A New Passtime

I am only 34 years old, but I have the joints of a 70 year old—at least that’s what it feels like. Anyway, in order to maintain physical (and emotional) fitness I discarded my running shoes and exchanged them for a bike. . . or should I say trike.

Yes, that’s right. I ride a tricycle. A three-wheeled wonder of bicycle engineering. It’s a one-geared beach cruiser with a big ‘ole seat and a basket on the back. I got it for mother’s day a few years ago, and I absolutely adore it. But this is the first time I have used it for anything other than pleasure rides.

Sometimes I ride in the morning where I encounter scads of runners and walkers. As I pass them, I watch for the double take I know is coming and then I giggle with the absurdity of it all. I am a sight to behold.

With my workout clothes on, my headphones in my ears, sandals on my feet, the wind in my hair, and a smile on my face I have gotten more than one is-that-what-I-think-it-is raise of the eyebrows. To all you mainstream cynics I say, “Yes. It is exactly what you think: A fabulous thirty-something, mother of four, riding a trike.”

Other times I ride at night. This is my favorite. It is as close to flying as I can get without wings. I love to ride with my music blaring as I shut out the world and fly on my bike. In fact, my bike is rather reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the West and I often finding myself humming her idée fixe as I zoom down hills.

Perhaps my bike is a temporary fountain of youth, for I must admit riding it makes me feel like a kid again. It also makes me wonder what I ever saw in running, when riding is so much more fun.

Riding my trike has brought me closer to my neighbors. I am now on waving terms with all the sweet old couples who walk the streets together in the morning. In the evening, it’s the teenagers hanging out in the street who exclaim, “I love your bike. I totally want one.” I love left over smells of evening barbeques and seeing the old ladies stop to talk on the front porch. Sometimes I think I live in the 50s.

I always end my ride with a speedy coast down the hill to my house. Throughout my ride, I work my way around the neighborhood and up to the top of the hill. I slowly round the corner to my street to make sure no one is in my way. Then I pedal as hard as I can until my one-speed wonder is at its maximum speed, then I ride the wave down to my driveway. And for just a moment, I am that seven-year-old girl without worries, who is just having fun riding her bike.

Now that’s exercise.

The Back-To-School Countdown

School is less than a month away, and I feel like being sick. I keep telling myself, "You just need to get back into the swing of things. It will be fine. Breathe."

Going into my zen state does nothing for me, so instead I use the age-old tactic of distraction. I figure if I keep myself busy enough, I won't have time to worry about how busy I am going to be. Hmmm, does that sound a little contradictory?

Okay, so that isn't why I stay busy, but I will admit that staying busy doesn't allow me time to freak out.

So, what am I doing? I am fundraising of course.

Tis the season to solicit people for money. The charter school my children attend is starting next week, and I am trying to convince the parent community to choose to donate their time and their cash to their children's school. This can be a daunting task, even for self-motivated people like charter parents.

On a similar note, it's soccer season. Yes that means I am coaching . . . two teams. One is just for kinders, so it's really low key. The other team is for 3/4 grade boys. It's going to be so fun, and I fully intend on using coaching as my therapy of choice for a while.

Hopefully, these activities will be enough to distract me from the time-intensive, general-education classes (last two!!!!) I will be taking this fall. If I don't calm down I just might miss the last few days of summer vacation. Breathe already!

Only 20 days to go.

Birthday Perspective

My birthday was last week. Usually I love my birthday; it really is my favorite day of the year, but his year as I crossed into 34 I felt a little disappointed in life because I don’t really know where I fit. Random, I know. Where does anybody really fit? But this feels different.

I am playing so many roles on life’s stage, that sometimes I am not sure who I really am. As a mother of four I try to be supportive, engaged, loving, and wise all while saying, “I can’t help you with that right now, I’m busy.” Now I am not about to go down the busy-mother-feels-guilty-for-neglecting-her-children road, I think my level of busyness allows my children a kind of autonomy that breeds independence and responsibility (in addition to keeping me sane), but I just am wondering how I got to this point in my life (where education is the center of the universe) and where will I end up.

