The “What If Monster”

We are dealing with monsters these days.  My three year old insists there are monsters around every corner, in the dark bathroom, behind closet doors and under every bed.   I spend a good portion of each day explaining that there is no such thing as monsters, all the while fighting the one who lives under my own bed.

My monster, the “What If Monster” has a way of keeping me awake at night worrying about what might be.  What if Blaise isn’t able to print out his project at school?  What is Meg is doesn’t make the team?  What if the car breaks down?  The “What If Monster” is annoying, but I have learned to deal with him.  I have learned to put my trust in God and go peacefully to sleep.  But his latest trick has put my faith to the test.

The “What If Monster” has learned to morph into the “Its Inevitable Monster.”  This morphing took place simultaneously with my receiving a questionable mammogram result.  The doctor called me a week before Christmas to tell me that there was a mass in my left breast.  My mother is a breast cancer survivor, so I am well aware that a questionable result on a mammogram is not unusual.  I also know that more often than not, a follow up mammogram will come back clean.  But knowing this and believing it are two separate things.  A diagnostic mammogram was scheduled for the Christmas Eve.  I would have to wait a week to find out what the mass was.

The night I received this news I expected the “What If Monster” to pop out from under the bed, keeping me from my much needed sleep.  I expected to toss and turn worrying about the “what if’s” of the situation.  That didn’t happen.  Surprisingly, I fell right to sleep.  Lulled into a false sense of security I slept like a baby for almost two hours only to be woken by the “Its Inevitable Monster.”  This monster didn’t give me what ifs.  Instead, I had already received the bad news.  I had cancer.  I was going to have to tell my children, my husband, my mom and sister.  I was going to have to settle things in my life and prepare to be bald and sick.  Each night for the week leading up to my diagnostic mammogram, I was woken by this monster who made me live with the bad news.  Each night I would find myself holding in the tears and forgetting to turn to God for comfort.

As though this trick was not enough, the morning of Christmas Eve, the “Its Inevitable Monster” woke with me, climbed out of bed and followed me around for the three hours leading up to my appointment.  I went in for the test and the monster grabbed hold of my throat.  The test took only minutes and I found myself sitting in the lobby waiting for the promised results.  All the while the monster sat beside me, whispering the inevitable in my ear. The fear grew and I suddenly, too late, I realized my mistake.  In fighting the monster for the past week, I had given him the power.  Instead of turning to God for comfort, I had taken on the fight myself and I had lost.  I sat there in the lobby and watched the monster lose his grip.  I felt him becoming weaker and realized that I wasn’t winning, God was.  At about the same time, the mammogram technician came in and gave me the all clear.  The mammogram was clean.

Today I sit here knowing the “What If Monster” will come back and hoping that the lessons learned this time will come to me next time.  That I will remember it is not my fight to fight.  That if I give it all over to God there will be comfort.  If I give it all over to God in the beginning the morphing of my monster will not happen.  If I do that, giving it all over to God, I will remember what I tell my three year old.  There is no such thing as monsters.

A Case For Independence

In the seventh grade, my teacher asked, “What character trait do you admire most in a person?”  At the time, I remember trying to figure out the answer she wanted most.  I decided she was looking for honesty, so that was my answer.  Honesty was the trait I admired most in a person.  Ironically, that was a lie.  What I knew then and has remained true all these years is the trait I admire most in people is independence and self-reliance.  I love an independent person.  But even more so, I love an independent child.

People who know me understand that this in the way I have raised my older children.  They see that I have always allowed my children to fall but that I have also always been there to pick them up.  On the other hand, people who only know me in passing might think I am too laid back.  They see me standing back while my child tries to climb a tree, instead of giving them a boost up and they think I am being a bad mom.  I would love to say I am a person who isn’t bothered by what other moms think, but I am not.

Instead, I have to remind myself that I have a plan in parenting.  I am trying to raise my children to take chances, hoping that they will succeed but knowing there will be some failures along the way.  Knowing also that these failures are part of the process.  I could have spent their childhood protecting them from every fall, made sure they were safe every minute of every day, but I let them explore and figure things out own their own, make mistakes and learn from them.

