But I do feel that blogging is an important part of being a writer.  I believe it helps me maintain a relationship with readers and encourages me to keep improving my writing.  Because I have remained focused on fitness writing, I still maintain www.annsrunnincommentary.com .  I would love to have you visit me over there.

We walk the tightrope as soon as we decide to sleep-train our babies.  Should we err on the shorter or the longer timeframe before going in to comfort them?  But that is only beginning.  The act builds and builds as the decisions become harder and harder – as we balance between being a strict disciplinarian and giving them a little freedom to learn from their mistakes, between keeping them safe and smothering them in our worries and between helping them to succeed and doing it for them.  Still, the tightrope is the buildup act.  As long as we, as parents, are the ones making the decisions, there is a safety net.  We are in control.  We can bend and move as the situation changes.

The trapeze act though, that is where the real danger lies.  The safety net is lowered.  The lights go down and the tension rises.  As we swing through the air with our child in our hands and release them at just the right moment, throwing them up, up, up into the air, where they will either soar or they will fall.  That is when our hearts pound and we realize that holding onto them was not the work.  The real work is watching them make their way forty feet above us, knowing the dangers and not snatching them back into the safety of our arms but being prepared to grab them when they fall.  Being prepared to grab them and hold them tight, reassuring them that it is okay to try again, to fail again, and then while our hearts are still broken for them, tossing them high and starting the process all over.

When my children were small I made a decision during the tightrope act to err on the side of independence.  I wanted my children to be comfortable away from me, to be able to self-correct. This meant watching them as they ran ahead on the city sidewalk where we lived, knowing I had taught them to stop at the corners and alleyways but still feeling my heart in my throat as they cut the stops just a little close.  My friends and my mother-in-law cringed at the independence I afforded them and I often doubted my decision but stuck to my guns as I watched them learn from their mistakes and make wiser and wiser decisions.

This was the beginning of our trapeze act and I felt good about our early efforts.  I had learned to let them go and fall.  I had been there to pick them up, dust them off and send them back out. But this week, when my oldest son received his driver’s license and pulled out of the driveway to head to school on his own, I faltered.  Instead of tossing him high, giving him the momentum he should have received, I lost my grip.  As he drove away, I stood in the driveway with tears streaming down my cheeks and visions of his fall in my head.  Without warning the trapeze act built to a crescendo and my child flew out of my sight, lost somewhere high above behind the light and I worried about what the fall from that height could mean.  And suddenly, I wanted that safety net back, not just for me but for him.

Parenthood is the greatest show on earth.  It comes with the highs of watching them grow and become the adults they will walk out into the world as, but that high has such a deep low.  To watch him walk away, to drive away, is the toughest thing I have had to do yet.  And still I realize that it is only the beginning.  From here there will be more and more of this soaring into the lights where I won’t always be able to catch him and I will have to trust in our years of training to get to this point.  I have to trust that he will continue to soar and self-correct.

In the days leading up to the exam, I prepared myself for the worse.  I asked my in laws to cover whatever I was supposed to bring for our family dinner just in case we were not able to make it and I scheduled a nice dinner at a local restaurant for my small family with the hopes of not completely ruining my family’s evening with bad news. I tried to maintain a normal appearance in our house – baking cookies with the kids, wrapping gifts, cleaning the house.  But mostly I worried.  Every second of every day leading up to Christmas Eve I thought about what would happen if it was cancer.

Cancer is my biggest fear.  My mother is a twenty year breast cancer survivor and since her original diagnosis there has been a small part of me that is convinced I am destined to follow in her path.  Luckily, so far it hasn’t happened.  After having the more thorough mammogram on Christmas Eve, I sat in the small room with the provided shawl wrapped around my shoulders shivering more from nerves than cold and listened for the sound of footsteps coming down the hall.  Would they be slow and dreading steps or quick and cheerful steps?  I listened for voices whispering about my diagnosis, all the while hoping not to hear anything.  When the news came, “Everything looks great.  We’ll see you again next year,” I was stunned.

With every fiber of my being I had believed I would be going home to tell my husband that it was cancer.  I had thought about how I would break the news, about how I would keep the news from my kids until after the New Year, how I would hold myself together while I waited for the next step.  Instead, I was leaving with what should have been great news.  But, I still felt the knot in my stomach.  Instead of feeling relief, I worried about when that other shoe would drop.  How long before I heard the bad news?

