How Long is Your Marathon?

Posted on by stilllearning2b
Marathon Preparedness
Marathon Preparedness (Photo credit: super-structure)

I’ve been getting this question a lot lately and it always make me shake my head and smile. Those are about the only smiles associated with the marathon at the moment. It turns out the nagging little virus I had a couple weeks ago was actually the beginning of pneumonia. I ended up taking a week off work (something I NEVER do) and spending all of it in bed. The marathon is now 6 weeks away and I’m trying to build up my stamina enough to stay awake past 6 pm, much less run for 4 straight hours.
At this point, I’m feeling quite a bit better. I’m just still very fatigued and my left ear has been blocked for two weeks and the associated dizziness, deafness, and ringing is about to drive me mad. I starting running again last Sunday (2.3 miles!) and just now got back from my second attempt (3.5 miles!). Tiger is happy as my reduced speed and short distances means he can join me on the runs. I, however, am not so happy as I should have run 9 miles today according to my now-defunct training schedule.
So, what do I do? I could give up and scrap the race entirely. I could force my body into running the distances spelled out by the schedule and just pick right back up. I could get angry and curse my body for getting sick without consulting me about the timing.

I’m not going to do any of those things. I’ve invested too much time and money to quit, my body isn’t ready to run 40 miles in a week right now, and the anger would just be wasted (especially since I wouldn’t be able to hear my cursing over my ringing ear). Instead, I am going to run as much as I can over the next 6 weeks. I’m going to listen to my body (figuratively until the ear clears, of course) and rest when I need to. I’m going to enter the race with no expectations about performance or time; I’ll just do the best I can with where I am on that day. Okay, maybe I have one expectation. I’m hoping the damn ear clears so that I can hear the bands the Rock n’ Roll race series is known for…

This isn’t that different than how I felt when the dust settled after the divorce. I never expected to be divorced. It was not part of the training plan I had for my life. I realized I could give up, pretend it never happened, or get angry and curse it for all time.

Or, I could accept that it happened and go forward the best I could.

How long is my marathon? Long enough that it will be a challenge but not so long that it will defeat me. I’ll complete it just like I got through the marathon of my divorce – one step at a time while remembering to keep breathing.

National Marathon Washington DC
National Marathon Washington DC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

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Power In a Story

Posted on by stilllearning2b
books
books (Photo credit: brody4)

I used to let my story tell me. I was the first wife of the bigamist. I was the woman whose husband left with a text message. I was the runner who could barely walk after my world was washed away with a tsunami divorce. I used to let my story tell me. Until I learned how to tell my story. Click to read the rest of the post on All Things Healing and learn about the workshop that caused my perspective to shift.

It Happened to Me

Posted on by stilllearning2b
Molly Ringwald
Molly Ringwald (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most people probably think of The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles when Molly Ringwald’s name is mentioned. I am not most people.  My strongest association with Molly’s name is a certain this-is-what-happens-to-your-body-during-puberty movie I saw in my elementary school cafeteria in 1985 with all of the other 4th grade girls. I remember being somewhat embarrassed for Ms. Molly as she informed us about body hair and menarche. It seemed so far removed from the somewhat sanitized world of Hollywood, where puberty only happens to advance the plot as an ugly duckling discovers her hidden swan.

Molly’s new book, When It Happens to You, attempts to be as raw and messy as real life off the silver screen. The story is told through short tales that weave together moments to paint a bigger picture of love, loss, and betrayal. Greta and Phillip’s troubled marriage is the centerpiece. Greta discovers that her daughter’s violin teacher has also been playing Phillip’s strings. The various tales speak of their separation and tenuous relationships with others as they journey through self discovery. Many of these relationships speak of real life. They are temporary and undefinable. They grasp at one another not out of true love but out of loneliness and a search for acceptance and companionship. They highlight the fact that no life occupies a bubble; decisions and connections ripple outward ensnaring others as well as ourselves.

There are lessons of acceptance in Marina’s story of loving her crossdressing son and warnings of what happens when we fight reality from the widow Betty. We learn from Phillip that happiness is not as simple as a young lover and we realize that betraying yourself is worse than being betrayed by another.

I only wish this book was not afraid to reveal the depth of anger and loss that accompanies the discovery of a betrayal. You see, it happened to me. I know the feeling of the tremors that shake your body and soul when you discover the deceptions. I remember the rage so powerful I was afraid it would tear me asunder. I recall the muscles torn from bone as the sobs wracked my frame.  Greta speaks of this pain in a removed fashion. She speaks of it, yet does not seem to experience it.

