Kicked by an Angel

Being alone has been at the forefront of my mind recently. My teenage children 17, 14, and 11 have been particularly ornery lately and all three, even the nice middle one, have been using me as their punching bag. Quite often in the last few weeks I have thought and said out loud that I would like nothing more than to live alone on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  I wanted everyone to just leave me alone. It’s more than just a whimsical thought, believe me, I have considered it seriously. They are at an age where they don’t seem to really need me except for money and rides, all which could be provided by their father or other mom-stand-in.

Ah, to be alone. It’s what I crave–minutes, hours, days of endless me-time.

When it comes to exercise and training I prefer to go it solo. I’ve never been one to join running clubs or biking groups, although I am frequently asked.  I have always preferred to run alone, swim alone (dangerous, I know) and up until recently, bike alone. When I started training for my first triathlon, I used to bike alone. I would ride fast 15 mile sprints to prepare for my races. It never occurred to me to go further than that.

That all changed four years ago when  Susan showed up after having hip surgery .

“Hey, can I go biking with you some day. I’m not supposed to be running as much on my hip.”

“Sure,” I said, remembering the last woman in town who asked to bike with me.  After a fast and precarious ride around the Wakefield rotary at Lake Quannapowit during morning rush hour, I never  heard from her again. It worked once, I was sure it would work again.  Susan didn’t look so tough to me.  If the rotary didn’t throw her off than the straight shot up Charles street with the trucks and potholes would surely send her away and I could get back to my solo training in no time.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll take you to Wakefield, by Lake Q.  See you then.”

Well obviously you know how that ended. Three Pan-Mass seasons later we have become official ‘bike partners’. Susan, my sherpa, my bike-Nazi was tougher than I thought. Her slight frame and matching outfit belied her core strength and tenacity. When we got home from the 13 mile ride replete with every obstacle imaginable short of coyotes, she said, ”That was great. What time tomorrow?”

And so began my slow slide from solo-biker to biker-dependent. Nowadays it is Susan who maps our routes and she is always the one who insists we ride even when I am advocating going back to bed–just for a little while. Usually if Susan isn’t riding, neither am I.

But yesterday Susan was working and it was a beautiful day and I didn’t feel like running; so I rode alone. At first it felt wonderful.  I was free to go fast or slow, whenever I wanted. I cut some sharp lefts in front of cars that Susan would never have allowed and pushed through yellow lights where Susan would have stopped. I felt liberated and independent. ‘I don’t need Susan to ride with’ I thought.

Yesterday as the miles rolled by, and I was imagining my cottage on the cliff and how happy I would be to be alone and away from my family; I was thinking how quiet and perfect it would be. Then I saw a biker riding while talking on his cell phone.  If Susan were there we would have scoffed at that together and discussed the dangers of cell-phone use in all moving vehicles.  But I just shook my head.  Then I saw a bird eating an egg. I surely would have mentioned that to Susan and something along the lines of “eating your young” and maybe how I could understand that a little these days.  But she was not there, so I rode along–making mental notes of my surroundings and as the miles added up and my ride continued I started to get lonely.  It seemed so great when I had started out a few hours before but now I wanted someone with me to notice all that I saw.

Alone is good in small doses, for short rides. But the long haul demands company. I imagine my cottage on the cliff would be similar to my bike ride. At first I am sure it would be quite liberating to be alone, sleep as long as I wanted, cook for myself, and have no one yelling at me.  I could take sharp lefts and speed through yellow lights and for a while that would be great. But when the sun came up over the water and the seagulls fought over a fish on the shore, who would I share that with? Without others along for your ride to share in the beauty and absurdities this world offers –it’s simply not as fun.

Toe the line . Stay on the straight and narrow. Onward and upward. It’s what we hear from a young age. Life is about pushing forward in a straight line. That’s what we are raised to believe. If we keep our ‘eyes on the prize’ we will attain our goals.

For a runner, the straight line is to add miles to your distance training while getting faster in your race times. It’s a simple formula–train more, train smart and you should progressively get better. Unfortunately I seem to be moving in the opposite direction.  Lately my runs have become more and more difficult. The bones in my legs have been aching  and the bottoms of my feet are sore. I have noticed over the past few races I have participated in, that my times are getting progressively slower. I used to run in the 7-minute mile pace, now I am crossing the finish line just under 9.  And I noticed today on a training run that my gait was much more labored than usual. I considered cutting my long run short that day because I was so tired. I have been making many excuses over the past few months; Maybe I’m coming down with something? Overtraining? Not getting enough sleep?  These all may well be true but I am convinced now that it’s something else–a combination of age and medication and the final result of what my body has been through the last few years finally taking it’s toll. Try as I may to continue on that straight line, life keeps pushing me off making me zig and zag and adjust my sightline to my goal.