Just before I discovered I was pregnant with Zane I found myself in awe of how well this form of parenting had worked out.  I was so happy with the independence that my children had.  At 10 and 12 they were self-reliant enough to take a third of the grocery list and meet me back at the checkout with their items.  They could not only carry their own luggage when we traveled but they could pack it before the trip as well.  It was so rewarding to watch my parenting theory prove true.

When I discovered I was pregnant with Zane, I told my husband I wanted to raise him exactly the same way.  I wanted to teach him to be independent and self-reliant.  Then he was born.  This tiny little baby was placed in my arms and suddenly I forgot all about independence.  I just wanted to protect him.  Every day I struggle with this urge to protect him from everything.  I catch myself doing things for him instead of letting him learn them himself.  But I look at his older brother and sister and know I need to let go and let him take the same chances.

Yesterday, Zane and I went ice skating for the very first time.  I asked him to stand to the side of the rink and let me go around a couple of times to get my legs back before bringing him out.  He stood there nervously, watching me getting my bearings and suddenly that feeling of protection almost overtook me.  Maybe I shouldn’t bring him out.  He might fall and get hurt.  He might fall and not want to get up again.  He might not want to skate again.  But I fought the urge to protect him.  I went over and took his hand and brought him onto the ice.  For an hour and a half we skated around the rink, Zane spending more time on his butt than his feet but laughing every time he fell.  By the end of our time on the ice, Zane was skating without my help and I, fighting the urge to catch him before every fall, skated ahead of him and made small loops on the ice to come up behind him, giving him just enough space to feel independent without feeling alone.  He would fall and try to pick himself up, and if he could that was great, but if he couldn’t, he knew I was right there to help.

Being a mom is hard.  Sometimes I feel like I have made it harder on myself by trying to instill independence in my children.  It would be so much easier to hold their hands and keep them by my side.  It would be so much easier to not worry about their getting hurt because I was protecting them every step of the way.  But would it be better for them?  I have to believe it wouldn’t.  I choose to believe that the falls and failures they face along the way will, in the end, make them stronger, more independent, more self-reliant people.  I will watch him grow into the person he will become, just as I have with the first two, and hope that I am right.

The Death of a Good Woman

I killed Hannah today. I knew she would have to die.  I had thought about it for months, contemplating her life and planning her death down to the last detail.  This morning as I made my way through the gym, from jumping rope in the empty racquetball court, to lifting weights in the free weight room, I thought through the scene that would be.  How would she react when she realized this was her day to die?  What would her family think afterwards? Does she really have to die?  Does she deserve it?

She definitely did not deserve it.  She had done nothing in life but help other people – her husband, her daughter, her best friend.  The only flaw she had was her inability to put herself first.  Her belief that everybody had to be taken care of and that she could just wait.

For an hour and a half I worked my way through the gym, hoping I could hold my emotions in while I weaved my plan.  This is not one of those things you can talk about.  It has to be kept in, even when the deed is done, allowing it to sit and take seed.

The grieving started as I stood naked in the shower thinking about the first time Hannah met John, the first time she laid eyes on her beautiful newborn child, her surprise friendship with Joyce.  Did I have another choice?  Was there another way?

No, she had to die.  I sat at the computer, eyes closed begging my heart not to break as the words poured out of me and I killed Hannah.  My heart failed me and the tears flowed.  The sobs broke through and I had to watch as the scene played out, as her husband and daughter and best friend lost this woman who had meant so much to each of them for so long.

My writing partner assures me that this is a good thing.  If I am this attached to my main character, it has to be a good thing.  My readers will become attached.  They will love Hannah and cry when she dies.  This doesn’t help my broken heart.  I sit here now wondering how I will get through the rest of my day.  My eyes are red and puffy and I still wonder if I should go back.  Should I bring her back to life, leave my novel unfinished and let her continue to traipse through my mind doing good deeds and making others happy?

I killed sweet, beautiful, generous Hannah today – wife of John, mother of Hannah, best friend of Joyce.  I killed her this morning.  But that was this morning.  This afternoon, I know I will cry again, I will mourn her as the family files through the church and stands by the grave.  I will comfort each of them and help them find meaning in her death and in what she had left behind.

