Rebecca Rogers Maher

Hi Friends,

How’s winter treating you? Still waiting for our first massive snowfall in the Northeast. We tried to go sledding the other day, but 4 inches of snow/sleet/mud/mush really wasn’t cutting it.

Just wanted to post a quick update about what’s coming in 2012. I’m very excited to announce the release of my next book–a contemporary romance novella called Snowbound with a Stranger–from Carina Press, on May 28, 2012. Read more about that story, including an excerpt, here.

Snowbound with a Stranger is the second book in my “Recovery Trilogy.” The third and final installment is a contemporary romance novel that’s awaiting an official title and will release on September 24, 2012.

Stay tuned for new blog posts, cover art, reading dates, appearances, release information, release party details, and all sorts of other good news throughout the spring and summer.

Best wishes to all of you, and thanks for reading!

Last year my friend Lisa told me that she frequently cries during long runs. I laughed at her. I just couldn’t believe anyone would possibly have the energy to run and cry at the same time.

Boy, did I have a lot to learn.

I ran the Philadelphia marathon on Sunday and pretty much sobbed my way through the entire thing. Joyful tears. Tears from laughter. Frustrated tears. Tears of pain. I cried ‘em all.

Here’s the breakdown. Too bad I didn’t live-tweet it. You could have played a drinking game.

Mile 4

Two miles earlier I’d seen my husband Kevin and our four-year-old son, and been hugged and kissed within an inch of my life. But at mile four I still didn’t feel warmed up. I felt slow. And when I imagined running twenty-two MORE miles, I was filled with a dread so profound I felt like I was running through molasses. Then, up ahead, I saw a woman with a t-shirt that said, “180 Days Until Homecoming.” Below the writing was a picture of her with her husband, a soldier in military fatigues.

And I was feeling sorry for myself? I had just left my amazing husband and was running toward the next place I’d see him again. She was running knowing that her husband would not be at the finish line, or behind the door when she got home, and that he might not ever come home. That was the first time I cried. Out of gratitude for what I have. And in solidarity with that woman’s guts and independence.

Mile 8

In preparing for this race I had to confront the fact that I always run alone, and always run with headphones. Most official race instructions caution against the use of headphones for safety reasons, but I’ve ignored this rule even when running races. I’ve become dependent on music to propel me forward. I’ve also become so immersed in my own determination to keep moving – and often, immersed in my own pain when running – that I purposefully tune everyone around me out.

On the advice of a friend, I decided to take my headphones out for this race, at least at the start. I wanted to take in the energy and support of the crowd, and see how that felt. Our race bibs had our names written on them. With my ears clear, I could hear people calling me by name, rooting for me, cheering me on, and wishing me well. I cannot tell you how good this felt. I thanked every last one of them. I accepted every high five as I passed. I read every sign. Even so, by mile 8 I was again counting the miles ahead and despairing.

That’s when I saw this sign: “Run the mile you’re in.”

That made me cry. It was exactly what I needed to hear.

I cleared my head and ran the mile I was in.

Mile 10

Here my sister Tammy, my brother-in-law Peter and my six-year-old son waited with their eyes held open with toothpicks for probably over an hour. They needn’t have worried about missing me. I saw them from several hundred yards away and ran straight into their arms. My brother-in-law snapped this amazing photo of my baby hugging me.

Their combined support, encouragement, joy and love made me cry for a good long while. I don’t know how I got to be so lucky.

Mile 11

After I left my family, I came upon a downhill stretch. There, my left knee blew out. It felt like something gave way, and then the pain began on that side.  I saw the first port-a-potties of the race that didn’t have obscenely long lines, and since I had to pee, I decided to stop and stretch.

It was here that I learned that I’d gotten my period. Ladies, can you feel me? The line of portable toilets rang with my “Dude! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

This development might help explain all the crying.

Mile 14

I really should have stopped at Mile 13. That had been the plan, in fact. The week before the race I’d gotten a bone scan because my wonderful physical therapist suspected I might have a stress fracture. She feared this because I’d been experiencing pain while running for the previous month. In fact, I’d had to take most of the month off from running, and bike instead, so I could let whatever was wrong heal. It wasn’t healing, though.