This year I decided to talk to my doctor about this fear.  As the time approached for me to receive my mammogram I called him and told him I wanted to make sure my Christmas wasn’t spent with the same worries as last year.  I love my doctor.  I love that he is laid back and relaxed.  I love even more that he has an optimistic outlook on life.  Two weeks ago he sat across from me and told me that he understood my worries.  Before he continued he wrote me a prescription for a diagnostic mammogram.  “No sense waiting for news when we can get it all done at one time with this test,” he told me.  The relief of having him understand the waiting is indescribable.  I have always felt so foolish for worrying over the results before they come out, but he understood.

But the next part of our conversation was priceless.  He addressed my fears with numbers.  After explaining what an industry the breast cancer cause has become, he looked back over my family history.  It is a short history.  My mother had breast cancer.  That’s it.  No siblings, aunts, grandmothers, just my mom.  He explained that my chances of getting breast cancer with no family history is twelve percent.  Because my mom had breast cancer, my chances do increase but only to sixteen percent.  Then he asked, “If I told you that you had an 84% chance of winning the lottery, do you think you would buy a ticket?” And I would.  Suddenly, breast cancer went from being a “going to happen”, to a “could possibly happen.”  Suddenly the elephant sitting on my shoulders shifted a little and I was breathing a little easier.

Today I went for my diagnostic exam.  I went in feeling fine, not worried at all about the prospects.  Maybe it would come back showing something but there was no reason to believe it would. I sat in the lobby reading a Joe Hill novel more worried about his character than my breasts.  I would love to say I remained that nonchalant but I didn’t.  As I stood in front of the machine and waited for my breasts to be squeezed between the plates, I felt that old fear creep in.  Felt my knees begin to turn to jello and I sent up a quick prayer.  “Please God, please,” I begged.  But this time the worry was only minutes.  With the diagnostic mammogram, the pictures are reviewed immediately.  I sat with the shawl around my shoulders, nervous but not shivering with fear and I waited until the technician came back in with her big smile and told me everything was okay.

I am a worrier.  It is what I do but thanks to my doctor’s numbers and a test that offers almost immediate results I am worrying less.  I have a lot of friends who are heading in for their first mammogram in the next few months.  They worry about the pain – it doesn’t hurt.  They worry about the embarrassment – seriously?  After pap smears, is anything ever really embarrassing again?  And they probably worry, like me about the results.  For this I don’t have a solution.  Except to say, look at the numbers.  Look at your history and send up a quick prayer

But he isn’t all work.  He is also pretty good at playing.  He runs and plays soccer when he can but what he really loves is photography. We generally take two cameras on our outings.  One for me, so I can take family snapshots.  Another one for him that is used for the one truly creative and relaxed part of his life.  He doesn’t go out on his own and take time away from the family.  He doesn’t lose himself in his hobby to the extent that we feel ignored.  Instead he has found a hobby and a passion in photography that allows him to spend time with us and still make beautiful photographs.

This summer as we made our way up and down the coast of Maine, we would drive down long dirt roads in search of scenery worth shooting.  The kids and I would clamber over rocks while he composed the perfect shot.  And eventually, after gathering stones and shells and climbing onto the tallest rocks, someone would get bored and want to move on to the next spot.  Usually whining would ensue and at some point we would have to move on.  After one of these particularly whiny sessions, I heard Blaise talking to himself.  “I bet Ansel Adams never had to deal with this,” he muttered and I laughed.  But the truth is Ansel Adams didn’t have to deal with whining from family.

For Ansel Adams photography was more than a hobby and more than a profession.  It was an obsession.  He didn’t head out and spend time with his family while partaking in his passion.  Instead he spent all of that time behind the lense alone.  My husband could do the same thing.  Though he doesn’t have visions of being the next Ansel Adams he could let photography take over his free time.  He could leave early in the morning and head out to the bay or up to the mountains and take beautiful photos but I don’t think it would be the same for him.  He loves photography but sharing that love with his family is what is really drives him.

Because it is important to him and because he does work hard to compose beautiful photographs, I wanted to dedicate today’s post to my husband Blaise and his photography.  If you enjoy them, please leave a comment and let him know.  If not, don’t worry, he has a house full of his biggest fans.

I woke up this morning to a guest post just begging to be added to my blog.  After experiencing technical difficulties connecting his computer with our printer, my sixteen year old son, Blaise, had forwarded hishomework to my email account and printed it from there.  Being the writing and editing mom that I am, I felt compelled to read it.  Luckily, Blaise is willing to share his work with me and in this case, with you.  I love this piece because it is a rare glimpse into the mind of my (and maybe your) teenage son’s mind. I hope you enjoy Blaise W. Brennan’s

The screen beams to life, slicing through the darkness of my room. A moment later, after my eyes adjust and my hand grasps the mouse, I begin to navigate to my browser, and sign in to my Facebook. Facebooking to sleep was not new to me at the time. As the infamous pressures of high school began to materialize, I often found my mind skipping around the homework I had just completed, or the homework that I had yet to complete, and my response was to put it to rest with a smidgeon of social networking.

