little Tibetan shop with one of my closest friends, we weren’t expecting to stumble upon the meaning of life, but we were open to the idea of experiencing a new facet of it, and we didn’t hate the idea of a great happy hour just across the street. During an astrology reading, it’s all about you, which is gratifying on a very basic level. For every believer in anything, there is a doubter, but we both left the shop feeling that fun tingle of new possibilities. My reading had said that I was entering a period of change and growth, and that 13 years ago, I’d been in the same phase, but had walked away from it. Since I’d definitely made some poor decisions 13 years ago, lucky guess or stars aligned, the idea that now was the right time to begin planting some of those latent seeds rang true. The reading also said that birds and the color blue were both important to me, and since I didn’t have an “I love blue birds” pendant on, but I do have a living room decorated with silhouetted blue birds, I took note. And July 13 would be “big.” Very big.

Leaving the reading, the only thing I knew for sure about July 13 was that I had a dental appointment, because I’d recently scheduled it, six months out. But, there were still 23 hours left in the day. Anything could happen. Meanwhile, I took on a bigger assignment at work, took charge of my health and started this blog as a creative outlet to balance the bigger but decidedly non-creative atmosphere at work. Spring came, wet and cool, and summer did the same. First and third grade ended for my children, I surprised myself by nursing an orchid back to life, and my youngest learned how to ride a bike, tutored patiently by my eldest.

And the day arrived. July 13. I won’t say I nearly forgot about it. Because I didn’t. Even if the astrologist had simply done the math to know that 13 years ago, I likely graduated from college, and I clearly wasn’t wearing nice enough jewelry to have a wildly successful career under my belt. Even if two-thirds of the population gravitate toward the color blue, there’s still something intriguing about a starred date on the calendar.

I woke up on July 12 with a summer cold, which seemed inopportune and unlikely to resolve itself in a day. And I still had a dentist appointment and not only was July 13 a Monday, but my first day back in the office in nearly two weeks. It seemed like a lot of competing factors. And what, I realized, late at night, if “big” didn’t mean good? I’d been assuming, based on the positive nature of the rest of the reading, that big equaled good. Suddenly, not only did I have sniffles and a sore throat, but also a somewhat paralyzing fear.

And what did happen on July 13? I hit snooze a couple times, for the first time in a while, because my summer cold was definitely lingering. Even so, I got to work a little earlier than usual because the children were agreeable, and I worked until my dentist appointment, which went smoothly and where my mouth was pronounced “boring,” which is really what you want in a dental visit. Blueberries were on sale at the grocery store, although when I got home, I was told I should have gotten oranges, and I was left to make dinner while everyone else half-napped in front of the tv, universally tired out by the first day back to routine. I drank tea and policed bedtime.

Maybe the beauty of July 13 is that I’m in a pretty good place, anyway. I’m not George Bailey, searching and despondent. I don’t particularly need a sign. And if I’m stopping by astrology readings before happy hour, wondering what ways lead on to ways, it keeps life interesting and provides a little motivation to sow some new seeds. We all need a little what if wonder in our lives. On July 13, I lived a day in the life. A day in my life. And it was as big as my husband, my relay partner of a decade, and our children, who were babies just a blink ago, and a job that keeps me busy, and a circle of friends who feel like family, and family whom I count as friends. If I could kick this cold, it would be even better, but what’s basic good health without a cold now and then to remind you of it?

Maybe July 13 was just a random day starred on a calendar. An astrological dart in a year of just-as-likely days. But I’ll still remember this day more vividly for having taken the time to focus on it, to treat it with intention. Maybe I’m not Mozart with an orchestra, or even with a paint brush. But maybe I’m getting a little closer to doing it right.

The Losing Effort of Being Good

The wonderful thing about vacation is that it’s a departure from your daily routine. This is exactly why we love it, for the most part. We spend the days and even weeks leading up to vacation daydreaming about not being at work, not setting an alarm, not cooking, not cleaning, about friendly servers presenting wine lists to peruse and hotel room service, or I suppose, kayaking white waters or learning the subway system of Tokyo, whatever vacation scenario fits your daydream. You can become the parent who says yes to ice cream twice a day, the person who sleeps in because hotels invest in the blackout curtains you haven’t gotten around to yet. “Yes” is easier on vacation.