As a student I fear becoming the antique the class no one can relate to. Take this last term for example. I don’t know if it was the break-neck pace of squeezing 14 week’s worth of work into 7 weeks, burnout on the part of me or my classmates, or my general inability to relate to those 22 and under but I did not have a single student with which I really hit it off. I kept committing little social faux pas like this:

I was working to create a presentation with an assigned group. At one point, we overcame an obstacle and as a celebratory gesture I attempted to give my 22-year-old group member Abel a high five at the same time he tried to give me a fist bump. Uh-uh cupcake. High five is totally passé. It was rather an awkward moment but I have now wrapped my head around the idea that it just isn’t 1995 anymore.

Now this little incident isn’t really anything that would alienate me from the social group, but it illustrates the difficulty of straddling two worlds.

Additionally, my husband recently finished graduate school. That means he is home . . . a lot (comparatively). Whereas before I had been acting as a single, with a helpful and handsome best friend who kept his distance, now I have a partner who shows up and actually wants to participate in the family. Not a bad thing, but it definitely requires an adjustment. New role definitions send me into limbo just a tad.

My last adjustment comes because we just moved: same neighborhood, different street. That wouldn’t make much of a difference right? Wrong. Who knew life was so different three blocks away. All of a sudden I am faced with these new social constructs of reality, people whose ideas of regularity are completely foreign to my own. Ironically, I knew many of them before the move. Becoming their next-door neighbor has created a whole new world view.

I suppose when I was in school I never had time to contemplate these kinds of issues. So far, summer has been a confusingly-enlightening experience. As I try to re-discover myself, my function, my role, my goals, my direction, and my purpose I just keep moving and hope in the end I get right, or at least close enough.

Happy Birthday to me.

Lessons of Year 15

This week I took my last final of the year. I rushed through it in a blur. Upon completing the last question, I closed my booklet, stood up, and walked to the front of the class to hand it in. I didn’t even check it over. I just turned it in and walked out. And this time, I felt it . . . the euphoria of being finished.

Hallah!! Year 15 is finally complete. Over the past year I earned 26 credits (making me a SUPER junior), changed my major, and decided that all finals should be oral. I learned that self-directed learning is the most amazing way to make subjects personally applicable. I re-learned that good writing is key in everything we do, and that the AP style book is the new Bible. I also discovered the proper way to read a short story, that Western novels rock (I am a total sucker for the cowboy archetype), news writing is fun, broadcast journalism is not for me, and the matrix method of doing PR is amazing.

This year has been a flurry of activity. Between being a soccer mom, coaching basketball, going to school, doing my homework, volunteering at my children’s school, moving, and everything else I can state with a 100 percent guarantee, I am ready for a vacation. I have gained so much, but it has been exhausting. I am so grateful for summer vacation. I plan to do everything, or nothing. Most of all, I plan to do what I want to do. No deadlines allowed. So, when year 16 begins I will be ready.

However, I think I also learned another valuable lesson from year 15: spreading yourself too thin is not a good idea. As a result, I am going to seriously rethink my choices. I have a tendency to try to fix everything by myself, but it is time to choose my battles; instead I am going to simply my life by giving up a few things. I am not sure what those things will be yet, but I have lots of time to think about it.

Charity Begins at Home

The mission: Find someone more stressed out than I am and do something nice for them and blog about it.

When this assignment was given, my initial reaction was to raise my hand and offer myself as a potential stress case, available to any and all classmates looking for someone to help. However, instead I determined to find someone who needed MY help. I mean, really as a person who is constantly volunteering for everything, can it really be hard to find someone to help?

Answer: Yes, it can.

