Born to Run Barefoot

I love running. I always have.

My mom did daycare at our house when I was younger, and in the summer she'd take care of a kid or two my age. Of course, we didn't have enough bikes for everyone, so I always volunteered to run beside everyone riding their bikes to the Creative Playground, our stomping ground, about a mile away. Even then, I loved to run.

I have never been super fast, I have never been ultra-competitive. I enjoyed running cross country and track in high school for the comraderie, and some of my best college memories are running around Chapel Hill after dark (because it was too freakin' hot to run in daylight) with my college roommates Ashley & Malina. I completed one marathon with Team in Training and the NYC Marathon in 2002, both with my good friend Julia. Running is both my time alone and my time with friends.

And then (insert screeching tires, car crash sounds, screaming and sirens here), I got injured.

No, it was not a glorious sports related injury. I remember the exact moment it happened. It was days before our wedding in August of 2003 and I was on the Upper West Side to get everything waxed for the wedding and our Mexican honeymoon. I was wearing flip flops and I was late. I shot across Broadway as the cars were coming, and snap! My right calf just...I don't know. Pulled? Tore? It hurt, badly. I took two weeks off, ran on it, and pulled it again. I took a month off, ran on it, and pulled it again. It became a sad routine, and then I stopped running.

And it wasn't because I was off my game. That summer I was training for the NYC Marathon again. I was in excellent shape--I could bike up to Central Park, run 18 8-minute miles, and bike home.I didn't run that marathon, or any other one, ever. My running life, for the most part, was kaput. Depressing.

I have had this chronic calf injury off and on for NINE YEARS. It has sucked. Every time I start to run again, I pull it again. I have had orthotics made for my marshmellow-y running shoes, I have had three different physical therapists, I have been taped, iced, heated, and I have rested. Nothing helped. I was told that it's because I have totally flat feet, feet that only became flatter with two pregnancies (and went from a size 10 to a size 11--god help me). I felt defeated.

And then I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. And I read it again. And again. The whole book resonated in me, especially the part that we--as homo sapiens--are all meant to run, not to be fat mother effers who sit on couches and eat french fries. Transport us back thousands of years and we'd have to run for food, from invaders, for life--what has happened to us? I refused to believe that I can't/shouldn't run because I'm flat-footed. And then he talked about barefoot running, and trusting in the architecture of my feet and my muscles to carry my body. He examined the history of running shoes, a tribe of indiginous peoples in the Copper Canyon of Mexico called the Tarahumara who run ultra-marathons wearing sandals and eating chia seeds, and the birth and new trend of barefoot running. I decided: screw those fluffy running shoes and my orthotics, I needed get barefoot. It was my last desperate attempt to re-cultivate my running self.

After having Nico, I was at a running ground zero = I was totally out of shape and had no mileage under me. Thankfully, this is a good place to start re-training your body on how to run. I read about running barefoot, studied the gait, and started small runs on the treadmill with the focus to land on my mid-foot, not on my heel. I got some Nike Free running shoes, and starting working out in them. Spin, small runs, elliptical, etc. I also stopped wearing my bulky Dansko clogs and other shoes I was told I needed to wear for "support" and wore only shoes with no support so my feet are on the ground, my favorite in the summer being Saltwater Sandals. Being both a teacher and a New Yorker, I walk a lot, so even when not at the gym my feet were practicing being barefoot, getting new muscles, and learning what it felt like to hold my body (which is not tiny) up. I remember my feet being sore last spring; they are never sore now.

A month ago I took the next step and got the Vibram five-finger running shoes. I headed out for a slow jaunt in Prospect Park (3.3 miles), cautious of my new kicks, and I found myself jumping over rocks on the trail and kicking it in at the end, I felt so good. I figured I would pay for it the next day--I'd wake up and my feet and legs would be immobile, but not at all! Not an ounce of pain.

Monday I went for another run in the park in them, and I am happy to report that for the first time in YEARS, I ran the loop in total joy. I felt great, my feet felt light and strong, and I ran with the happiness I had as a kid. I just wore them to a cardio interval class, and I felt so stable and connected to the ground as we jumped and balanced--so much better than those big running shoes.

I am sold.

I have put off writing this post for fear that I'll jinx myself and pull my calf again, but I'm hopeful that maybe, baby, I was born to run--just not in actual running shoes.

(PS: I have heard that Peter Sarsgaard is directing a movie adaptation of Born to Run, the book. I can't wait.)