Vacation is wonderful, and taxing. It’s also late nights for children, unfamiliar surroundings, getting lost on new roads and being out of your daily routine. What we daydream isn’t always utopian in practice. Knowing that many of my routines have become a bit specific, and that the rural Midwest might not be as friendly to that routine as urban Denver, I gave myself some options. I packed low-sugar Kind bars, and cashews, and raisins, and my running shoes.

Our vacation began with a couple days in Minnesota with my husband’s family. En route, our airport meal was surprisingly easy. I’ve learned throughout this dietary shift that you can pretty much ask for what you want. If you go to KFC in an airport and ask for a grilled chicken breast with lettuce and tomato, they will happily give you just that, charge you for the grilled chicken sandwich, and move to the next person in line. Summer bbq’s are also pretty easy, because there is always grilled something, salad and fruit, and if I’m the one bringing the salad (and the sour cream and cheddar chips), that’s an easy contribution. So, food as sustenance isn’t really the issue.

More at the heart of the matter when visiting family is that the most natural thing in the world is to show love with food. Breaking out the special recipes means, you matter to me. And turning down special recipes and noting that you no longer eat gluten, dairy or corn feels awkward. Like you’re turning down love. And let me be clear, this is all on me. This is me feeling guilt that hasn’t been assigned because we’re culturally programmed to give and receive food. It feels disobliging to turn down homemade cookies.

At the same time, the most frequent phrase I heard throughout vacation, even from my husband who has been at ground zero during this re-envisioning, was, “You’re being so good!”

I think the idea of being good and bad when it comes to eating is a disservice to us all. As my 7-year-old said after a day of virtuous behavior evaporated in a landslide of boredom-inspired trouble-making, “It’s just too hard to be good all the time!” And it really is. If we’re weighing each choice we make as good or bad, we’re bound to feel like when we’ve tipped the balance enough to the good, we’re due for some bad. But for the first time in my life, I’ve started making choices not on how good or bad they are considered universally, but how good and bad they make me feel. And in that sense, vacation is the absolute worst scenario to be “bad.” If I’m on an unfamiliar road on a stretch of highway that goes 30 miles between exits, I’m absolutely not going to tempt fate by having “just one” of what I’ve discovered are definite triggers to feeling digestively awful. This isn’t me being “good.” Being the person who is always “good” feels obnoxious. No one wants that mantle. This is in no way a virtuous decision of steely self-control. I’m still at odds with my self-control, which is why I can only bring those sour cream and cheddar chips to bbq’s and not have them in my house. Nope, it’s not willpower but an entirely selfish decision, and one that I’d make again because spending 1700 miles in the car with my family without a desperate search for a dubious public bathroom has nothing to do with being good, and everything to do with feeling well.

For the record, once I was safely at home, I overdosed on the amazing smelling roasted (i.e., sugar encrusted) almonds we bought during the trip, and promptly felt awful. And then did it again the next day, just to make sure it was the sugar. It was. Ten steps forward, one step back.

The American Road Trip, or How to Make Memories

The American road trip summer vacation. I assume other countries also road trip, but Woody Guthrie was on to something when he sang about America. From the redwood forests, to the Gulfstream waters, there is a lot to see here, and in fact we looked those lyrics up in their entirety on our recent road trip. Driving across the country fuels patriotism.

I think everyone has a road trip story. Childhood is full of road trips. We’re totally dependent at this point. The car is packed, and away we go. If we’re lucky, there are an abundance of snacks to make up for our childhood powerlessness. I have very vivid memories of driving the 9 hours to my grandparents’ house when I was young. It was a different era, so one kid was always rotating into the “way back” of the station wagon, and as such the dynamic up in the front changed a bit, keeping it fresh. I remember a lot of singing (we were that family), and a lot of stories on tape (stories I can still tell today, and that my brothers and I break out lines from like great comedy sketches), and there were those games with the little red vinyl windows where you marked if you saw a cow, a semi, a church…

As adults, we are more in charge of the destination, and thankfully there are still snacks. In college, road trips changed slightly… up to Niagara Falls (Canada side, where the drinking age was lower and we could go OUT), to the Shore, to home and to friends parents’ houses when we needed to be reminded that food didn’t always come in take-out containers or industrial-sized steel vats. As an adult, I drove to and from Colorado from the Eastern Time Zone a few times before moving here for good. My husband proved his mettle with my family while we were still dating by spontaneously driving us the 20 hours from Colorado to Ohio when our Christmas flight was canceled. Our bags were already packed, and what’s 20 hours in a 13-miles-per-gallon Dodge Ram when you’re young and in love?