I guess betrayal is like puberty in that we tend to sanitize it when we talk about it. We talk in platitudes and metaphors, tiptoeing around its ugly realities as though we can deny its existence and hold it at bay. We like to think that we could be like Greta, rational and collected. But, in reality, when it happens to you, the truth is much uglier than fiction can ever be.

Read about when it happened to me in Lessons From the End of a Marriage.

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Perfection in a Chipped Plate

Posted on by stilllearning2b
Image from growingyoungereachday

In my old house, I strove for perfection.  My ex and I were constantly laying tile, painting walls, building furniture, and then repainting walls. We looked for furniture, dishware, and accessories that would give a Pottery Barn look on a Target budget. I once spent over 30 hours looking for just the right throw pillows for the couch after we repainted the living room. We both had a similar level of neatness, so the carefully selected objects in the carefully crafted house were not obscured by clutter. Perfection always seemed attainable, although slightly out of reach.

In my new home, perfection is laughable. My boyfriend’s talents do not extend to homemaking; in fact, as far as the house is concerned, I feel like I live with a scattered 16 year old boy. Our furnishings are a compilation of his twenty years of bachelorhood and my on-a-very-tight-budget IKEA run to furnish the apartment I was in for year 2 of my new life. The cupboards are filled with an odd assortment of dishes and glasses, many of them chipped from being carelessly loaded into the dishwasher. The couch, a remnant of bachelorhood, is stained from spilled drinks and muddy paws. It is topped with throw pillows that don’t match much of anything. Even the house itself is a rental, so we have done the bare minimum to improve its aesthetics.

Sometimes, when I visit other people’s homes and I see their perfect serving dishes and their matched accessories, I feel inadequate. I think about hitting the stores and upgrading some of our things. But then I realize that I don’t want to travel that road again. I don’t want to feel the pressure to create a perfect home. In my old life, I took pride in my surroundings, yet I was also a slave to them. I like living in a home where I do not have to be worried about a spill on the rug or a chip in the wood. I like not being owned by my home.

So, if you ever make it over for dinner, I can promise you a mean Mexican lasagna on a chipped IKEA plate, plenty of wine (although it may not be served in a wine glass), and lots of laughter and good company (oh, and pit bull kisses too). That’s my idea of perfection.

If It’s Broke…

Posted on by stilllearning2b

I don’t know about your life, but in mine everything seems to break down at once. It’s as though everything in my surroundings has been woven into a complex Rube Goldberg machine and once one part breaks, the rest inevitably follow. This past week was one of those times when everything seemed to break around me. As I struggled to stay positive and centered in my busy schedule, I realized that all breaks are not the same and do not require the same approach.

Illustration of a garage door.

Adapt to It

The domino run started with the garage door. The motor burned out a couple of weeks ago. As we are currently in a rental, we had to wait for the landlord and are now waiting on an appointment with Home Depot to have the mechanism replaced. Considering that I don’t park in the garage (or even next to the garage, as that would require going downhill), you would think that this would not be a major inconvenience for me. You’d be wrong, however. No garage door means that I have to navigate the front door with my hands full of bags and beverages several times a day. The front door that has a sticky lock and a companion screen door whose jaws snap shut faster than my pit bull’s. Then, in the dark of the early morning, I have to navigate a poorly-laid stone pathway in my heels without spilling my coffee on my work clothes.

My first few times with this new routine were a disaster. Coffee was spilled or left on the front porch. The keys would somehow become glued in the lock and require archaic incantations to be released. The screen door snatched groceries out my hands and attempted to amputate my legs as I wrestled with my bulky gym bag. Over a few days, however, I learned how to prop the screen door open just so and I mastered the precise twist of the key that unlocks the door. I’ve developed a hopscotch dance around the loose stones on the path and I’ve even managed to get the coffee to the car without spilling.

I have adapted to the situation as it is. Its repair is out of my hands, so complaining about the current state of the garage door is worthless. The discomfort is temporary and I am now much more appreciative of how much a simple door makes it easier to come and go from the home. I’m still looking forward to Home Depot’s visit tomorrow, though!

Scanner

Work Around It

My classroom is pretty high-tech. I have a mounted projector and an interactive whiteboard that I use for instruction. This means that I need digital copies of documents and answer keys in order to show them to the class. As a math teacher in the era where physical textbooks are obsolete, this is something that I do several times a day. I have a desktop scanner in my room that is connected to one of the student computers. This scanner worked reasonably well last year, but was very slow and cumbersome. This year, it decided not to work at all.