Banana Bread Thanks

So, news around here is Adam got a new job. He's an architect for a construction & development firm (which is awesome!), but the construction office is located in Larchmont, New York. For those of you who don't know the City or its layout, Larchmont is not in New York City. It's in the 'burbs. So he has a long commute now, but he's doing it for experience and he uses his train time wisely to read and work on his side work.

Due to his new job, I now have to do the mornings as well as morning drop off. For years, Adam has done the mornings and drop off b/c as a teacher I had to be at work at 7:45 and daycare didn't open until 8am. But now I am in charge of the mornings and all the chaos the morning brings.

I have NEVER been a morning person, ever. Even when I was a baby, my mom claims she would have to wake me in the mornings (sadly, my kids did not inherit that trait). I am grumpy, I don't want to be touched, and I hate everyone. Of course, this is difficult when you have two little lambs who need your attention. I think that maybe the hardest part of becoming a parent for me has been cultivating some early morning kindness. I am just naturally snappy and bitchy when I wake. One of my tragic flaws, I guess.

Monday night I made banana bread. Yes, it was 90 degrees at 9pm and I decided to turn the oven to 350 for an hour and a half to make banana bread. Our 800 square foot apartment became a veritable sweat lodge and, naturally, I was sweating like a beast, but the bread was sooo good it was totally worth it. I added some chocolate chips and cut back the sugar and the result was simply divine. Wish I had some now, but we ate it all in two days. Damn, our kids can eat.

Tuesday morning the kids were whining, crying, ripping out their hair and gnashing their teeth over going to camp. I was just beyond sick of listening to it and playing the calm and patient mom. I gave them banana bread and yogurt for breakfast and sat glaring at them, wondering why I had chosen to have kids and fantasizing about how easy my life would be when I can send them to sleep away camp in the far future. Then Nico looked up at me, chocolate smeared all over his face, and said, "Mommy?"

"Yes, Nino?" (Nino is his nickname b/c for the longest time he couldn't say the hard "c" of Nico)
"Tank you."
"Thank me for what?" I asked, a little snarkily b/c I am just a mean mom before 8am.
"Tank you for banana bread," he said, barely making eye contact as he continued to nosh the bread, getting chocolate all over his face, hands, and swim shirt.

And from that moment onwards the morning was okay.

(Note: The recipe is from The New Best Recipe cookbook, btw. Our fave cookbook.)

Baby Fat Expiration Date

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to bear witness to my next-door-neighbors and friends bringing home their first baby to their apartment. The uncanny thing is that they live in the apartment where Adam and I lived when we brought Alexandra home. The truly uncanny thing is that their baby was born on Alexandra's birthday which made me delightfully happy in a really weird way, like I was watching my life unfold again but with other actors playing me, Adam, and baby Alexandra. But their sweet pea is a boy, so there are some differences, too.  Overall, thought, it was very moving to watch.

Kate, the mama, looked amazing. Granted, she was one of those women who probably gained 10 lbs and had a 7 lb baby. While pregnant, she was her normal stick self with a gigantic belly; she looked truly absurd. I'm not kidding, I don't think I have ever seen anyone stay so the same with such a huge baby bump. When I told her she looked great yesterday, she chortled and said, "You can't see all of me" and left it at that. That's because she has tact, something I greatly lack. I would have elaborated on my flabby stomach and my sausage-like vagina and my ass fissure and the many other ailments that accompanied giving birth to my two almost-10 lb babies. But she has much more grace than I do. I love women like that. Maybe in my next life I'll be given a frontal lobe.

I left them on their stoop to cross their threshold for the first time as parents and took my 5-year-old to the water playground. There, my two mom friends and I laughed about how mortified we were about our bodies after having given birth--oh, the horror, the horror! Kurtz from Heart of Darkness has nothing n a woman who has made and birthed children. Now we can laugh, mostly. But there are some days when we still cringe. I had one this morning.

Today I was getting ready in the bathroom with the company of Nico. I was naked, a towel wrapped around my hair, and putting lotion on my face when Nico asked me if I had a baby in my belly. Of course, I do not, nor will I ever again, and I told him this. I said, "It's just a little chub." He stood there silent for a minute, then he looked at me and said, in a confused way, "But it's not little, it's so big!"

Wow. Thanks, kid.

Needless to say, I am getting myself back to the gym/yoga tonight. I can't really use the excuse that it's baby fat when I no longer have babies. The baby fat expiration date has passed and now it's just fat. As I saw Kate, two days postpartum, I was reminded just how long ago it was when I gave birth. Time to start waking at 5am to workout again. Wish me luck.