Spontaneous proofs of commitment notwithstanding, there are two types of road trips. One is the meandering, hells yes, let’s stop at the 60-foot-Jolly-Green-Giant road trip, and the other is the drive-straight-through hyped up on caffeine and possibly an ice bath to the back of the neck when all else fails (this is stupid and dangerous, obviously; never get to this point). When you add children into a road trip equation, the latter option is pretty much off the table. And suddenly, it’s a childhood road trip again, but it’s no longer YOUR childhood road trip. It’s THEIRS. And because you, now the driving, snack-dispensing, responsible adult, remember your childhood road trips, you have the added weight of knowing that you really are MAKING MEMORIES. The great American road trip has begun.

At the risk of sounding old and crotchety, the road trip is totally different for kids ‘these days’ than it was in our childhood. As we packed up for our 2015 trek, we packed books, and crayons and paper and magnetic tangram puzzles, and withheld the kids’ monthly magazine subscriptions until we were on the road. It could have been 1988. But today’s children also have Chrome books and Netflix and mobile hotspots, and since my children are – they will tell you – deprived enough to not have their own cell phones, they have the second-best chorus of, “Can I play on your phone?” More than once, my husband and I said, “When we were kids….” And, much like ourselves as children, I’m sure, we were largely ignored. And yet, somewhere in western Minnesota, my youngest started counting windmills. And then there were too many windmills to count, so she started to count red barns. Road trips are like that, no matter how much technology is along. My husband and I tried to interest the girls in the license plate game, but the highways in eastern South Dakota are long and empty. While they quickly grew bored of checking the one or two cars that passed every 20 minutes, my husband and I doubled down to really invest in it (we got 42/50, including Alaska, plus 5 Canadian provinces, so we kinda rocked it, just saying).

In our non-road trip lives, we live in a suburban metropolis. Because we live next to a park and have a mountain view, I sometimes forget, until I spend some time in rural Minnesota and South Dakota, that we live in a crowded people soup. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we rarely have to go more than 5 minutes to accomplish our daily lives. Sometimes for soccer games it stretches to 15 minutes, but we grumble about that. By deciding to drive 1700 miles in less than a week, we were definitely making a gamble. I should note that I have two very different children. One is, as a friend said in reminding me to be a road trip palm tree (not an oak), energy incarnate. The other is an introspective, contemplative child who processes much more internally, and who, luckily enough, can sleep almost any time she is in a car.

Do you know where Rapid City is located in South Dakota? I’m going to be honest. I did not. I never gave it any thought, even when my husband proposed and planned this road trip. We were in South Dakota when it occurred to me to wonder. It turns out Rapid City is in western South Dakota. Pretty far west. Pretty much across the entire state, if you’re starting from Minnesota. But it also turns out that as soon as you cross the Missouri River (about mid-South Dakota, for those geography buffs), the entire landscape changes. Instead of flat farmland, it becomes green rolling hills and buttes. It’s a change so dramatic that it focuses you on the landscape and, since there aren’t many other vehicles on the road with you, you can’t help but imagine what the change meant to wagon trains 200 years ago. You mean we just lost half our number crossing that river, and now we need enough horses or cattle to ranch? It’s no wonder the allure of gold was so strong (as opposed to today, when the allure of easy money has totally lost its luster).

About the time that the scenery got really picturesque, our oldest woke up car sick from her most recent nap, since we were somehow better about carrying Dramamine around as a cup of water on a bonfire, rather than dispensing it preventatively. Our youngest, always ready to push boundaries and fight boredom with pugnacious mischief-making, was thrilled to have a newly conscious target, and, already feeling below par, her sister wasn’t about to turn the other cheek. This was the tightrope that we spent the last five road-winding hours walking. Children know that you have no true, immediate discipline options on a road trip, in a car. Our route included multiple stops to break up the day, which meant that a 9-hour drive stretched to 15. It’s a lot of together time and, my helpful comparisons to the size and time and distance of wagon trains aside, the car grew smaller as the hours grew longer. Come ON, kids! We’re making MEMORIES here! “Can I play on your phone?” “No. Well, yes. But at least LOOK outside while I get it out.”