As I scrolled through the plethora of status updates, a strange thought occurred to me. A trend that had been sitting there upon the white backdrop the entire time suddenly began to take form in front of my eyes. I glanced from picture to picture, status to status, noting each occurrence, and it hit me: I was not like these people.

Somehow apart was I from these people I called friends. I saw girls with skimpy clothing, their faces awkwardly puckered, their hair straightened to perfection and their ears with more piercings than I have fingers and toes. I noted the boys with skater shoes, jeans barely resting on their hips, graphic t-shirts loosely suspended upon their underdeveloped shoulders, and their necks plastered with fake gold chains. I gasped at the orange complexions of the girls who called themselves popular and at the profanity of the boys who called each other “bro.” My findings, in their melancholy, pointed to one conclusion, and despite my reluctance to accept it, I was forced to realize that these people, the mere children I had surrounded myself with, were superficial. They were everything I didn’t want to be.

Was it inevitable that I would, in some shape or form, through some kind of feelings of inadequacy or longing for self-improvement, become like them? My brain droned on, steering me in circles, while my heart cried out for fear of the inevitable.

But it was then that I felt a slight vibration in my wrists that had been resting on the desk.

I shifted in my seat, surprised that at this hour anyone might have tried to contact me. With a few deftly aimed keystrokes I opened the message, its white screen no less agonizing to my eyes than the laptop had been. The message’s choppy texting language deciphered, I discovered that it was an invitation to come see a friend of mine play with his band. His plea was that they had not even played a single show yet, and with their early slot he was afraid that they would have no one to come out and support them.

Anxious for asylum from my recent epiphany, I responded immediately, typing out the message with cold deliberateness. I would go to see my friends play. It seemed like years until the show date finally came around, and in that time I thought about what it might be like. He called it “Manhattan Beach Club,” apparently referring to a music club in our local community. I had visions of enormous crowds “moshing” to gods of rock ‘n roll on stage playing machine gun drum solos and raging guitar. My mom had visions of something else entirely when I mentioned the word “club,” and it was only with heavy reluctance that she allowed me to go.

When I finally arrived at the location on a Friday night, just as the sun was passing over the horizon, I discovered that it was none of those things. The one-story building was a hole-in-the-wall hangout spot at best. The ancient side paneling peeled away from the brick in the foundation (which I hypothesized probably peeled apart from itself as well). Only a few band members had even shown up yet – apparently it was the style of rockers to be fashionably late- and I gathered with some people I had been acquainted with through school or sports, but never became absolute friends with.

In the absence of a ride out of this place, I was forced to stick around at least until 11:00. After about an hour, I noticed a considerable group forming. Not overbearing, but enough that I was able to freely travel through the one room edifice without seeing a single face twice. The music, at first a noisy background to the larger social scene, slowly began to become the center attraction. Anybody still outside had by then poured in and crowded the amateur musicians. Everyone danced, from circles of “skankin’” to headbanging to “moshing” everyone was active, and no one was left out.

I stopped dancing. I looked to my left and saw people with nothing to prove to anyone. The girls were not flirting, the guys weren’t trying to impress. I looked to my right and saw not baggy pants and low-cut shirts, but high-schoolers who wore what was comfortable and practical. There was a unity here that contrasted to the ruthless, selfishness of every “friend” I had in school. There were people here who rejected the falseness of our peers. People who had found their realization long before I had. It wasn’t futile. I was with people who could be real. Happy. Honest. This was who I wanted to be.

I put an arm around the friends at my side, put my head back down, and fell into the rhythm of the music. I danced, and I felt a grin stretch across my face.

For the past week I have chosen not to worry. Instead, I prayed every morning when I woke up and every night before I went to sleep but contrary to my normal reaction, I chose to let God take the worry.  The biopsy was scheduled for this morning and though I woke up with a heavy weight on my chest, I immediately started praying.  But my prayers were interrupted by a memory of another time I prayed for my mother.

I was 22 years old and I was in France with my class for a mandatory winter term trip abroad.  The other girls around me were, as you would expect, excited by the prospect of being in a new country and seeing it with two professors who knew the country so well.  Even though I had never even imagined visiting another country, I found it hard to be excited.  Instead, I found myself worrying about my mom and my brother and sister.  On the second day of the trip we were at Mont St. Michel.  As we walked through the village to go to the large monastery at the top I spotted a small chapel built into the side of the hill.  I told my roommate to go ahead of me and I ducked into the chapel.