1, 2, 3, 4, FIVE

Today my baby girl, Alexandra Osa, turns five.

The photo above was us as a new family. She was about seven weeks. We were still in shock and awe that we were parents. Actually, I am still in shock and awe that we are parents quite frequently! But we have been for five years now. Wow.

For some reason, this birthday is making me sad and nostalgic. I look at the photo above and feel that the summer of 2007 was just yesterday. I remember clearly sitting in the hospital five years ago, a 9 lb 8 oz baby in my arms, exhausted from pushing her and all her chubby glory out, and blissed out by the amazement that my body had made and birthed this little person. I found her to be perfect; I was totally blind to the fact that her head was a complete cone due to the hours of her edging her way down the birth canal and into the world. Her squished face and pointy head were the image of pure beauty to me.

And now she is a little girl. The weird thing is, I remember a lot of being five which means that Alexandra is entering into the parts of life that she will later remember, too. I remember feeling like a big kid, and I remember breaking from my mom little by little. My mom's favorite story of me being just barely five is how she had organized for me to be in a carpool for kindergarten. We lived just shy of one mile from Guilford Elementary School in Sterling, Virginia therefore we did not get bussed. She set it up for me to get a ride, but when the first day of school rolled around I protested. I had already arranged for me to walk to school with a group of older elementary kids in the neighborhood. No way, I was not carpooling--I was walking with the big kids.

And she let me. Yes, it was a different era and I cannot imagine sending Alexandra out the front door here in Brooklyn to walk almost a mile with some 8 and 9 year olds to anywhere, but my mom let me go.  Maybe it was stupid of her or maybe it was brilliant. Who knows. A lot of parenting is like that.

I see that independence beginning to break through with Alexandra, too. Small things, and I can't even recall a concrete example for this post, but I have noted that she is already establishing her separation from us, her mom and dad, in her small ways. Already, and she's only five.

It makes me love on Nico a bit more and a bit harder, knowing that the time they are truly small is very short. I understand that the tension between dependent and independent will be a constant in the parenting years ahead of us, and I understand that even when both our kids crave full independence before it's time (say, at age 13!) that we will have to wrestle them into a hold of sorts, but it gives me pause when I look at my now big girl and realize that she is already laying the path to her own life, even now at age five.

Happy birthday, sweet baby girl.

Love the Life You Live

This was our holiday card this year. As we decided on a photograph, we worried that our friends and/or family would find us twisted human beings for putting our scouring/crying kids on a card to be sent to the masses, but we were surprised at the amazingly positive response we got from nearly everyone. And, amid these responses, our choice of photograph grounded me in some deep thoughts about our life and our little family.

Last spring my close friend Julia Beck Vandenoever, of Julia Vandenoever Photography, spent a grey spring morning with us in Prospect Park. Adam was ridiculously hung over from a good friend's bachelor party the night before, I was cranky because he had been out to 6am the night before our family pictures (!), and the kids were just...Well, a one and a three year old. Needless to say, anyone who dared hold a camera up to take images of us as a family was a brave individual that day, and Julia did it with grace.

When we got the images back, I was thrown. I blogged about it here, but suffice to say we looked amazing--like photos of fake families that get put in frames (but much cooler, of course). I never like photos of myself, but I liked these. Wow. And there was such a great variety of all combinations of the four of us.

But, like every busy family, the photos were taken in April and by December they all still only existed on the computer. When we went back to look for a holiday card shot, I laughed--heartily--at the many photos of either one, or the other, or both of the kids crying. They sulked, scowled, cried, and ran away from Julia during the shoot, but she kept shooting. And it's those photos that I love the most: the ones of my kids being the little pissers that they are every day. She truly captured who they were, at those ages, in images. I'm not sure every photographer would keep shooting, or that every photographer would present those images in the final edited version that the client gets, but I am so thankful Julia did.

As much as we all try to get our kids to smile, be cute, look like little angelic model children, I think we all know that our kids can be difficult, challenging, or downright intolerable. I'm so thankful to have images of some of these less-than-perfect emotions documented. There were many a beautiful photo of them as well, but somehow they didn't resonate in me like the cranky ones.

And maybe I am twisted to put it on a Christmas card, but, as my friend James said in a text to me proclaiming his love of our card, love the life you live.

And I do.