What lies ahead for them, I do not know.  Where they will end up, I have yet to decide.  Tomorrow morning I will head back to the gym, the treadmill this time.  I will run and change their lives, move them forward and hopefully find a happier place for all of us.

I am quickly learning that writing a novel isn’t about putting words on paper.   It is about letting a character run through your heart and become a part of you.  It is about creating a world for your characters and letting them live, giving them reign to decide their own fate and letting it happen even as it breaks your heart.  The words come easy, it’s the letting go that is hard.

Breast Cancer – My Mother’s Story

My mother found the lump in her breast the year before she turned forty.  She screwed up her courage and went to her OB/GYN the next day.  He, of course, sent her for a mammogram.  He told her he would call in a couple

Nineteen Years Later

of days and let her know the results.  When a week went by with no call, she couldn’t handle the strain of the wait any longer.  As a single mom of three kids, she had spent the week wondering how she would support us if she had cancer.  What would happen to her kids if she were to die?  She had imagined the long illness and her death.  She had imagined the last moments spent with her family.  She couldn’t wait a minute longer, so she called the office.  She asked for the results and was told that they only call if the results were positive so if she hadn’t received a call she was clear.  This was the answer she had hoped for and though she would look back on it and say she should have asked to speak to the doctor or a nurse to get a more definite answer, she accepted it.

 

In January of the following year, she first noticed the dimple in her left breast.  She said nothing to me until April.  During that time, it must have weighed on her.  After the scare of the year before, she had placed a card in the shower showing how to do the self exam.  The card had a list of things to look for.  Not just the dreaded lump, but changes in the breast as well, specifically changes such as dimples.  She knew it was a bad sign but couldn’t face it again.  When she did finally call me at college, she told me she was worried, but knew she couldn’t afford another mammogram.  We talked about putting aside twenty dollars a week until she could afford it.  But we both knew she wouldn’t.  She knew she in her heart it would come back positive.  And ignoring it was the best she could do.

In October, I heard that the clinic at the local hospital was offering free mammograms as part of National Breast Cancer Awareness month.  I called my mother and asked her to please go.  She waited until her birthday, October 30^th, before finally getting up the nerve.  The doctor at the clinic called the next day.  Within the week they had confirmed cancer with a biopsy.  We had also been asked to pick up her last mammogram so they could compare the two and see how much it had grown in the past year.  To our horror there was a sealed envelope in the x-ray file addressed to her OB/GYN.  We opened it to find a report from the radiologist to the doctor stating that there was indeed a tumor in her breast and it had attached to the tissue around it making it a clear carcinoma.  The new doctor scheduled a mastectomy for the day before Thanksgiving.

During the mastectomy, they removed 17 lymph nodes.  Eight of the 17 were infected with cancer.  She was told to get her affairs in order.  She would not survive the year.

This weekend, nineteen years after that fateful mammogram, we are celebrating my mother’s 49^th birthday.  She is a true miracle story.  She fought the cancer with everything that she had and she won.

My mother’s story has taught me a few things.  First, get a mammogram, but even more important, don’t just call the doctor for the report, pick up the radiologist’s report and read it.  Second, ignoring the problem will not make it go away.  And third, doctors don’t always have the answers.  When I am in doubt about a doctor’s instructions or prognosis, I ask questions, I express my doubts and I push for myself or my children.  I am my best advocate.  If I don’t ask the question or stand up for myself and my children who will?

For more information on self examination please visit – The American Cancer Society

Putting the Pieces Together

Everybody is on Facebook.  Teenagers use it to keep in touch with their friends on a daily basis.  But, the older Facebook users use it to go back.  The phrase use to be “you can never go back” but Facebook has changed that.  I have several groups of friends on Facebook right now but the two I visit most often are my girlfriends from college and my gang from middle school.

This second group is my going back group. I may have never realized that except that my brother in law was laughing at me for being back in touch with people from middle school.  “Why would you ever want to do that?” Sometimes a remark like this will just roll on by without an answer, but not this time.  This time I thought about it.  Why would I want to be in touch with people I haven’t seen in almost twenty five years? It was an easy question to answer.  My middle school years were a defining time in my life.  Life was great.  I had friends.  A lot of friends and we had fun.