The bone scan revealed no stress fracture, so that meant the pain was coming from tendonitis or muscle inflammation. In other words, running would hurt, but it wouldn’t hurt my body permanently.

As my fantastic orthopedist said, “You can run through the pain. If you’re into that.”

Was I into that? You ‘d think the answer would be hell no. But a funny thing happened to me in the course of this training. I wanted so much to be a runner, to be a successful runner, to not give up on my training, that I stopped listening to my body. Running was hurting me, but I wouldn’t stop. My physical therapist had to really force me to see this. She said, “Running is supposed to be fun!”

For real?

That was news to me.

But it was news I finally became willing to hear. I vowed that if I was in too much pain during the marathon, I would stop running. One good option was to simply turn off the course at the halfway mark, along with the half-marathon runners, and accept a medal for that race.

However, at Mile 13 I still thought the pain would be manageable.

By Mile 14 I knew that it wouldn’t be. I had been having muscle cramps along my quads and IT bands on both legs for two miles. The trouble spot on my right thigh was completely flared up. Both knees were on fire. This was in addition to some truly mind-blowing menstrual cramps. (Pardon the vivid detail, fellas.)

I had already started walking off and on at mile 11. By 14 I couldn’t run at all.

I called my husband. He was in a CVS with my four-year-old, buying me tampons. (I’d left him a frantic message 3 miles earlier. Husband of the Year times twenty!) He stood in that CVS aisle for thirty minutes, just listening to me sob.

I want to say for the record here that I would have completely collapsed at that point, without that phone call. With it, I just kept walking forward, along the Schuylkill River. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. Even in my distress I could see that, and it made me cry even more. Out of joy too, and gratitude.

Mile 19

A few people have asked me why I kept going after Mile 14, why I didn’t just turn back. The answer is partly practical. I was planning to meet my husband and younger son again at Mile 18. I thought I’d make it to them, even if I had to walk, and if I needed to at that point, I could grab a taxi with them back to the hotel.

I hung up the phone with Kevin at 16, where I nabbed a tampon from the Red Cross tent.  After I pulled myself together, I started running again intermittently.

It hurt. It hurt, really, like nothing else has ever hurt me besides childbirth.

During this training process I’ve often thought of myself as wimpy about pain. I don’t know why I’ve judged myself that way. I did give birth to a 9 pound, 4 ounce baby, standing up, with no pain meds. So let me say this out loud so I can hear myself say it: I’m not a wimp.

But this hurt, and I’m sure my face showed it. I must have looked like I was struggling. The Schuylkill River stretch, as lovely as it is, lacks spectators. If I’m remembering this right, people start showing up again around Mile 18. Unfortunately, because he’d stayed on the phone with me for so long, my husband couldn’t get to our meeting point there on time. After I passed the Mile 18 marker and he wasn’t there, I called him again. He was at Mile 17. The soonest he could meet up with me was at Mile 22.

So now I knew I needed to get to Mile 22. I had no fucking clue how I was gonna get there.

At around Mile 19, I was beginning to lose it. At the top of a hill, I passed a woman who read the name on my race bib.

She looked at my face and said, “I see you, Rebecca.”

People, I am telling you, I cried my heart out after that. Are there any more powerful words in any language?

Mile 22

My husband and little boy met me here, and ran with me. My baby got upset when he saw me crying, but he kissed and hugged me. After I fell into Kevin’s arms, that is, and sobbed for a minute.

I could have stopped at this point. But I was so close! I just wanted to finish the stupid thing so I could cross it off my bucket list and never run again as long as I lived.

Mile 24

I called my friend Lisa, just to hear her voice. She had just finished the marathon herself. I was really happy for her, and happy to hear her talk about it. She didn’t want to talk about it though. She said lots of beautiful things to me, and comforted me, and promised to meet me as soon as I was done.