I looked and looked, I offered my services to stressed out friends, neighbors, strangers etc. etc. etc. but no one wanted to be on the receiving end of my assigned charity. I suppose in the end the one I needed to help was me, so I decided to help myself by taking a short overnighter to an isolated cabin with just my girl friends and our daughters.

We ate delicious food, played games, created trash-bag fashions (complete with fashion show and photo shoot), had a fabulous dance party, watched movies, and stayed up late talking. It was, I forget the word . . . oh yeah, fun.

So Shayne, thanks for the quest.

Murphy's Law

Have you ever noticed how when you are in a panic filled rush to accomplish things, that everything that can go wrong does go wrong? I know, I know, they call that Murphy's Law. But, lately I have been paying attention and it really is true.

Take this very moment, for example. Here I sit, with my lemon of a laptop, leisurely typing out a blog post. It is quiet, it is peaceful . . . all my children are playing somewhere. Of course, I have piles of boxes I could be unpacking right now, but that will keep.

Yesterday, when I was in a crunch to expertly compose a business case for the last day of class, it was pandemonium. It was happy chaos, but it was definitely non-productive. Every two seconds, it was, "Mom, can you help me find. . .?" or "Mom, can I . . . ?", really there was no escape. So, I gave up and decided to cram my paper into the few evening hours available when the children are sleeping.

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much, because it did work out in the end. My rough draft was complete before midnight (totally awesome!), and I even had time to revise. I just hope my teacher likes it as much as I do.

I suppose the lesson to learn from this is not to freak out about anything so everything will work out. Hmmmm. I'll try to work on that one.

The Dirty Dash

Do you remember the days when you used to play in the mud for fun? Adults just don’t get to do things like that anymore. That is, unless you run the Dirty Dash. For unfamiliar readers, the Dirty Dash is a 5K sludge through a mud-rich obstacle course. Held in beautiful Soldier Hollow, it is a scenic run with killer hills and steep descents.

My husband Mike, oldest daughter Nan, sister-in-law Angie, and brother-in-law Patrick were on the same team. We decided to dress in eveningwear for the event. I wore a little black dress over my running shorts. Mike and Patrick were wearing white shirts and ties with running shorts. We looked fabulous. (One of the parking attendants even thought we were there for a wedding and tried to direct us to a different parking lot.)

We checked in, got out numbers, and prepared to begin. In our assigned heat we were joined by a group of hillbillies, some pacific islanders in lava lavas, a group of girls dressed like firefighters, a group of ladies with mud flaps covering their backsides, and several luchadores (complete with Nacho Libre catch phrases) to name a few.

We slogged up the hill through the mud, jumped over several hay bales, crawled through several tunnels, and ran some more. Then we waded through the mud and climbed over several walls. I slipped at this point and the dash really got dirty.

Next was a run, down a steep, dry slope. This eventually led to the tire obstacle. By this time our shoes were several pounds heavier.

Next we raced to a swampy marsh where our shoes sucked free of the mud with every step. After a short jog to a small net you had to army crawl under (no mud here), it was a quick jog to the biggest hill I have ever seen. It was at this point my exhaustion really took over.

I hiked up the hill, using my husband as a human winch. At the top of the hill was a slippery, muddy ooze like cake batter. Remaining vertical was a challenge as I descended to the waterslide below. With the fire hose spraying full force on the slide, I ran, hoping to fly head first down the slide. Instead, my running start resulted in a flying slip with a rather ungraceful landing right at the slide’s entrance. So much for the poise of eveningwear.

After the slide was a downhill slope that led to the final obstacle . . . the mud pit. I wearily approached the mud pit, realizing that a big-muddy finish was expected. I jumped in, and proceeded to belly crawl through the pit. From there it was another ten yards to the finish line. We made it in around 57 minutes. (That is twice the time it usually takes me to run a 5K.)

At the end of the race we were covered with mud. We still looked fabulous. And yes, I think I may wear that dress again, it totally came out clean.