June 2015 – Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

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?

Living in the Present on Mondays

Ever have one of those days when you wake up and you’re covered in red rashiness because you spent time in the sun over the weekend and you’re allergic to sun, and then you remember on the way to work that you have to drop off your car at the dealership because your brakes suddenly sounded awful over the weekend, and then you realize that the dealership is going to have to call reception at work because you don’t have your cell phone, and when you get to work and check email you remember that you’ve been gone for two days and while you were gone everyone else was still working and sending email?

This is where I have the hardest time aligning my goal to be alert, healthy and present with, well, real life. Over my four-day weekend? I felt like I was really knocking those goals out of the park. We went hiking, we enjoyed the beautiful weather, spent time as a family, we went to the pool, had some hang time with my brother… I made smoothies!and if my house never really got clean and I never got around to sorting through my children’s winter clothes because it was too nice to stay inside, I thought, Good! The fact that we’ve haven’t been inside enough to meet a gold star standard of housekeeping proves that we’re living right! (It’s always nice to be claim your messy house is a product of intention… oh, sorry about the dust, I was too busy *living* to worry about the mundane!) Even as a little red rashiness began to creep in last night, I felt the contented tiredness of a (long) summer weekend, muscles just used and fatigued enough, eyes just heavy enough to feel a happy twilight sort of drifting.

And then… Monday morning. I’ve read countless times that if Monday morning is a rude awakening, you’re not at the right job. You’re not following your passion. Well… true enough. I feel ambivalent about my 9-5 for a number of reasons. But, like everyone who sometimes struggles with Monday mornings, there are reasons I’m there. The work hours are sometimes long, but they’re extremely flexible. I like my coworkers; I like my boss. If I don’t love what I *do* all the time, well, that seems like it’s just a pro/con list sort of item. Like everyone except the Waltons and the Hiltons, we have bills to pay, and so … up and at ’em. But on days when you’re itchy and the dealership thinks you have money to burn and when you get home and your husband, who gets up at 5am, is asleep on the couch and even though it’s late, your dinner isn’t going to make itself and your child had a less than fabulous time at the daycare that you put her in because you’re at your job that you feel ambivalent about… how do you make alert and healthy and present happen in that scenario?

If you thought I had an answer… not so much. I know I need to find a balance between working for the weekend and enjoying each day in between, and maybe part of the balance is just being more aware of when days get out of balance. But I think for today, I’m going to take a walk after dinner, probably before the dishes are done. At this rate, I think the answer to being present in the moment may just be to hire a cleaning service.