Regift Boomerang

For those who know me well, you might know that I am an avid regifter. It's shameful, I know. Not one of my best attributes at all. But, if I am given something and I don't like it, I am not the type of girl to hold onto it and wear/hang/put it out in obligatory fashion when the giver comes over. I usually stash it in a drawer and then give it to someone else. Sometimes as a present, but more often as a simple offering because I like them and I think they would like my unwanted gift. Maybe they do....Or maybe they regift it to someone else. I don't know.

I do have a shred of sentimentality in me. If the gift truly means something or is symbolic in some way and I don't like it, I still hold onto it. I'm talking more about the regifting of common everyday gifts here, so let me make the disclaimer that I'm not completely heartless.

But, for example, I have received a proliferation of items that depict my first tattoo--Picasso's hands holding flowers drawing--throughout my life. I got this tattoo when I was 18 years old, and while I don't loathe it now, it no longer feels like me. However, the stuff keeps pouring in: erasers, pencils, coffee mugs, notepads, posters, stationary. Most of it is from my mom (bless her heart), but sometimes it'll come from someone else. I smile when I receive it and stash it in a drawer to regift it.

This past weekend we attended Adam's Aunt's funeral. Aunt Marilyn was the best recipient of my regifts. She accepted all gifts with pure joy and thankfulness--an earnest joy and thankfulness. She was a very simple woman who appreciated simple things; she was also single her whole life, and I feel that when gifts came to her she truly felt part of a family and loved. I cannot begin to explain the large number of gifts that were given to me by my family that were recycled to Aunt Marilyn, and she loved each and every one. In fact, at the luncheon after the funeral and burial, Grandma Watson (Marilyn's mother) explained to me how much Marilyn loved a throw blanket that Adam and I had given her years ago for Christmas. Well, that was actually a gift my mom and stepdad had given us, but in a small apartment that already had three throw blankets, we didn't need another and regifted it to Aunt Marilyn. Grandma said how once Marilyn was wheelchair bound, that throw blanket was on her lap 24/7.

Aunt Marilyn had been in an assisted living facility for the past eight years. There wasn't much to clean out of her room, but Adam's mom, Marcia, came up to me on Saturday and handed me a mug of Picasso's hands holding flowers and said, "This was in Marilyn's room and we thought you should have it." Marcia didn't know that I had given the mug to Marilyn (or if she did, she didn't say), and she definitely didn't know that the mug came from my mother about nine years ago at Christmas. But now the mug is back in my hands, and, since it is a relic of Aunt Marilyn and symbolizes the hilarity of my regifting boomeranging back in my face, the mug is now safely situated in our cabinet where it will stay.

I guess when I regift comes back at you, it's the universe's way of saying you're meant to keep it.

Rest in Peace, Aunt Marilyn. I'll drink my coffee and tea from my mug, which was your mug, which is now again my mug and think of you.

Parent Teacher Night

My body may have been deep in my crappy Ikea couch tonight, but my mind was at my the high school where I taught the last ten years where my past colleagues stayed at work until 9pm to host parent teacher night.

My first parent teacher night in Bushwick was when I realized how important this night was to figuring out my students as people. Seeing who my students went home to at night peeled back layers and layers of who they were and they made so much more sense. I feel very strongly that so much of us comes from our parents--the good and the bad--and that once you meet someone's parents you truly begin to understand their quirks and neuroses. When you observe how the parents dress and how they carry themselves, once you hear how they speak, once you watch how they beat or berate their kid in front of you for the bad grades, once can realize that their kid has them more duped than he had you, once you see a single mom cry after she reads her son's college essay about her....Wow. So much is said by both words and body language on parent teacher night.

I miss that window into my students' worlds.

Because now I teach adults. They may mostly be one year older than my prior students as freshmen in community college, but they are no longer wards of the NYC Department of Education and they are paying for their education. After the first day of class, I stood in my empty room after my students left and made mental notes of which parents to call when I realized, "I don't have anyone's phone number!" Several times I have wanted to call when a student was absent, or if s/he did something amazing, but I can't.

It's so strange!

But I also realize how--developmentally--it's important. It's time for personal responsibility to kick the f*ck in finally. Now my students have nobody to fail but themselves in this attempt to secure their human capital through education and a degree, and it's high time they know that. Nobody's checking on you, so check yourself (before you wreck yourself, as Ice Cube would say).

And, as a control freak, it's time for me to let go, too. Grow up, my students. And welcome to the harsh, and often rewarding, world of adulthood.