A funny thing happened, though. After that 15 hour drive, our bar reset. How far is it? About 30 minutes. No comment. How far is it? Two hours. Shrug. We spent a lot of time in the car and for the majority of it, we were – I think – making memories. When we drove through Custer State Park and got caught in a traffic jam of buffalo, the girls were exhilarated, joyous in their wonder at these giants in our midst. “It was only 2 hours,” they pleaded, “Can we do it again?”

By the drive home, maybe we’d found our groove, or maybe we were all just tired and mellow. The 6-hour-drive took about 12, including an hour-and-a-half tour of the Wind Cave, a sizable stop at a wild mustang sanctuary, lunch and dinner. Our youngest created an entire world with the stuffed horse she’d gotten at the sanctuary and named Isabella; our oldest mostly napped, that enviable talent. As we pulled into our driveway, unbending our stiff legs and backs, thrilled to be home, but glad to have left, the youngest of us summed it up perfectly: “Good job, family!”

Back in the Groove

I’ve been back in the running groove for a few weeks now, and I have to say, it’s as I remember it. That is to say, it’s not very glamorous, I do a lot of red-faced deep breathing from about 4 minutes in, and I have to perpetually play mind games with myself to get through it. And, when I’m not giving myself a new 30-second goal, it’s gratifying, and feels good when I’m done to know I made it happen.

Some thoughts about running, from a perpetual newbie, for the perpetual newbie:

1) If you’re going to be getting up extra early in the morning to exercise, be assured that your running shoes and your sports bra are not going to be where they should be. Even if you know where you left your running shoes, just assume that in the night leprechauns came in and moved them to the other side of the house, on a different floor. Nothing destroys motivation faster than an unanticipated hunt for shoes or sports bra; so overnight, put them in a safe zone pile right next to the alarm.

2) If you’re like me, running requires music. I wish I could be one of those people that just communes with my thoughts and appreciates nature and/or the steady beat of my exercising heart, but I’m not. A good playlist can really make or break a run for me. One poorly-paced song can make it all feel like a slog through industrial strength Jell-O where a few minutes ago, it felt like it was going pretty well. Take the time to make a playlist, or ideally several playlists, of songs you love that put you on pace. If you look forward to your playlist, it makes all the difference.

3) Speaking of that playlist, start with some shorter tracks. It makes you feel like you’re moving through time faster. (Hey, look, I’m already into the third song. I’m a rock star!) And I’m not just saying to avoid American Pie. I’ve learned from experience that if you put a playlist on random shuffle and the first song is Britney’s Til the World Ends, followed by Taylor’s Blank Space, both about four minutes, that’s the longest 8 minutes ever (no offense to the pop-alicious beat that is Brit and Tay.) Heartbeat Song by Kelly Clarkson and Love Don’t Die by the Fray are 3-minute wonders. Put those longer songs in the middle when you’re, hopefully, in the groove.

4) Don’t be afraid not to run. Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? My plan is always to get outside to run. Since I spend so much time sitting in an office building, it’s nice to remember first thing each morning that there’s a whole wide world out there. And I like to think I’m helping my circadian rhythms and my Vitamin D levels, but at healthy, off-peak sun hours. But it’s been a wet spring and early summer and for those days when I need to stay in sight of the house, I just run giant laps of my “front yard” — i.e., the park and baseball field across the street. One day, after slogging through half an hour in my front yard course, I left wet footprints up our porch stairs. It wasn’t worth it. My back-up plan is a Tracy Anderson DVD, or sometimes just powering through a load of dishes. Instead of assuming one missed day will be the beginning of the end, have faith that practicality and forward momentum can be inclusive.

5) Finally, be impressed with yourself, even when your accomplishments may pale in comparison to the countless running bloggers you may follow on Instagram for motivation. Remember, they’re motivation and inspiration, but their 8 “easy miles” (because they’re on a rest day) does not mean that my 2.5 painful miles count any less toward my own goals. My goal is to keep running. I’m like the Dory of my suburban neighborhood. Just keep ~~swimming~~ running. Just keep ~~swimming~~ running. When I finished a morning run last week, I realized that, since it had rained the evening before, each step on the baseball infield was mine. They weren’t competitively paced. They were only as valid as the next ballgame and or the next rain shower. But they were there. Because I had been.