Mile 25

I saw the lady with the “180 Days Until Homecoming” shirt. She was walking too. She looked calm and strong. Talking to her for a few minutes steadied me. She was thirsty, so we shared some water. I ran again for a little while after that. It hurt, and I cried some more.

Mile 26

At the finish line, my sister Tammy met me. She had to hold me up because my legs just sort of buckled under me. My older son was there too. I got my medal and he tried to get me a second one! Then my sister Heidi came jogging toward me, crying because I was crying, and that made me cry even more. She had just run the half marathon like a flying gazelle, and then came back to meet me at the end of my race.

God knows she had plenty of time. I ran the first third of the race at a good 10-11 minute mile pace, which is strong for me, but with all that walking, I crossed the finish line at 5:48.

Dude, I‘ll take it. I finished that damn race, and I’m proud of it.

At least I think I am. See, it’s like this…

Whenever people ask me about my marathon training, I usually say, “Oh yeah, it’s totally destroying my body, but you know. That’s okay.”

I regret to say that for the past several months I’ve noticed nothing askew in this sentiment.

So what if I hated absolutely everything about running? So what if every run felt like willingly subjecting myself to sadistic torture? That’s normal, right?

After I ran my first half marathon I came home with a vicious stomachache that kept me crying in bed for the rest of the day. Second half marathon: same thing. When I started my current training, I knew it was coming. I knew that by the time I reached the weeks when my training runs were thirteen miles or more, I’d have to figure out a way to prevent the stomachaches, or else the second half of my training would be a nightmare.

This time, the stomachaches started at seven miles. And soon, at four miles. And then every four miles thereafter. I began sticking to four-mile loops around my apartment, so that I could stop home after each loop, be violently ill, catch my breath, and then head out again. I did this for two full months. Every weekend I faced down my long run of the week knowing how sick it would make me. Knowing that I’d have to face that moment, again and again, where I’d be sick as hell and still have to strap my water belt back on, get out there again, and run some more.

I went to a nutritionist. I went to acupuncture. I read diet and nutrition books for runners. I asked the advice of everyone I know who runs. I wore out Google looking for stories of people with similar issues and hoping to find some magical cure. I tried everything. No dairy or fiber for twelve hours before the long run. Then twenty-four hours. Reduced caffeine. No artificially flavored chewing gum – my one vice: I usually chew it like a bookie all day long. Then there was the nutrition during the run. I calculated the exact formula of carbohydrates, salt, potassium, and water per fifteen minutes of running and carried the whole mess in two fuel belts around my waist as I ran. I even made my own rice balls to eat on the run so I could control the ingredients.

It got a little better, but really, nothing worked. I was miserable. Even the thought of running was starting to make me feel sick. And yet I refused to even consider the possibility of bailing out of the marathon. I still followed my training plan to the damn letter.

Then one day my legs just kind of gave out. I went for a routine five-mile weekday run, and halfway through it my leg muscles started spasming. Quads and calf muscles both: they just freaked the fuck out. I’d heard of leg cramps but holy wow! It was like a dozen Charlie horses all at once. They lasted throughout the two-mile walk home and kept at it periodically all night and into the next day. When I tried to run again two days later, my legs could barely even extend. I made it half a block.

And then I wrote the world’s most pathetic email to my saintly physical therapist, who advised me to stop freakin’ running for a couple of days, for God’s sake, and let my legs rest.

I took a week off. And during that week, instead of rushing home every day to squeeze in a manic run between work and picking the kids up from school, I just kind of relaxed. I met my husband for lunch. I got a pedicure with a friend. I read a book. It was … amazing!

Taking a little time off gave my brain a chance to start thinking clearly.

My marathon training had become this kind of drawn-out self-punishment. I don’t even know for what. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be a wuss and drop out. I felt like I should be able to endure the stomachaches gracefully and stop whining about them.

After my week off I was scheduled for my second sixteen-mile run. I didn’t want to do it. I had several long, pained talks with my close friends about whether they would forgive me if I bailed out of the race. They just shook their heads and showered me with love.