January in France is cold.  That day was bone chillingly so.  And even as I entered the chapel I knew it would offer no reprieve from the cold.  It was dark inside.  So much so that I had to stop and let my eyes adjust.  The only light came from the candles sitting on the far side of the church.  I made my way to the candles, lit one and knelt to pray for my mother.

At the time, I was not yet Catholic.  To be honest, I was not religious at all.  I didn’t attend church and I prayed when it suited me.  I didn’t spend time being thankful for the things I had.  Instead I prayed when I needed God’s help.  I did believe.  I believed that God would help and so I prayed.  I prayed with everything I had.

Only two months before, I had sat holding my mom’s hand as a young doctor told us her cancer had spread more than they had first thought.  When they had removed her breast, they had also removed some lymph nodes to be tested and eight of those had tested positive for cancer.  The doctor told us as gently as you can tell a mother and her daughter that she might live a year.  He told us they would do everything they could do to give us that year but she should start making arrangements for my younger brother and sister.

As I knelt in that chapel at the bottom of Mont St. Michel, I prayed with my whole heart.  I begged God to spare my mom.  I told Him that I knew I could survive but I didn’t know how my brother who was only fourteen and my sister who was only sixteen would survive it.  I begged Him to please let her survive at least long enough to finish raising them.  For the longest time I knelt there praying for my mom and my brother and sister and then I heard, “Ann, she’s going to be okay.”  I turned around expecting to see one of the professors who had come back looking for me but the church was empty.  I was all alone.  Except, I didn’t feel all alone.  Suddenly, I was no longer cold and I was no longer worried.  I had really handed it all over to God and He had really heard me and yes, he had really answered me.  I had no doubt.  I knew it.

Twenty years later I still have my mom and as though God wanted to show me he meant what He said then, I received a call from my mom this morning, when she should have been in the hospital for her biopsy.  “I’m alright,” she said, “They made a mistake.”  When she arrived at the hospital this morning they performed another CT scan and were able to get a better picture of what the four doctors had seen.  The new views showed more clearly the scar tissue left over from her bouts of radiation treatment.  They have asked to see her again in four months but right now, my mom is cancer free. And I am not alone.

Until one day while I was training for my fifth marathon, when it occurred to me – marathons are not supposed to be easy.  Wow, what a incredible thought that was.  Suddenly, I wasn’t the only one struggling through my long runs.  I was not alone in the sweating and the runner’s trots.  Others were experiencing the same thing.  It didn’t make the training physically easier.  But it did make it mentally easier.  Instead of finding myself mulling over negative thoughts with every step. I gave myself permission for praise.  Wow, I am out here when I could be spending the morning watching cartoons with my kids.  Isn’t it great that I just ran eighteen miles?  Isn’t it awesome to have just finished marathon number five? Suddenly, instead of beating myself down over what I couldn’t do, I was raising myself up for what I could.

But I am not a fast learner.  Just because I learned that marathons are hard, doesn’t mean that I have applied those same forgiving thoughts to other areas of my life.  So, lately as I have struggled with the rewrite of my novel, pulling my hair out when I come to a bit I know is not quite the way the story should be going, I have been denigrating myself.  What kind of a loser gets stuck on a rewrite?  What kind of a loser can’t figure out how to make characters do what they are supposed to be doing?  Why in the world am I taking so long to get this done?

Then the epiphany hit, again.  After listening to three separate authors speaking on Barnes and Noble’s Meet the Authors and listening to each of them say how hard the process of writing a novel is, suddenly I had that lightbulb moment, again.  Writing a novel isn’t supposed to be easy.  If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and not only that, but everyone would be doing it well.

So I am going to give myself permission to stop beating myself up.  I am going to give myself a pat on the back for sitting down at a blank screen and getting words on paper.  I am going to give myself credit for making an attempt at a dream I have had my entire life. And most importantly, I am going to keep on writing and rewriting it.  I am sure I will have to remind myself of this again and again but for tonight, I am working on a rewrite.  I am writing a novel. I am a novelist.

But Zane is my third child and the older two are so much older that this worry quickly made its way out the door.  I became too busy to worry over ever single move the child made and I noticed that people around me worried enough for all of us.  My mother-in-law and friends would cringe every time they would see him climb up on the table or head towards the stairs but I was much more laid back.

After he was dropped on his head, broke his poor little skull and came out completely finem I found myself worrying even less.  As a result I have ended up with this child who is so different from me.  While he is not completely fearless, he is close to it.  And watching his approach to life brings me absolute joy.