Fathers and Daughters

Being a father is a somewhat thankless job. As a daughter and a mother, I appreciate fathers only more as I grow older, as I realize not only the incredible and positive impact that my own father had on me, but as I watch my husband navigate his role as well.

We spend less on Father’s Day than on Mother’s Day. And a quick scroll through social media gives a complex picture of the holiday. There are touching photos of tiny daughters dancing on their father’s shoes, and heart-felt quotes and photos of much older daughters, brides now, dancing in their father’s arms. But there are also a lot more jokes than you see with mother’s day. A lot more cards with fathers sitting in arm chairs in front of the television, or nods to the notion that fathers are a loving and open wallet. And there’s a lot more anger. Anger from children and from mothers about fathers who didn’t make the jump to being “dad.”

Parenthood in general has become much more of a balancing act between home and career. Compared to even 50 years ago, more mothers are working outside the home, whether as corporate lawyers or as fulltime facilitators of their own and their children’s activities and pursuits, and more fathers are working within it, as fulltime or equal partners in the three C’s of parenthood: cleaning, carpooling and caretaking. I think that’s proof of evolution. We’re less defined by our gender than we are by our interests. Popular culture, however, has yet to catch up. We’re still more likely to see a well-intentioned but bumbling father on primetime tv than we are an inept mother. Father’s Day itself wasn’t made official until 1972, while Mother’s Day has been on the books since 1914. Fatherhood is a somewhat thankless job.

Single parents are the greatest superheroes there are in my book. I look at everything that has to be done, day in and day out, and the thought of tackling it alone is sobering and terrifying. And so many parents do it every day, and do an amazing job. I am, however, infinitely grateful to have had my father dance with me on his shoes when I was his tiny daughter. I’m grateful that later, he ran beside me as I learned to ride a bike, and then sat beside me, at times terrified I’m sure, as I learned to drive a car. He taught me how to love music as a visceral element of the soul, the fine art of dry wit, and the importance of getting on with it, whatever it might be at the time, without complaint, to get the job done, because hard work is part of life and is better embraced than bemoaned. My father unquestionably has my back. Every time. When I do good things, when I do incredibly stupid things. I know he’s not proud of every decision I’ve ever made, but that he be proud of the sum total of them is hugely important to me, because he’s a man who I will look up to forever.

Because my father is a hardworking, centered, loving man, I knew what to look for in a partner. Sure, I messed that up a few times first, but because I had my father’s example, I knew when I’d chosen poorly, and knew to keep looking. My husband doesn’t have a collection of vinyl records to share with his children, and he doesn’t sing songs at bedtime, but he’s the father to our daughters that my own childhood taught me to search for. He gets up at 5am every morning so that he can pick his children up from school, at which point he shuttles them to various dance classes and soccer practices, and helps make duct tape clothing for Girl Scouts and badgers them into cleaning and homework and general responsibility. He keeps our ship running while also giving our daughters a perspective that I just don’t have. He lets them jump from that high wall, and he assumes that they can trench a sprinkler system and that a little blood on the pavement is just a part of growing up, worth a Band-Aid, deserving of some tears, but not excessive coddling. Right now, his daughters think he can fix anything. In time they will discover that a broken toy is more easily mended than a battered heart or disappointed hopes, but because they know that their father has their backs, they’ll be okay, and will keep their standards high.

Happy Father’s Day to my dad and to my husband, two of the most loving, hard working, steadfast men I know. All my love.

When Food Isn’t Fast

On one hand, eating real foods is pretty easy. What’s more convenient than grabbing an apple? In a world where we’re told from a young age that so many things don’t, apples do literally *grow on trees.* No prepping, no cooking, no plating.

On the other hand, man cannot live by apples alone. Real foods take some planning. Real foods take some time. One of my favorite breakfasts right now is grainless banana pancakes. It’s eggs, bananas, a little coconut flour. I’ve sometimes added coconut flakes, cinnamon, vanilla. But they don’t keep, so you only make a serving at a time, and they take a little longer than a regular pancake to heat through. They’re a little trickier on the flip.