The day before the run I followed all my new dietary rules. In case you’re interested, the day before = the following magic quintet: one avocado, one sweet potato, three eggs, one-quarter block of tofu and a bowl of salty white pasta; during the race = 1/3 Clif Z bar alternating with one Clif shot blok + 6 oz. water every twenty minutes, and (let’s be honest) an Immodium before the run. When I headed out I told myself that I could decide during that run whether to continue with the race plan, switch to the half marathon, or bow out entirely.

Since I told myself that – that I could stop anytime – and for the first time truly believed that I would allow myself to do it, I was able to just take it easy. Every time I started to feel sick, I stopped running and walked for a while. I took two fifteen-minute breaks at home, at four miles and at eight miles, at which point I called my husband and told him I was definitely going to switch to the half. I was just going to head out for another mile or two to finish off the run.

At twelve miles I realized I hadn’t had a stomachache yet. I felt pretty good, actually. So I decided to try for sixteen. At sixteen miles my legs were on fire. I was exhausted. I must have scared the hell out of the residents of Brooklyn Heights as I ran, audibly groaning, down the Brooklyn promenade. I cried. I sang out loud to Patti Smith. It was awful.

But also, it was wonderful. For the first time, I got it. I understood how it’s possible to run a marathon. Without the stomachaches, it was just all the other stuff: the leg pain and indescribable fatigue, and all the emotion you can’t control. But all of that was doable.

I ran eighteen miles. That marks the longest run I have to do before the actual race. If I wanted, I could just coast from here.

Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. When I described my method in this last run to a friend who is a running coach, she pointed me to this super-interesting article about a run/walk strategy for marathons.

This is what I’d accidentally done during that eighteen-mile run. Whenever I started to feel sick, I stopped and walked. Which presumably gave my poor tummy a chance to calm down and get right again. Then I started running again once I felt fully ready to do so.

I also let go of the terrible pressure I was putting on myself to run faster, to feel less pain, to be less of a baby, to stop whining. I took care of myself instead. I vowed to myself, in fact, that I wouldn’t let my body come to harm. That I would protect myself.

Those words, spoken aloud at mile fifteen, when darkness had already fallen, when I was completely overcome with exhaustion, had a powerful effect. They had what I think will be a lasting effect. They made me able to push through those last miles. Because I knew I had my own back.

This past weekend I ran a 10K race in Prospect Park. I’ve explained before what a slow runner I am. I tried the run/walk strategy, even for this relatively short race, and ended up with the fastest pace I’d ever clocked for any race or run. (Still pretty slow, but for me, a big deal.)

I knew that undertaking this marathon training would teach me something. I had some ideas about what that would be. I’d hoped I’d become more brave about physical pain, for one thing. I didn’t have to get all G. Gordon Liddy about it, though, did I? And subject myself to pain unnecessarily. The fact is my body was screaming at me to slow the fuck down, and I wasn’t listening, and that is a lesson I hope to take away from all this. I cut everyone else in my life serious slack all the time. I need to give myself a break once in a while too.

So I’m going to run this marathon. (I think. My knees are flaring up. They hurt like hell even during short runs now. We’ll have to see.) But if I run this marathon, I’m going to do it slowly, and walk part of it, and just try to finish and celebrate all the work I’ve put in so far. And take care of myself. And be proud of how far I’ve come. And let go of the compulsion to do it perfectly.

And most of all: enjoy it.

One day I was telling a friend that I felt depressed, and I was trying to explain why. I said it was as if a geyser of energy were constantly shooting upward out of the top of my head – emotional energy, creative energy – but that the force of that energy was too explosive. So I spent a lot of time shoving a cap down on it, to hold it in. As a result, it exploded internally, and made me sick inside.

She made an interesting suggestion. She told me to find a physical activity that would mimic the force and motion of the geyser, and then do it. This made a weird sort of sense to me. It seemed right to actively find a place where I could take the cap off and let loose. I had a little trouble picking the right activity, though. Is there an exercise in which you’re propelled off the ground like a rocket? I couldn’t think of one. Bungee jumping, maybe? Trampoline? Gymnastics? I decided to choose running. If I lean forward a little, it’s kind of like preparing for take-off, no?

