The trick is to keep breathing

The smell of lilacs and rain made me cancel my gym membership.

I've been running later in the evenings lately; when Matt gets home from work there is still plenty of light. I don't think anything clears my head better than a jog through the quiet streets of my neighborhood. The area in which I live is thick with trees and doesn't get much traffic, relatively speaking, and the air has been intoxicatingly full of spring these past few weeks. When I really feel like pushing myself there's a hill I tackle on the last mile or so of my run, depending which route I take, and the reward is not only a satisfying burn in my legs but the scent of lilac bushes growing thick along the sidewalk. If I stop to pause anywhere, it's here -- ostensibly to flip through the selections on my little music player, to find the best songs to power me through the last leg of my workout, but really it's to spend a few moments breathing in the scent of those lilacs.

I nearly skipped my run on Friday evening. A light rain was falling, and Matt was cooking dinner, and it would have been awfully cozy to stay inside and put on sweats and just skip straight to sipping wine and anticipating the weekend. At the same time, the air was so quiet and still outside, and the promise of forty minutes of solitude, of fresh air and soft grey light, led me to lace up my running shoes, blow kisses to my family, and head out the door. The wine would wait.

(I think I like writing and running for the very same reasons: it just feels so good when I stop. But there's always a moment, after the initial resistance, after all the excuses, after the slow start, when something catches -- my breathe, the pen, the keyboard, the page -- and I fall in, and suddenly I'm not even really there anymore, I'm just movement. Miles are run and words are written, and they might be slow and clunky, but something really good is happening to my body and my brain and so, despite the awkwardness/slowness/belief that I'm not really a runner and my writing is just a total sham, I continue to trust the process.)

Several months ago the gym I went to rather grudgingly for nearly eight years closed, and our memberships were transferred to a bright and shiny new gym much farther from our house. I was not at all pleased about this, because I've learned something about myself in the last year-and-a-half of jogging fairly regularly a few times a week:

I hate the gym.

And it's not that I hate working out. I mean, I don't always want to do it, of course, but I always feel great when I do. Even when I go to the gym and run on a treadmill. When I ran a few miles and then hopped on the elliptical for awhile afterwards, I'd go home feeling all the same adrenaline highs I feel anywhere else. But after Isaac was born and I started making running a conscious part of my Weekly Sanity Rituals, I realized that what really felt good to me was running outside, breathing fresh air and feeling the pulse of the world around me. I needed to be going somewhere. I needed to be able to choose a different street, a different hill. Sometimes I even drive a few minutes to the boardwalk and run along the water, which is arguably not much more interesting than jogging on a treadmill except that the boardwalk can be an interesting mix of bustle and solitude, of tranquility and energy, depending on how many people are out, on whether or not the tide is in and the water is slapping the boards underneath my feet or whether I can go and walk on the sand if I choose.

I guess, in the end, it's that going to the gym felt like work. Good work, to be sure, healthy work, but work. It was a total drudge for me. And I realized that there was just no way I would be motivated to drive fifteen more minutes to get to the shiny new gym clear across town when I was going to the one near my house once a week at the most. Matt bought me new outdoor running gear last fall, and unless it's just pouring, or our sidewalks are buried in snow (which doesn't happen much here), I'll happily run all winter long outside.

I think what I love about running outside is not so much that I can pat myself on the back for getting in a good workout; it's more about finding a space in my day in which I can be truly present. I'm not distracted by people on machines a few inches away (which always makes me feel stupidly competitive); I'm just breathing, letting my thoughts go where they will, and finding my quiet center. Last week I posted this as my Facebook status:

When Isaac was a newborn, 7:00 or so was his "witching hour" every night -- he fussed and fussed for awhile, just processing all the crazy new things he had to absorb. It occurs to me that my urge to jog in the evening is the same thing; I can run in the sweet evening air and let all my crazy thoughts rattle around in my head before they finally fall out on the street somewhere, or I can sit in my house and fuss for awhile. And let's be honest, no one wants to see that.

This is probably why running "works" better for me in the evening. Saturday morning is a much more convenient time, but I'd much rather drink coffee and eat waffles and play with the kids. Letting the stress of the day -- even just ordinary stress, ordinary stuff, nothing earth-shattering or horrible -- build up a bit drives my desire to get out, to move, to let it go, to breathe, to find my way quietly back to myself.

And so we quit the gym.