Generally when we have a spaghetti night, I’ll make traditional noodles for my family and make spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles for me. My youngest daughter loves the zucchini noodle for its sheer size — sometimes as long as she is tall. But where fusilli has a shelf life of months, zucchini is a little less hardy. There have been times that I’ve realized that, because I put off this Italian-esque feast til later in the week, the spaghetti squash sprouted, the zucchini spotted. Plan B.

And at 8:11am, which is about the last possible moment for making lunches on a school day, real foods aren’t always convenient. Real foods don’t always like the microwave. Foods with a shelf life measured in months or years also tend to come in really convenient packaging, easier to pack cubic Tetris style in lunchboxes. Lunches of whole foods tend to come in a mountain of Tupperware, so that by the end of the day, you can create a faux wall of plastics to keep out the world.

Full disclosure, my family still eats a lot of convenience food. Food that I purchase because they like it; because sending a Little Debbie in a lunch is a like sending a little mid-day hug. While my brain may know that calcium stearoyl lactylate isn’t actually an ingredient of love, I haven’t cut the cord. I may have substituted granola bars for Lara bars and Kind bars, but let’s face it. They’re both basically sugar bombs of a different origin, with lengthy shelf lives of their own.

It’s hard to separate food from emotion, and in many ways, I don’t think we should. Why is Thanksgiving such a beloved holiday? It’s not all about handprint turkeys and football games. But it is about family recipes, family memories, traditions. It takes a day to make a Thanksgiving dinner, and perhaps an hour to eat it, but it’s the continuity that we’re celebrating. It’s why we hand recipes down from generation to generation. Food is love, and interestingly, and not discounting the deliciousness of an Oatmeal Cream Pie, the more time we take to make it, the more “real” it tends to be.

While our family hasn’t disavowed the fast and the convenient, I think we’re making progress. For breakfast today, my oldest daughter cut an apple into slices, arranged them on top of her cereal in a pinwheel, and sprinkled them with cinnamon. It wasn’t the fastest option, but it fueled more than just a summer morning of play. Our relationship with our food is important, and when we take the time to prepare it with intention, it becomes its own reward. Maybe even a little hug we give ourselves.

Snowball!

Anyone ever heard of the snowball effect? Anyone ever lived the snowball effect? Anyone just occasionally feel like a giant snowball, both growing out of control and dizzy as you hurtle downhill? Of course we’ve all been there, for one reason or another. Everything is going just fine, thank you, and then — wham — suddenly it’s not.

Yesterday, if you’d asked me how this healthy life journey was going, I’d have said, It’s great! I feel well; I feel confident. I’m in control of where I’m going; I chart my own course. That’s a lot of semi-colons, but stick with me. Today, I got up early on a Sunday because I had a training class from 8-5. It’s a pre-requisite for taking my newly-minted Brownies overnight camping later this month, and while I wasn’t altogether looking forward to spending a full day of my weekend at a training, I wasn’t dreading it or anything either. And it was fine. We cooked over a Dutch oven and a propane grill and set up a tent and I totally failed the knots lesson. After the square knot, I was pretty much a washout. But — and this was in no way a fault of the training but all on me — I came home realizing that I have a lot to do in the next couple weeks. My daughter’s birthday party is next weekend and I have multiple lists I haven’t ticked through for that. And then the following weekend is Girl Scout camping. We’ve never done an overnight troop event before, plus camping requires planning for a lot of hypotheticals. It requires organization, which has never been my strong suit, and, as presented by today’s training, a good deal of liability before you get to the heart and the fun and the memories of it. More lists. My thoughts echoed: Undone, undone, undone.

Happily, the training, which was supposed to be from 8-5, ended a little early. Whew. I stopped by the grocery store because I wanted chef salads for dinner. Whether it was the Fritos from the Frito pie I’d had at the training, or the fact that I hadn’t had a bite of the delicious smelling but gluten-filled Dutch-oven gingerbread applesauce cake, when I hit the grocery store, everything bad for me looked good. Not just good, amazing. Amazing in the way that the desert feels about water. Chocolate covered cashews? Cinnamon sugar rice Chex? My personal crack — sour cream and cheddar chips? Yes, yes, YES! my stomach screamed. But cooler heads prevailed. After much debate, I got a package of frozen pure-fruit bars. They looked delicious, and topped out at 60 calories. It’s summer-hot today, and I could imagine bringing them home, the excited exclamations of the children, and the three of us sharing in a moment of camaraderie on the back porch. Those fruit bars were like a beacon to me, and also a symbol of a good choice, and a choice where I wasn’t doing without, but just doing one better.