Many times in my life I’ve felt stuck. There’d be something about myself or my situation that I wanted to change, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Of course like any self-respecting girl I would try talking about it. That usually helped me feel better, at least temporarily, and sometimes it would even help clarify exactly what was wrong or missing or broken. That’s not nothing; I realize that. But it didn’t help me change what needed changing.

Which is what I want: to actually change what is bothering me. To solve the problem. Over the years I’ve had conflicts with friends over this. Someone would tell me about their troubles, and I would immediately hunker down and try to help them brainstorm a way out of them. Then they’d get mad at me. “I was just venting!” they’d say. In other words, “I don’t actually want to solve the problem right now. I just want to complain about it.”

WHA?

Conversely, I would share a problem of my own with a friend, and wait for them to ask questions about it, to help me analyze it, to point out the aspects of the situation that I hadn’t seen, to suggest courses of action, and…

*Crickets*

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand this dynamic, and to seek/give support accordingly. Some people don’t like attacking their problems like a rabid terrier. Okay: noted. Not that they’re passive; they just go about it a different way.

But me, I’m the terrier. And to do my job properly, I need tools.

Maybe because I’m a writer and a reader, I appreciate symbols. I love the Jungian principle that our subconscious is constantly speaking to us through symbols, sending us messages, giving us clues, if we would only make the effort to interpret them. It raises a question: If my subconscious is communicating to me through symbols, can’t I communicate right back in the same way? If there’s something about the way I operate that needs changing – and talking about it, while it relieves pressure, isn’t working – can’t I access my subconscious and rewire it using symbolic acts?

In retrospect, I see that I’ve done this accidentally many times. As a kid, I was very shy – painfully so – and couldn’t bear to have any attention focused on me. The first job I took as a young adult was as a canvasser for Clean Water Action. I knocked on people’s doors and asked them for money. You can imagine how that went. My first summer was a miserable failure. I had never been worse at anything I tried to do. But I believed in what we were doing, I loved the people I worked with, and I hated the fact that I couldn’t articulate myself confidently. So I went out and knocked on those doors every day until I learned how to do it.

Because the Clean Water Action teaching system is so GREAT, the training was broken into discrete parts: make eye contact, keep it short and simple, be specific about what you want, use confident language, etc. So for example, if you want to sound confident, you don’t say the word try, as in “We’re trying to find out what’s in our drinking water.” You say, “We’re FIGHTING for the right to know about toxins in our drinking water.” In other words, you become more confident by acting more confident. You fake it ‘til you make it.

It works!

This phenomenon also comes up in teaching. When I first started, I worked with the lowest-performing classes in one of the lowest-performing schools in the city. My students were failing, and they were furious about it, and as a result their behavior was atrocious.

I came into that classroom full of idealistic bravado about teaching them to act appropriately out of a sense of personal responsibility and inherent ethics. You can probably guess how that turned out. I got my ass handed to me.

Thank God, I happened to be working with a teacher who used a behavior plan. According to his system, students earned points and rewards for specific, targeted behavioral changes. I gave him all sorts of huffy resistance to this system at first, calling it manipulative, shallow, etc. He just laughed at me. Because his plan worked. And mine didn’t.

I was asking these kids to reach for a golden hoop a hundred feet above their heads, and then getting mad when they couldn’t do it. He, on the other hand, asked them to reach for the hoop that was just beyond them, that they could stretch for and reach if they tried hard, and if they did, they were soundly acknowledged, celebrated and rewarded for it. He did this for them one step at a time, one level at a time, until they could grab for that final hoop. With his help, they built their own staircase there. But they did it by isolating specific behaviors and then mastering them. And the behavior wasn’t a generalized, “be good,” or “act better,” it was “raise your hand before speaking,” or “stay in your seat:” concrete, physical, doable actions. Symbols. Because by learning to raise their hands before blurting something out or remaining seated rather than jumping on the desk, they learned self-control.