It was just after a cool, lilac-scented run a week or so ago that I burst through the back door into the noisy warmth of my kitchen, sweaty, spent, a little more clear-headed and able to approach the chaos of dishes in the sink and trains on the floor and the exuberance of my children (who just get louder and louder the closer we get to bedtime; why is that?) with patience and good humor. I appreciated the contrast, even, and the fact that this blessing of solitude exists literally right outside my front door, that these moments of serenity -- however fleeting they might be -- are moments I won't find on a treadmill. I suggested to Matt that we stop kidding ourselves with the "Well, we should probably try the new gym a few times" and go ahead and admit that we just weren't going to do it, so therefore we should stop paying the membership fee even if it was such a great deal. He agreed. I might miss the treadmill in the dark of winter, when it's tougher to get outside in daylight hours, when I'm feeling trapped by weather, but I've also learned I'm tougher to keep inside than I realized -- so I think I'll be okay.

Little things are big

What I am about to write will interest almost no one. No, truly. Matt and I are terribly excited, and Suzannah was happy to cheer along with us, and possibly our parents will cheer along with us as well, because grandparents put on a good show of being interested in everything having to do with the grandkids (or at least they just call up those memories of what it was like to be in our shoes and play along politely). But to most of the rest of the world, this will not be all that interesting, even for people who like reading about other people's children and/or other people's experiences of raising them. Still, I feel I must record it for my own sake.

Isaac peed in the potty tonight!

My little baby son!

The scene: Friday night, post-bath. I had just come in from an evening run and was eating dinner while Matt finished bathing both of the kids (sidenote: good grief, they're noisy in the bath). Isaac usually gets out first while Suzannah plays a little longer, and I heard the slap slap slap of his fat little feet on the hardwood living room floor. I watched as my naked little son trotted gleefully towards me. He paused next to the dining room table, gave a few cheerful stomps for good measure, laughed at me as if to say HA! I am NAKED!, and trotted back down the hallway as Matt called, "Isaac, get back here, you're making us nervous." Nervous indeed, because this little boy, when left bare-bottomed, has no problem casually peeing on the floor. (This hasn't happened in awhile, but the trust isn't real high. I mean, he doesn't particularly care when his diaper is poopy, either, and doesn't take kindly to our insistence that we change it if he is busy playing.)

So Matt managed to wrangle him into his pajamas and I grabbed his toothbrush. Teeth-brushing has been hit-or-miss; sometimes we have to pretty much hold him down, and sometimes he is quite jolly about playing "Show Mommy your teeth!" Tonight he pushed my hand out of the way and said, "No...potty!"

I have to admit here that I did not take him seriously, because he actually does like to sit on the little potty next to the bathtub sometimes, especially when his sister is sitting on the big potty. (And yeah, Matt and I say potty way too much now, even when we're just talking to each other, which I guess is what happens when you have two children under the age of five?) Once, a long time ago, he squeezed out like three drops of pee at the same time, but I'm pretty sure that was a fluke. Anyway, it was way past his bedtime and I really didn't feel like playing his "let's pretend I'm going potty" game because he always wants to take off his diaper and I just wanted to put him to bed already so I could take my own bath. But he insisted. So I stripped off his diaper and he plopped his chubby little bottom down on the little potty seat and I left the bathroom to do something else for a minute. I don't remember what.

The next thing I knew, though, he was hollering at me. I thought I'd just go in and put his diaper back on and brush his teeth and waltz him off to storytime, but when I went back into the bathroom, he stood up and showed me that he had actually filled up that little Bjorn potty with actual pee. Oh, my word, the cheering. Matt and Suzannah and I went nuts with all the ISAAC! You went POTTY! GOOD JOB! WOO HOOOOO!

He stared at us briefly like we'd just entirely lost our minds, but then he broke into a terribly pleased grin. He grinned and grinned and said, "I did it!" And we were all, "YOU DID IT! YOU WENT PEE! YAY!" Especially Suzannah. What a great little cheerleader.

So Isaac got a little treat for peeing in the potty, and we brushed his teeth and read stories and tucked him into bed, and then I stood in the middle of the kitchen and said to Matt, "I am actually a little sad about this." It's not as though I adore changing diapers, but it's just one more milestone that carries my baby right on out of babyhood. It's all a little hard to take. I thought Isaac would be my little nursling until he was at least three (really), but he tapered off all on his own sometime in the last month. And I hadn't even considered the possibility that he'd be interested in the potty yet, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because he wants to do everything Suzannah does; he wants so much to be a big boy. It's strange. On one hand, I kind of hate this, and yet watching him grow -- watching both my children grow -- brings me so much joy, the greatest joy of my life.

It's a wild ride, this motherhood stuff.

When I did finally turn off the lights tonight, after we'd read our stories and he'd hugged everyone, he held out his arms and I picked him up. He wrapped his arms tightly around my neck and rested his head on my shoulder, and I just breathed in his soft still-baby fresh-out-of-the-bath scent, and we swayed back and forth in the dark of his room. I know that tomorrow he'll play hard outside and start smelling faintly of potatoes behind the ears, and he'll be demanding and too rough with the dog, and he'll holler and laugh and be very much a little boy. Tonight's milestone was one more exciting (if bittersweet) step into childhood, and every day he becomes more and more his own little person, entirely separate from me. But I'll hold these nights for as long as I can, these moments when he wraps his chubby little arms around me and sighs his baby sighs against my neck, and even though I can almost feel the future -- his grown self -- in a real and visceral way, right there in my arms, I'm so grateful for these moments in which the boundaries between baby and boy, or between mama and baby, are still a little blurred.