When approaching something new in my life, my knee-jerk reaction is to worry.  What can go wrong?  How can I keep that from happening?  Should I risk it?  Luckily, I have just enough chutzpa to push through most fears and try new things. But I seldom approach a new event with total abandon.

Zane on the other hand has two speeds – full out or asleep.  This summer he learned to swim.  He went from not even putting his face in the water to swimming to jumping off the diving board all in one afternoon.  And it is not just muscling through the fear with him.  I took these pictures this weekend and caught the pure joy in his face as he jumped with total abandon into the deep end of the pool.

This child of mine that came into the world as a surprise continues to surprise me everyday as he finds enjoyment in every moment of life.  Zane means gracious gift from God and we chose it because we believe he really is a gracious gift from God.  But the name fits his attitude.  Zane lives his little life like everything is just that.  Everything in his life is a gift from God. And I sit back and watch as the gifts continue to unfold.

Give a baby a pot and spoon and he can make a noise that will delight his soul.  Give a two year old a cardboard box and he can create a train, a car, a tree house or an alien planet.  Put a child in an empty room and instead of thinking, “Well, this room is empty,” they see a blank slate on which to create their own world.

As summer draws to an end and the mornings start in the lower sixties, my mind turns to fall days.  I would love to say that I daydream of the colors of the leaves and the long runs through the multicolored trails.  Instead, for the past two days I have been focused on how many boxes of leaf bags I will need to buy.  How much money I will have to pay the local handy man to clean out my gutters and how alone I will be in the yard trying to keep up with the leaves as they fall.

This afternoon on the way home from school, I found myself grumbling aloud about the work to come when from the back seat, I heard, “Oh yeah!  Does that mean I get to play in the leaves soon?”

It’s funny how one statement can snap me out of a funk.  Suddenly I realized that there really is always something positive even in the uninspiring jobs of being a parent and homeowner.  Almost 5 years ago when I discovered I was pregnant with our bonus baby, I was so worried about raising another child.  I worried about the late nights and the hard work to come.  But my mother in law promised me that this new baby would keep me young and brighten my world.

Today he is a little over four years old and I can honestly say that she was right.  Every day since he was born I have been in awe of the joy I have found in this child.  But some days I think he was sent just for this purpose.  He is here to remind me of the fun there is to be had and the games that can come from the simplest things.  I will never be a Pollyanna, but through his eyes, I have found my rose colored glasses.

Nevertheless, when it comes to self-imposed rules, I am pretty rigid. So, this month, I found myself reading Eat, Pray, Love.  The entire time, I wrestled with smug self-righteousness (I knew this book wasn’t for me) and a desire to analyze it compared to who I am and what makes me happy.

In some ways, I found it very difficult to relate to the author.  She seemed to wallow in her own misery, looking for someone or something to make her happy.  I couldn’t commiserate.  But watching her struggle through what seemed to me like self-imposed misery, I realized how happy I have been most of my adult life.  The interesting thing is that the very thing that brings me the most joy is the very thing the author was running away from.

Through my marriage and my children, I have found a joy I never knew existed.  Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, I knew little of the love and joy a family could offer.  Having seen the pain my mother seemed to experience because of her children, I was unprepared for the pure happiness and light that my children brought into my life.

As the book progressed and the author made her way to the “pray” portion of her memoir, I found it difficult to relate to her meditation and her thoughts on what meditating meant to her.  The truth is that I have always thought of meditation as forced relaxation and that has never appealed to me.  I seldom participate in a yoga class, but when I do and I get one of the instructors who is all Zen-like, I cringe in anticipation of the forced relaxation I know will follow the other portion of the class.  I spend that time lying on the floor thinking of all the things I need to get done at home and usually leave the class more stressed out than I was when I walked in.

But this morning, after I had eaten my breakfast, read the paper and checked my emails, I did what I love to do most in the world.  I made my way back up the stairs and crawled into bed beside my still sleeping four year old.  As I lay beside him, I noticed my breath mimicking his, my body relaxing and my mind clearing.  It was with the clearing of my mind that this article began to form.  And suddenly I realized that, in my own way, I do meditate.  In the moments I lie relaxed beside my son my mind often empties its worries and brings me the stories I share with my readers.

I also realized that I meditate in this way throughout my day.  That though I am not sitting in a yoga pose, I am meditating when I am running or riding or swimming.  I have often shared that exercise for me is much more than just physical, but thinking about it this morning I realized it is my “Zen” time.  It is the time I allow myself each day to let go of my worries and to analyze what is happening in my life and what those things mean to me or might mean to others.