I know this is not new. It’s behavioral therapy, or behavior modification, and millions of people (and animals) have tried it in one form or another. But for some reason it was news to me that I could choose to do it to myself, and change things that I didn’t like.

Interestingly, this blog is one experiment in that direction. As a teacher, I was trained to be aware of a particular gender dynamic in the classroom: boys usually raise their hands first. Before you even get the question out, many boys will have their hands up. Most of them don’t even know the answer yet. They just want to be called on. So they’ll take that risk and get their hand up and figure it out later. Girls, on the other hand, tend to stop, breathe, ask themselves if they know the answer, formulate an articulate response, and then raise their hands. In the time it’s taken them to accomplish this process, a boy has already been called on. As the teacher, if you wait a few beats after asking the question, allow it to sink in, and give all students a chance to formulate a response before you call on anyone, you give girls a better chance to be heard.

At the same time, you have to teach girls to just go for it. To be willing to make a mistake, to say something imperfectly, to be wrong. But to go for it. This blog is my attempt to practice what I preach to my students. I spend a lot of time editing my for-publication work, but on this blog, I edit very little. I write and then I hit send. Knowing it’s not polished. Knowing it’s still raw. Knowing people will read it and judge it and find fault with it, or not read it at all.

This blog is my symbolic act, and the goal is for me to learn how to not give a fuck what anybody thinks. The goal is for me to be willing to be imperfect publicly.

Today at the playground some lady started yelling at me because my kid was riding his bike too fast. He shouldn’t have been; it’s true. But she was rude about it, and loud, and she scared my child, and so I gave her a very public smackdown. I didn’t care what anybody else thought about that. In the past, I would have shrunken away and meekly apologized. But not today.

I thank this blog for that. Here, I say what I think without editing myself. I just force myself to do that, and then leave it up here for all to see or ignore. And lo and behold, the world keeps on spinning. Mostly, no one even notices. Which is perhaps the most hilarious discovery. No one really cares what I say! That is SO LIBERATING.

Another example: One year I gave up worrying for Lent. I know that sounds crazy. But it was actually the first time I tried behavior mod on myself. I figured my compulsive worrying was getting in the way of my spiritual life. I was living in a state of hyper-vigilance and trusting no one. So for the forty days of Lent, every time I started to worry, I stopped and prayed instead. And I always prayed one kind of prayer – I said thank you for something glaringly obvious and beautiful that I otherwise would have ignored. Because I was worrying so much – about so many ridiculous things over which I was completely powerless – I ended up praying a hell of a lot. At the end of Lent, I was changed. I had tripped a switch in my brain. I felt safer. By replacing worrying with gratitude, I shifted my brain’s focus away from the fear of what I might lose to all the bounty that I already had.

I didn’t start out feeling grateful. I became grateful by acting grateful, and I reduced worrying by replacing worrying with an act of gratitude. Isn’t that nuts? But it worked.

Right now I’m in the thick of whatever it is I’m trying to learn by training for a marathon. I started out wanting to become comfortable with being bad at something (I’m a terrible runner) and doing it anyway. Also, I wanted to become less afraid of physical pain. And I wanted to see that enormous, seemingly unreachable goals could be broken down into single, achievable steps. So far, so good. I do appear to be learning all of this. The great thing about these mind puzzles I give myself, though, is that I learn a whole crapload of stuff I didn’t expect as well. With the marathon, I’m learning that I’m too hard on myself (duh), that I could stand to be a lot more protective of my own health, and that I do too much stuff on my own (like, for example, running). (Whoops.)

Perhaps my obsessive self-challenges are weird. I don’t know if other people operate this way. I only know that when I hear myself lamenting some perfectly fixable problem more than once, I get twitchy. I start looking for a way to solve it. This way works for me. And even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it sure keeps me busy.

And now I leave you with a picture of this Georgia O’Keefey flower.