Last week,  my 17 year old son had surgery on his knee –the fourth  in 3 years. This kid who loved hockey and baseball and committed himself to both sports since he was a toddler was told that he not only needs a bone transplant but that his knee is degenerating and will need a full knee replacement in the near future. He will have to re-adjust his goals and reinvent himself. He will need to step off that line for a while and take a different road through life. He faces a choice at this point in his life–to give in to self pity or get back on the line.

And it’s not just the physical changes and injuries that sideline us.  Recently, I attended the funeral of a friend’s husband.  Instead of listening to the priest, who seemed determined to read us the entire bible front to back, I focussed my attention on the 14 year old son as he sat in the front row staring at the coffin of his father. I watched this boy, uncomfortable in his dark suit, arms crossed, his skater sneakers thrust in front of him –I imagined this boy hardening like cement. I knew he would be forever changed from the boy he was the week before when his father was still among the living. Thrown off his straight line of childhood and shoved into adulthood before he should have to be.

We could all list a dozen incidents that happened in our lives that changed us permanently.  Sometimes they aren’t cataclysmic but could be as simple as meeting a particular person–someone who changed the course of your life forever–maybe got you involved in an activity you would not have done before like fishing or biking or feeding the homeless. Something that switched you to another track.  Or it could be the death of a parent or sibling, a move, a divorce. You could step off a curb and break your ankle which makes your lose your job and therefore discover some other career path you may have missed if you stayed where you were. So many events beyond our control that continuously push and change us, reform who we think we are or should become.

How do we keep moving forward when life’s circumstances are determined to undermine us? When outside actions change who we are or what we believe is our own lot in life? How do some people forge ahead while others lay down and give up? My friend Gina says that no matter what happens to us, the straight line is always there–in your heart.  I believe she is right.

You have to keep your own personal line way deep down where nothing can touch it. The line that defines who you are and what you stand for. Because if we keep our straight line in our hearts and know with clarity what we believe in and who we are and continue through the pain or boredom or frustration that surrounds us at every turn, then I think eventually whatever is crooked in our own lives will straighten out.

When I was growing up, my mother was ridiculously afraid of lightning . Whenever a storm threatened our family my mom would unplug all the appliances, make us put on our sneakers and wear rubber bands around our wrists and sit in the middle of the room until it passed.  We were not allowed to take showers or, God forbid, talk on the phone because everyone knew that Mrs. so-and-so was electrocuted right there in her kitchen one day while she talked to her daughter on the telephone and Mr. so-and-so was killed while lathering up in the privacy of his own bathroom.

Whether these horrible occurances actually happened didn’t matter– we never investigated further, taking my mother’s word for it.  Unlike the kids today who question the validity of everything we say to them, we tended to take our parents’ word as gospel. Just like my lovely friend Clare who still believes that lightning can come up through the toilet because her father said so. Actually, that may be true.

So now as a mom, I have spent the last 17 years following in my mother’s footsteps and passing on my phobia’s about lightning to my kids.  Around my house, when it thunders and lightnings, everyone knows to look for me as I might be crouched under a table, or running to my basement. My kids have seen me get out of bed in the middle of the night when the lightning flickered like a strobe light around the house and sit for hours in the middle of the upstairs hallway –the only place without windows. They’ve seen me have panic attacks and stay sweating in my car with the windows rolled up tight, refusing to go across the parking lot into the store until the storm had passed. They’d witnessed my utter breakdown when I was stuck with them in a metal canoe, in the dead center of a lake when a storm rolled in faster than I could paddle to the opposite shore–my own personal idea of hell.

But yesterday, when it thundered outside my kitchen window and the dog slunk upstairs with her tail between her legs to shiver under my bed, my oldest son looked at me in mocking expectation.

“Are you freaking out?” he asked

“Nope.”

“Really?” he said with a disbelieving cocked eye-brow.

“Lightning doesn’t scare me anymore,” I said. “Neither do bees, or the dark, or anything much. Having cancer took care of that.”

“That’s cool,” he said, and went back to his texting.

Sometimes we don’t realize that things have changed within ourselves until we say them out loud. I hadn’t even realized that my fears had subsided until I voiced it.  Being told you have cancer, then being told it’s aggressive, then getting through surgeries and chemo–Well, hell, if I can do that, what exactly can lightning or a bee sting or the dark do to me?

It was well known to anyone that knows me that I was afraid of lightning, but my other fear lingered quietly in my mind–my fear of death.  That isn’t one, most people talk about. My fear of death and dying always stayed low, crouched behind my couch, waiting to jump out and say ‘boo’. And although that fear still lingers in some aspect, it seems to have shifted a bit since my diagnosis.  It seems now, that more than I fear death as it exists, I fear ‘not living’.

My fear these days is that I will not squeeze as much life out of each day as is possible. Living without purpose and gusto doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.  Lightning will strike, bees will sting, the dark exists,death will happen, there is not a lot I can do about those things. But life on the other hand–there is an awful lot I can do about that.