I moved to my middle school in fourth grade and it was not just my first year at the middle school.  It was the first year for the school itself.  The building was finished a month before we moved in.  Many of my friends had been going to school together since kindergarten, but something about the new school made them more accepting of the new girl from the city.  I was poor but so were most of them.  Over the next five years we mished and moshed until we had the right combination of friends in our group.  We were members of the school band, cheerleading squad and basketball team.  Suddenly we weren’t just little kids trying to find our spots.  We had found our places.

Our world was compact.  It existed between those walls.  The summer after eighth grade, I spent in fear of what would lie ahead for us.  What would become of us in high school?  What would be expected?  Already there were signs that friends would change.  Already there were friends experimenting with sex and drugs.  Already there were rumors in our small town of divorce and job loss.

The changes in my life came as a surprise.  My life outside of those middle school walls had always been in upheaval.  My friends saw my mother as a wonderful, cheerful person.  They saw her as the joking, laughing mom that they wished they had.  They saw her when she was in her upswings.  They missed the downswings.  They missed the depression and the angry fits complete with fly swatter beatings.  They were not aware of my dad who was too quiet to be noticed but was like a super hero in my life.  They didn’t know that he was the protector.  The person who took the brunt of my mom’s anger as long as he wasn’t at work.  This was my life outside of middle school.  It had been my life for thirteen years and I assumed it would be my life until I graduated from high school and could get out.

But, I was wrong.  Halfway through my freshman year of high school I began to hear rumors.  To notice how other adults looked at my mother.  I wondered whether our secret had finally gotten out, whether someone had finally connected the dots of my many accidents.  If someone had noticed some wrong in the cheerleader who could get through whole school days and basketball games without hurting herself could show up to school with a black eye caused by her now famous clumsiness.  I kept waiting for the shoe to drop.

When it finally did, I was surprised.  The sin was not that my mom was beating her child.  It was that she was having an affair.  I found this out the day my dad and his shot gun disappeared from our house.  The principal found me and explained what had happened.  They did find my dad and all was fine, but my family was changed forever.  My life was never the same after that day.

We left that year and I lost touch with all of those friends.  The friends who had let me live a normal life six hours a day, five days a week for five years.  After that I was always the girl who couldn’t explain who the man we were living with was without turning bright red in embarrassment.  I was the girl who moved to five different high schools in an effort to escape my mom’s sins.  I was the girl whose home life overshadowed everything else.

My middle school friends were the friends who had let me escape that. They know what became of me and my family because it was a small town, but what they remember is the girl who was happy – the girl who was silly and liked to have fun.  As an adult, that is the girl I am again, but it is nice to put the two pieces together – to welcome friends, who meant so much to me twenty five years ago, back into my life.

With Both Feet

My three year old hates every food that is not pizza, hotdogs or chicken nuggets.  For a mom who loves to cook and has raised two other kids on gourmet foods, this is a nightmare.  No matter how many times I read him Green Eggs and Ham, he refuses to try new things.  It occurs to me though, that this tendency to not only avoid new things but declare a dislike to them must be innate to humans.

My Dad hates to fly.  He has never flown but he hates it.  I have a friend who hates crowds but has never stepped foot outside of his small town to find himself in a crowd.  I live twenty minutes outside of Washington, DC and have met people who have lived their whole life here without once stepping foot in DC.  In one way or the other we all limit ourselves this way.  A limitation I have put on myself?  Cruises.  I know I wouldn’t like a cruise.  I have a list a mile long why this is so.  Yet, I have never set foot on a cruise ship.

I will, once in a great while, get my son to agree to taste something new.  He will pick up the smallest amount of the suspicious food with his fork and touch it to the tip of his tongue shaking his head before it even reaches a taste bud, never giving the flavor a chance.

Grownups do this too. We dip our toes in an experience and form an opinion without giving it a chance instead of jumping in with both feet and immersing ourselves in the experience.  Instead of looking at the situation for what it might offer, we go in with our opinions set and color our experiences with that brush.

Blogger, Katie Leas, over at Tremendous Blondette just showed us all how it should be done.  Several months back she posted a bit about not liking to travel and being afraid to fly.  Recently, she posted a retraction.  Apparently, in the last few months, she has jumped in with both feet.  She has done enough travelling to feel like an expert. But what really came across in her post, especially in the photo captions, was the joy she has found in each new place.