So… guess what wasn’t in any bag when I got home? Probably a couple things — I find that you rarely end up missing just one item; it’s usually a bag — but I did not come home with those frozen testaments to my iron will and conquered cravings. I came home with … worthless grape tomatoes, and inconsequential ham and practically inedible eggs. Crummy, meaningless, hollow husks of foods that WEREN’T MY FRUIT BARS. Now, if my daughters had this reaction to coming home without a favored treat, they’d be in some hot water. There would be a lesson about using words (oh, I used words, all right … about not using THOSE words), about dealing with disappointment and being lucky to have so many other available choices. I chose none of those paths. And when I was out of canned goods to shelve as noisily as possible, I ate probably a full cup of blueberries, straight out of the container. And then some of those worthless grape tomatoes. And then some cashews. So, so far, maybe this is anger-eating, but it’s still basically on the up and up. But, really, not only did I not get my fruit bars, I didn’t get my sour cream and cheddar potato chips! And I haven’t had a damn cupcake in months! Not even a Cheez-It! But I do have a small hoard of candy. I haven’t had refined sugar in 6 weeks. But today? I had Almond Roca and I had sugared gummy assorted “fruit” slices and some chocolate covered raisins. All right after the other. Not savoring and seeing how my system felt, which had been my eventual sugar re-introduction plan, but mainlined. And then, in an effort to curb it back a notch, I had more cashews, which everyone knows are meant to be eaten as quickly as you can get them into your face.

Snowball. Coming out of the red-hazed food coma, I realized, well basically: Frick. Frick. Frick.

Yesterday, I took more than 15,000 steps (per Fitbit). Nearly 6000 of them at a jog. I finally think I perfected the grainless pancake, and until today, I hadn’t had refined sugar since mid-April. I’ve remained gluten free, which isn’t for everyone but has been huge for me, for six months. Today… I fell off the wagon a little. Not even as broadly as “today.” Today, Sunday, during the 5pm hour, I was a bit of a disaster. But 6pm is minutes away. And I have 6 months behind me to counterbalance the 5pm fiasco. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I’m going to turn back now.

Happiness in the Balance

A friend and I met for drinks last night, and one of the things we talked about — because we’re très cerebral, especially with sangria — was the universal and sometimes elusive search for happiness. Everyone claims to want it, but far too often it feels like catching lightning in a bottle. And maybe we’re a little afraid of it, too. Because what if we find it, and lose it? Or find it and realize we have to change ourselves to keep it? What if we realize that the reason we keep giving ourselves new goals, changing the finish line, is that we’re programmed for the chase and not the win.

Tonight, I’m ending the day feeling like it was a pretty good one. I feel content. And thinking about yesterday’s happy hour conversation, it occurred to me to wonder why. Why are some days better than others? Barring something truly negative happening, why are some compilations of routine hours rosy and others gray?

My happiness list for today:

1) I got up at 6 am and went outside. I took 30 minutes to do my shuffling, wheezing jog. By the time I showered, I felt like I’d already accomplished something.

2) My kids and I got out of the house on time with no threats or raised voices. Everyone found their own hairbrush, two shoes from the same pair and had no opinions about the color of their water bottles.

3) Work went quickly, and included a ten minute afternoon break to walk to our neighborhood Starbucks. I didn’t even get anything. The ten minutes away was a boost in itself.

4) I talked to one of my best friends, who has recently moved away. When we live in the same city, we tend to neglect phone calls in favor of convenient texts and meeting up a couple times a month. It turns out that my phone can be used to talk to people and the connection feels a lot more substantive than a textversation, even when it’s about nothing in particular.

5) I stopped at the store, bought fresh ingredients and made dinner. It involved peeling potatoes and watching my daughter mash them. And it involved butter, which shouldn’t be discounted.

6) Chai. Decaf chai with coconut milk. It tastes like warm zen, especially if I can grab five minutes on the back porch to drink it.

Here’s to ordinary days with rosy hues.

Just Run With It

I saw a post on Instagram today that said, Remember that the reason you’re doing this is to make your life better.