Desperation and Grace

I've been mentally writing an entry here for days. I keep trying to say something profound and compassionate and wise about mothering sick children for days on end, about how it's brought me to the edge of my sanity, as well as all the ways my family has been shown incredible love and grace by some really wonderful people.

But then what I come up with is all blah blah blah, everything is doomed and none of us are ever going to be healthy again and we're just going to keep passing around the same horrible viruses and I will lose my job because I miss so many days staying home and also now is my spring break and I'm still home with sick kids and I don't have enough mom friends here who understand how truly lonely I feel and Suzannah has got to be sick to death of me by now and this is all very, very terrible and DOOM FOREVER and whiiiiiiine.

Today was the first really decent day after thirteen or fourteen consecutive days of illness here, which is mostly why I've been so quiet. I know it must seem like I'm always writing about my children being sick; it's really not that they're sick so terribly often, it's that it feels so consuming when they are. This one has been rough. Suzannah especially has had us worried; she went from feeling fine one day to a fever of 102 and total lethargy the next. She ate hardly anything for several days and it was all we could do to bully her into drinking a few sips of water or grape juice or orange juice or anything. She even admitted that her throat hurt, and for my little girl to admit that something hurts is pretty significant. So I took her to the doctor, where she tested positive for the flu. Wonderful. I spent the rest of the day in varying states of total distress -- how would I keep my young son from catching it? How would I keep all of the rest of us healthy? How would I handle staying home from school the week before spring break when I've already missed so much time with my classes due to the senior IB orals, which took over a week to finish? And then I couldn't get her to even take the Tamiflu, because she threw up her first dose (straight into my hands, which meant I did not need to clean the carpet -- a victory!) and the sight of the bottle made her cry after that.

It wasn't difficult to keep her away from Isaac, really. She was so sick that she had little interest in doing anything other than lying in her bed or on the couch. She had her own bag for her used tissues. I disinfected everything constantly, and I've been washing my hands so often that my knuckles are bleeding. After crying in defeat on Saturday night, I managed to rustle up just the tiniest bit of optimism over the next couple of days when the rest of us appeared to still feel perfectly fine.

But Suzannah didn't get better over the weekend, and last Tuesday her fever was still holding steady at 101-102. I stayed home with her on Monday; Matt arranged to stay with her on Tuesday and Wednesday. I took shameless advantage of this to head out for wine and appetizers after school Tuesday -- I needed it. Some honest conversation, some adult company, some camaraderie. But as I headed to my car, I received the call I'd been dreading: Isaac had a fever and apparently rivers of green snot, so could I come and pick him up? I called Matt and nearly sobbed this unfortunate little update.

"I'll go get him," he said. "You should still go out." He sounded tired, too, and resigned. He was, I think, just being generous and considerate -- he was home, he was five minutes away from Isaac anyway and it wouldn't be such a huge deal to buckle Suzannah into the car and pick up her little brother. Of course, what I actually heard was something more along the lines of, "We are completely effed, so you might as well go enjoy a couple glasses of wine."

When I arrived at home a couple of hours later, Isaac was actually in pretty good spirits, acting more or less normally. Suzannah was passed out on the family room floor. Snoring. Would you care to guess how many times my little girl has fallen asleep on the floor? The answer to that would be zero. It was deeply unsettling. The next day her fever was holding steady and she was refusing food; she couldn't even be persuaded to play The Ladybug Game, which is her new favorite board game and for which she can rouse herself from near-death. On Tuesday, she still wanted to play The Ladybug Game.

So we went back to the doctor. He wanted to rule out secondary infections -- pneumonia, obviously, or strep. And just for fun, we had Isaac tested for all that stuff, too.

Sidenote: Isaac really dislikes nurses right now. He watched his big sister step onto the scale, and I thought that when she did not burst into flame he could be coaxed into copying her. Instead, he backed away, his eyes filling with tears, until he backed right into a cart or a table or whatever was behind him in the hallway. I sat him on the baby scale instead, and he sobbed as though I'd plopped him in a bowl of scorpions. Afterwards he clung to me, eyeing the nurse with great suspicion, his lower lip jutting out in a truly spectacular pout. If I hadn't been so worried and exhausted I'd have found it funny. (What was funny was that later, as we were leaving, we passed the same nurse -- who, incidentally, was fantastic -- and he waved jovially and said "BUH-BYE.")