Looking at each of these photos, I wondered how her life will change.  What will be different now that she has seen New York City for the first time, visited Las Vegas and a handful of other cities she had never visited?  Whether those cities changed her I can’t tell you, but I can tell you, from personal experience, that what changes is attitude.

When we jump in with both feet and experience something we thought we didn’t like or thought we would never do, suddenly, anything is possible.  Suddenly the world really is our oyster and we begin to wonder, what else we are missing?  We start looking for the next adventure.  The next new discovery.  Or in Zane’s case the next new and delicious food.

To Text or Not to Text

As we prepared lunch this afternoon my husband asked whether he should make a sandwich for our fifteen year old son.

“I don’t know, text him and ask ,” I said.

“Text him?  Where did he go?”

“He’s in his room upstairs.”

Such is life with the teenager.  I could yell up the stairs for ten minutes before my voice registered in his teenage brain but the slight vibration of his phone gets his attention every time.

My husband recently read an article in the Washington Post about parents who text their teenager as their only means of communications.  I didn’t read the story before he threw the paper out but his take on the subject was that texting as a parental means of communication is a bad thing.  I respectfully disagree.

Several years back a dear friend gave me a bit of advice about raising a teenage son.  She said it is a parent’s responsibility to find ways to relate to their child.  Pay attention when they go on about their video games or the latest argument with a friend on the soccer pitch. Ask them who they had lunch with at school each day.  Even go so far as to listen to their music.  I took this information to heart and have not regretted it for a moment.

The first step in my quest to relate more closely to my son was having him load my iPhone with his music.  I take my iPhone with me on my run and listen carefully to the same music he listens to.  To be sure that I am getting the same music, I borrow his on occasion.  Though Drowning Pool and Avenged Sevenfold may not have been my first choice for my run, I find that for the most part I do enjoy his taste in music.  But, when I don’t enjoy it, when I am offended by it, I tell him.  We talk about it and we discuss whether there is value in it or whether dumping it off of both our systems is in order.  Sometimes, when my argument is convincing, he does just dump it all together.  Sometimes, I find that he is right, it might not be my taste but he can remove it from my iPhone and keep it as part of his personal music library.  Even this small step of give and take has us speaking in a way we might not otherwise.

In addition to music, I decided to take a step toward understanding the sports that he enjoys. I have set up alerts to my phone to remind me when a game is going to start or when someone scores. If he comes home excited about his team winning, I can relate as I have watched the scores fly across my screen throughout the day.  My subscription to ESPN Magazine has us communicating in a completely different way as we fight over who gets the issue first.  Rick Reilly is a favorite for both of us and we could go on for hours with fodder from his latest article.

So, we do communicate in ways other than texting, but texting offers its own special form of communication.  He communicates with his best friends via text the same way I, as a teenager, communicated with mine by phone.  The fact that he will text me puts me a leg up on my mom.  There is no way I would have taken the time to chat with her by phone as a teen.  Facebook and Twitter have both opened new avenues as well.  We share information we may never have thought to share – stories from the news, fan pages for products we both like, even political views.  We discuss things we may have never discussed.

Years ago my sister-in-law told me that the best way to have a real conversation with a teenager is in the car or doing laundry.  If you aren’t sitting face to face, they will have an easier time opening up.  Texting and Facebook are much the same thing.  They give my son an opportunity to open up about things he might otherwise clam up about.  They give him a chance to think about what he is going to say before he says it.  And it works that way for me as well.  There have been several mornings when I have come downstairs to find a book or a lunch still sitting on the table after he has left for school and as I started a snide text message to remind him that this is an inconvenience for me, I realize how it is going to sound and change it to something lighter and less judgmental while still getting the point across.

If texting were our only way of communication I might be concerned but as it is an addition to the lines of communication we have created, I am not.  As it is a language that young people speak fluently, I am glad to be a part of it, to be let into the club and be part of his life in a way that was not available to my parents.  As a parent, it is my responsibility to relate to my son and to create ways in which he can relate to me.  If that is through texting then so be it.