It’s a good reminder. Throughout the last six months or so that I’ve started taking this whole wellness thing a little more seriously, I’ve been often surprised at what I’ve accomplished, which makes me think that perhaps a big part of my wellness struggle is that I’ve been selling myself short. I just never considered that I could be, or would be, the type of person to do without. Hey, life’s hard. We need fresh baked Italian bread and filled, frosted cupcakes! Until I realized it’s not so much doing without, but making a choice. Choices are interconnected by nature, winding roads that put us on a path that’s familiar but not always comforting. Previously, I’ve never really given interconnected choices a chance to play out in a positive way, at least from a health perspective. I’m not about to tell anyone it’s the universal answer to give up gluten — I didn’t make it through very much of the anti-grain tome Grain Brain before I put it down and took a big step away from that vat of kool aid — but since ditching wheat, I feel better than I have in years. And for years I felt pretty awful a lot of the time, so again, it’s good to remember why I’m choosing to crunch cucumbers instead of pretzels. The fact that I’ve been able to do so is surprising to no one more than me.

And so, in the vein of not selling myself short, I’ve realized for quite some time that exercise is very much lacking in my life. We try to hike as a family once a week or so as the Sunday weather permits, but in my Monday through Friday life, hours can go by before I realize my jaw is tensed, my feet are asleep and I haven’t moved since I got to my desk. It’s beyond unhealthy; it’s destructive. I think sometimes I can hear my muscles atrophying. They’re miserable in their fate, and yet so weakly anemic that their pleas for movement can be easily shushed as one more email comes in.

Tonight, I went for a run. A short run. Let’s call it a jog. I’ve been a sporadic jogger for most of my life, starting with 7th and 8th grade cross-country. I was abhorrently awful and gave it up for tennis in high school, at which I was moderately inept — definitely a step up. In college, my roommate and I ran together separately. By that, I mean we had a very strict Even Stephen rule about having to match the other for time or distance, but we weren’t the two girls in bouncy ponytails and cute outfits regaling each other with stories of the previous night out while we ran. We were grimly determined and usually rewarded ourselves with no-bake cookies or sometimes Kailua and ice cream (delicious). We continued our Even Stephen philosophy after college, checking in once a week to report our progress, or lack thereof. There were times in my checkered running career that I would get to a place where I’d nearly look forward to a run. I ran a 10k at one point; I could run for more than an hour straight. Take that, 7th grade me. And then I’d take a break from running — to cross-train, I’d tell myself — and that would be that, until the next cycle.

Tonight, I chose my long neglected playlist from the Bolder Boulder 10k… I put it on shuffle, but the running gods were smiling. My old playlist greeted me like a friend. It started with Franz Ferdinand The Fallen. Good beat, set the pace. I quickly realized that I haven’t been running in a long time. A few minutes in and barely around the corner of my block came Cake’s remake of I Will Survive. I smiled a little, grimly, yes, but smiled, and pressed on. I found that short groove where you think, I could totally do this. This isn’t so bad. Maybe I’m in better shape than I thought. And as I realized I was lying to myself, Sing by My Chemical Romance — a heavy hitter for me in the motivation department rotated in. 16 minutes later, Misery by Maroon 5 began and I decided that it was only fitting to end my inaugural run with such an appropriate anthem. Not quite 20 minutes, and I figured it was better to walk a few hills to finish up than to embarrass myself in a public open space where real, actual runners would have to stop and assist me. I wouldn’t say that my run was somehow new and shiny. Or that I was new and shiny because of making the effort. But I remembered that my husband has told me, ‘You’re a happier person when you’re running consistently’. I always laughed and said, ‘That’s funny because I’m miserable while I’m doing it.’ But even small wins can feel empowering, and that’s what tonight’s run felt like. I get to define myself, after all, and out there on the Wildcat Trail (that’s literally the name of the trail, not some weird metaphor I’m going for), no one knows for sure that I’m not a runner just like them. (I mean, they may be concerned that I’m just getting over bronchitis or something, but suburban runners are generally too polite to do more than throw a closed-mouth smile and head nod your way as they pass).

I don’t know if tonight is the beginning of a cycle or if, interconnected with other more positive choices, it can become more. I do know that I’m capable of surprising myself. So who knows?