Isaac tested negative for the flu. His ears were fine. His throat was fine. He didn't even have a fever, actually, so the verdict was "just" a virus. Suzannah's throat was raw -- possibly from coughing -- but the strep test was negative, and her lungs sounded fine. And yet, she was still so sick that she didn't even have enough energy to walk from the doctor's office to the car. She went to bed as soon as we got home, and after that I paced around and around our study, crying into my hands. It isn't that I thought she was so desperately ill, although it was beyond horrible to see her so sick, so listless and miserable and so not at all herself. It was just that I was exhausted, and I felt utterly powerless. I couldn't do anything to make her feel better. Bullying her to take her medicine resulted in tears, for both of us. Convincing her to drink anything was almost as bad. Worrying about Isaac was all-consuming, and worrying that we'd get sick as well just filled me with a deep, insidious dread. And worrying about how in the world we could keep everything going -- our jobs, obviously, but also stupid things like cooking dinner and keeping up with the laundry -- made me want to lie on the floor and sob.

Isaac's illness, in the end, was less worrisome in that he wasn't completely listless or completely miserable to the point where he just wanted to sleep all day long. His fever went up and down, and his appetite went up and down. He did worry us one night with a fever of 103; he just laid down on the living room floor with his blanket until we put him to bed. That was not at all normal, and I hated it, but his fever broke overnight and he seemed so much better the next day. The day after that, he spiked another fever, possibly had a febrile seizure (which would have worried me more except that I know what they are and have watched other mamas go through them with their children), and wandered around with dark circles under his eyes. Finally, finally, a week after his first sign of illness and nearly two weeks after Suzannah's, I'm beginning to believe we'll come through this.

People suffer so much worse, and I know that. More than once in the last two weeks Matt has wrapped his arms around me and said, "We'll get through this. Because people do." He sounded so sure, and mostly, I believed him. But I still posted a semi-hysterical Facebook message about how overwhelmed and despairing I felt, because I just needed those feelings to go somewhere. What happened after that, though, was that a handful of people sensed my desperation and asked, immediately, what they could do to help.

I can't even begin to describe how much that actually meant to me. It's very, very difficult for me to ask for help.

But even as I continued to not really ask for help, the offers came: a wonderful lady from our church offered to go grocery shopping for us (which she did, and delivered the necessities along with a delicious pasta salad and loaf of zucchini bread, plus treats for the kids), and a few more friends made us dinners and delivered them to our house on Friday and Saturday night. Real food, comfort food, with vegetables, cookies, a plant, fresh bread. It was such a huge, huge blessing not to have to think about cooking for a few days but still nourish our weary selves with something other than, say, three days' worth of pizza or reheated Thai food. Love and grace taste exactly like those dinners.

Somewhere in there, I realized how much time I've wasted wishing for other people, or other relationships, whatever they are, to somehow be better or more than they are. I've really driven myself crazy doing that sometimes and probably allowed myself to hurt more than is strictly necessary. And not only that, but the sad truth is that once you start dissecting all the ways other people have failed you, or all the ways they somehow haven't come through like you may have hoped, at some point, you have to come right back to yourself.

Children are really mirrors, in so many ways, and these experiences -- like, say, parenting children through illness, among other things -- show us the best and worst of ourselves. It's so much easier and more gratifying to focus on the worst in other people; I can be all self-righteous and wounded and blame other people when I'm hurting or lonely. However, when I try to talk this over with Jesus in the midst of my more visceral "Please, just let everything be okay" prayers, I tend to want to leave the conversation, because who wants to be told that she should probably work through her own sh*t a bit more before she becomes the expert in everyone else's?

I really think Jesus must be pretty exasperated with me quite a bit of the time.

(By the way, I would like everyone to know that I wrote "sh*t" instead of the actual word because my husband may have expressed just the tiniest bit of discomfort at my casual use of the word "fuckup" in my last entry, mostly because our parents read this blog, and then I accused him of censoring me and suggested that he go and start his own blog for everyone to read, and then he insisted emphatically that he was not in any way censoring me and that I could write what I wanted, that he was just feeling a little weird about it, and I said good, because that was the only appropriate word in that context and if I'm not going to be honest I might as well just shut this whole thing down but I said I would try to be good in the next entry.)

I feel like I may have started writing this with a point in mind, but I'm sure I lost that a long time ago. Maybe just this: that the last two weeks have shown me (again, because I never learn things the first time) that it is an incredibly freeing thing, to put down the burdens of my disappointments. Of my expectations. Those things shut me right down, make me just want to curl into my own tight little ball of worry and hurt. When I can leave myself open, when I can accept the deep kindness of others who took the time from their busy lives to show us a little grace when we desperately needed it, I'd like to think I'm more equipped to show that kind of love and grace as well. And that's really what it's about, isn't it? Helping each other through this life when we can?