A Mind of His Own

With life just begun, my sleeping new son
Has eyes that roll back in his head
They flutter and dart, he slows down his heart
And pictures a world past his bed
Its hard to believe
As I watch you breathe
Your mind drifts and weaves

- When He Dreams by the Barenaked Ladies

The first time I heard this song, I was running through Kinder Park pushing my sleeping five month old son in his stroller.  Maybe it was the hormones still coursing through my body, but it touched me that day.  Suddenly, I realized that this child, who I knew so well, already had a mind of his own – a part of himself that he didn’t have to share with me.  And I wanted to know – what did he dream about?

As I ran, I thought about the times I had asked my other children about their dreams. My oldest son insists he doesn’t dream and my daughter has always held tight to her thoughts and dreams.   The times she does share feel like rare gifts that I should treasure because it isn’t guaranteed to happen again.

Zane is different.  At three, he is my most verbal child.  He is always talking – to me, to his dad, to his siblings, and even his matchbox cars.  He never stops.  For this I am grateful.  It allows me to see into that place he doesn’t have to share.

When he wakes in the morning his dreams tumble freely from his little mouth.  Sometimes, because he thinks his dream was real, he wakes up and runs to the window, lifting the shade and sighing in disappointment, “I thought the train would still be there.”  Or he searches his covers for a treasure he must have been playing with in his dreams.

On other mornings, he will wake up talking about something like dinosaurs or panda bears or colors that floated through his mind.  He hasn’t developed the filter that will hide his thoughts and dreams from me in the future.

With the age difference in my children, I have been given a special insight.  I know what will happen as he gets older.  I know that he will want to establish his own identity and to do that, he will withhold parts of himself.  I have been able to see this happen with my older children without warning.  With the knowledge comes an appreciation I didn’t have the first time around.

When they were newborns, I held their naked little bodies and looked at every inch.  I would sit in the rocking chair feeding them, taking in the curve of their ears, the shape of their fingers, the lines on their palms and tiny feet.  When they were newborns, I knew everything about them.  I don’t know when this changed, I suppose it was gradual. There is a part of me that hopes I caused it to happen and can avoid the same mistake this time.

Because Zane is the last of our babies, I find myself holding on to him tighter – trying to keep him from growing too fast.  To his chagrin, I still refer to him as my baby.  But, I know he is changing and growing.  He reminds me every day with a very clear, “I am a big boy.”  And, I have noticed, there are more mornings these days when I am left to wonder, what does he dream about?

Be Inspired

I seek inspiration – in my writing, racing, parenting and in my relationship with God.  I look for it within myself, in friends and family and in people I may never meet.  It was not something I was consciously hunting for before.  If someone or something inspired me, that was great, but I didn’t expect to find it.  But, over the past year, as I have built a freelance writing career, I have made a choice to be inspired.  And I am.  Everyday, in a hundred ways, I am inspired.

I have found inspiration in a childhood friend.  He and his wife have chronicled their struggles over the past two months.  Two months that took him from living an average American life to being a cancer victim – bald, lying in a hospital bed, fighting an unexplained fever, losing weight by the minute because he can’t keep food down, not being able to spend the days with his children.  They have shared all of their pain and suffering, but most importantly they have shared their faith in God.  Through it all they never lost sight of their belief that God would take care of them.  This undying faith has inspired me.

Being a parent is my favorite role in life, but parenting isn’t always easy.  And to top it off, it is one of the most difficult areas to find inspiration.  Parenting is personal and so much of it takes place at home.  This week though, it was on the evening news and across the internet for everyone to see.  This week, Emily Monforto (see video) and her father were all over the internet and television.  Emily’s father, a Phillies season ticket holder, caught his first foul ball.  In his excitement, he presented the ball to Emily who turned around and proudly threw it back onto the field.  This was all caught on tape.  The best part of the tape though, was not the look of surprise on her father’s face but the hug he gave her afterwards.  That hug was a rare gift of inspiration for parents worldwide.

Epic Bill Bradley

Athletically, I find inspiration in so many people.  Bill Bradley who is in England this weekend swimming across the English Channel after having biked across America and completing the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon through Death Valley this summer, has been inspiring me for months.  The actor/comedian Eddie Izzard, who is not built to be a marathoner, just completed a 1000-mile run through England to raise money for Sport Relief.  He ran 42 marathons in 53 days and raised £200,000 along the way.