For the first couple weeks of school, this was a major stressor for me. Something that should only take a few moments (the scanning of an answer key, for example) could take over an hour as I sought a functioning and available scanner. Not a good use of time.

The tech guy finally made it around to my room but he didn’t sound very hopeful about the chances of a full resurrection of my scanner. But he offered an alternative – an iPhone app called TurboScan that would allow me to take a photo of the page using my personal phone, convert it to a PDF, and email it to my work address all within a couple minutes. I no longer cared about the slumbering desktop scanner taking up space in my room. It became obsolete with the $1.99 purchase price of the app.

Sometimes a breakdown requires looking for a novel solution to a problem. It can be the push we need to move beyond the status quo and figure out a new way of doing something.

1994-2001 Acura Integra photographed in USA.

Fix It

I’ve written before about my car. Maybe I shouldn’t have, because as soon as I wrote that post, my car has demanded attention in the form of a new timing belt and water pump (planned), new brakes (unplanned), and a new power steering pump (unplanned). After that expensive summer, I thought I was home free for a while. Apparently my car did not receive the message. While on the interstate at 6:30 am on Tuesday, the temperature gauge sprinted to the right, burying itself in the red. A stressful situation for anyone, but especially so for a teacher at the beginning of the school year. Repair shops open after I am at work and close before I leave. I have no lunch break and cannot take time off without a sub. My boyfriend, who usually helps in situations like this, was out of town. Luckily, through the assistance of several people and a mad dash to a nearby shop, the issue was temporarily fixed (water added directly to the radiator), diagnosed (bad water pump – yup, the one that was just replaced), and will be repaired tomorrow with the help of the boyfriend (if you’re keeping track, that’s the same day as the new garage door).

In the midst of all of this, I began to bad-mouth my car, wondering if it was time to let her go. But then, I suddenly realized, that including the original purchase price and all of the repairs and maintenance over the life of the car, I have spent an average of $1,500 per year on the vehicle. Even if I spend several hundred dollars on her now, that ratio will probably only improve over the next 100,000 miles everyone says she’ll last. Sometimes it’s best just to fix what is broken and realize the value that is still inherent within.

Cover of "Sh*t My Dad Says"

Rest It

Break downs can happen apart from the objects in our lives.  By Friday, my body decided to join this great damaged party as it fell prey to the new pathogens arriving on the hands of the students. Instead of running 20 miles yesterday as prescribed by my marathon training program, I took 20 naps. Experience has taught me that these August bugs are viral, meaning there is no “fix,” as antibiotics are useless. Instead, the only prudent course is to rest.

I was able to alleviate some of the frustration over a “wasted” weekend when I learned that my library (finally!) has books available on Kindle. I never thought I would get used to ebooks, but I love the ease on my wrists (those heavy books hurt after a while), the lack of clutter around the house, and the built-in nightlight for reading in bed. Although the selection is still somewhat anemic, I was able to download and read three books yesterday (Sh*t My Dad Says, The Help, and Juliet Naked) without a trip to the library. Heaven for a sick bookworm.

On a side note, I have noticed that since I added green smoothies to my daily diet, my illnesses are greatly reduced in frequency and severity. Since receiving a Vitamix from my boyfriend as a recent birthday gift, I am now pretty much living on smoothies:) As long as the Vitamix doesn’t break…

Let It Go

I’ve talked before about Maddy, my cat. My ex and I got her in the early years of our relationship. She has been with me through everything and is now happier than ever with her new daddy and her pit bull snuggle-buddy.  Unfortunately, her age is beginning to show and she is demonstrating signs of kidney failure. This is a break that cannot be fixed. Her body is simply wearing out. At this time, she is still happy and hungry and does not appear to be in any discomfort. We are addressing her needs – more water and more absorbent litter – as we watch her for signs that it’s time to make a decision. This is the hardest kind of break of all. I cannot fix her. Only recognize when it is time to let go.
It is natural for things to break. We only become more stressed when we fight that reality. Accept the break and recognize what path is indicated in each situation. Use the breakdowns to highlight the blessings within your life and to find novel solutions. Just because it’s broke, does not mean it’s over.

photos from Wikipedia (door and car), Flickr (scanner), and Amazon (book cover)