And as though to prove my point, I woke up this morning to an inspiring story about Capt. Ivan Castro in my local paper. Though wounded and ultimately left blind when two 82-mm mortar rounds exploded near him in Iraq, Capt. Castro has since climbed the 14,270-foot Gray’s Peak in Colorado, run seven marathons, a 50-mile race and a triathlon.

As an athlete, I look for these stories everyday.  And when I am at mile 22 of the marathon and my legs just don’t want to go another step, I use them to propel myself toward that finish line, knowing that it can be done.

Inspiration is all around us.  Maybe it’s the way our next door neighbor encourages her teenager to shovel the driveways for our elderly neighbors.  Maybe it is your friend who shows up to school with the bandana hiding her bald head, still smiling at her beautiful daughter though you know how sick she is feeling.  Maybe it is the veteran you see on your local running trail running with his new prosthetic leg.   Whatever it is, it is out there.  Look around you. Search it out.  Be inspired.

Distractions

Even on the best of days a bookstore is a dangerous place for me.  But on a day such as today, when I am supposed to be working, it is even more so.  Surrounded by so many books, I find it hard to concentrate on the task at hand.

Leaving my husband and children to fend for themselves, I took this Labor Day morning off of mommy duties and headed to the local bookstore with my laptop in tow.   Since school has started and my older children are no longer around to entertain my preschooler, I have found writing to be nearly impossible.  Each of my last four articles has been written in my car, during my daughter’s soccer practice.  This was not the romantic idea I had of writing before I decided upon this career path.  I had pictured afternoons in a sun- filled room, coffee at hand, pouring my words out onto my computer screen.

To be successful, I know I need more than a couple of hours each week alone in my car.  I need time to look inside and find the story.  This morning I decided it was time to take the bull by the horns and head to the bookstore, find a table and write, undisturbed.  But the books call my name.  I didn’t even make it to this table before stopping to browse the aisles, gathering books that will grace my bedside table until I finally get someone to add yet more bookshelves to our house.

Before leaving the house, I realized I would have to overcome the temptation of the books, but there is another distraction I had not considered.  The people around me peak my interest.  Their conversations and their books stacked on the table beside them send my mind racing in too many directions to count.

As though sent by the devil to distract me, the guy at the table beside mine has a stack of books about my favorite non-writing activity – running.  Based on the titles, I know he is a beginning runner.  How do I ignore this opportunity to speak with someone who is still so excited about the prospects of the sport that I love?  Shouldn’t I tell him that running is my specialty?  Aren’t there words of wisdom I should share?

No, I should be writing.  I should be thinking about my readers and what they might find interesting this week.  Maybe I should write something about the power of rest.  Something in celebration of Labor Day.  But I know my readers and they don’t rest.   They run, bike, swim, read, write and parent.  They are active.  They would understand this restlessness I am feeling and know that it is for them that I stop for a minute to learn that the beginning runner started running with his wife six months ago and they are now training for their first marathon.  I have learned that his wife is beginning to feel a pain in her right knee and already considering changing sports.  Now, I am sure it is my duty to keep her in the sport.  The writing must wait a moment as I guide her to a great orthopedic surgeon who is also a runner and a good running store that will analyze her gait.  I knew this running knowledge would come in handy one day.

If my running club is any sign of the future of our sport and I am not sure that it is, then we need these two to stay true to running.  The last race I ran was full of seasoned runners, runners who are slowing down and even stopping to smell the roses and appreciate the course for the beauty rather than the speed.    A new runner or two might add to the competition in our local races but more importantly may help guarantee a future for our historic running club.

So, once again a morning meant for work, has been wasted, not because of the dogs barking at the front window or the preschooler pulling on my leg but because of the world at large.  But maybe that’s my story.  Maybe I don’t need that quiet, sun-filled room to find the words.  Maybe the words don’t have to come from inside.  Sometimes, instead of the words spilling out of me, maybe the world around me is what spills onto my page.  This again is not what I dreamed of when I chose to become a writer.  Instead, it is an unexpected perk to what has turned out to be an already perk laden career path.