I have a low pain tolerance. I like to say it’s because I feel SO MUCH! SO INTENSELY! but that self-justification doesn’t make it any easier to put on a brave face when life requires it. I know exactly how much something is going to hurt. Even before it happens, I’m cringing.

I suppose that’s normal. It’s probably also normal to avoid risk in order to avoid feeling pain.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I chose a very stoic, traditional male obstetrician. I believed – correctly – that he would frown upon any display of emotion and therefore would set strict boundaries about what feelings would be allowed in the delivery room. I didn’t want to risk falling apart.

The result? A medical, confusing pregnancy and a truly terrifying labor and delivery that took me years to recover from.

I took a different approach in my second pregnancy. I worked with a midwife and a doula: both profoundly compassionate, strong women. When I went into labor, my wonderful husband, beautiful sister and doula kept me company at home. We talked, ate, told stories, laughed, and listened to music. I took a bunch of warm showers. And when a contraction hit, I closed my eyes and breathed through it. Then, while my sister stayed with my older son, my husband, doula and I met our midwife at the hospital.

Throughout the pregnancy I reserved the option of asking for an epidural. I was scared to death of feeling what I’d felt the first time. But the great thing about having a baby is that that shit’s gonna happen, whether you want it to or not. Whether you’re ready for it for not. That thing you’re terrified of bears down on you like a freight train and there ain’t no stopping it. You can’t control the outcome. You can’t back out. All you can do is hurl forward, one step a time.

In the delivery room, I screamed my heart out. And those three miraculous people held me up. They told me I could do it. With each contraction and each push, they cheered me on.

When my son was born, I was standing. I caught him with my own two hands.

With no pain medication of any kind.

Me. I did that.

I could not believe it. It hurt like absolute hell. But I did it.

Afterward, I wanted to understand how it could have happened. Because if that level of craziness were possible, other things might be possible too.

Like writing that book I always meant to write. The first thirty pages or so had been languishing in my hard drive for years. How does someone write a whole novel anyway? It’s ridiculous to think that you could.

After my son was born, though, I went back to that story and started writing it. I hired a babysitter for eight hours a week, and for eight hours a week, I wrote.

Some days it felt like dripping words into a void. I had no illusions that I would ever finish. But the fact is it did get done. It moved. One page at a time.

Soon after that I started running. My first run was five minutes long, and it nearly killed me. Dragging my wheezing ass past the chicken factories in Red Hook, I asked myself why anyone in the world would do something so stupid.

I’ve asked myself that question many times since then. Basically every run. And particularly before each run, when I’m pacing around the apartment, dreading the walk out the door, looking for any excuse in the book to weasel out of going.

When I do manage to get started, it’s not pretty. I lurch and sweat and whine to myself the whole way through.

I’ve run two half marathons and am now working toward a full marathon. When I started training again in July, I tried thinking ahead to what 13 miles would be like, or (God help me) what 26 miles will be like, and every cell in my body screamed at me to stop running and lie down on the curb instead.

There’s no other way to say this: I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of how hard it is. I’m afraid of how much it will hurt. I injured my knees in the first race and although physical therapy is totally working to fix that problem, I’m still afraid every time I feel a twinge in my legs. I get terrible stomachaches when I’m running, and even though I’m working with a nutritionist and an acupuncturist to address that issue, I’m still afraid every time I feel a pang in my belly.

I’m afraid that I won’t be able to carry out the training. I’m afraid I’ll quit halfway through. I’m afraid that even if I do complete the training I’ll be a shitty runner anyway. I’m afraid that my race time will be humiliatingly slow. I’m afraid that I won’t finish the race. I’m afraid I’ll embarrass myself. I’m afraid I’ll let myself down.

I feel this way about writing, too. Every time I sit down to write a new story, or a query letter, or a blog post, I ask myself who the fuck I think I am.

I don’t know if that fear of failure will ever go away. But it’s the reason I decided to do the marathon. Running is hard for me, and the prospect of such a long race – for me – is almost paralyzing.

What I’m trying to learn is how to not be paralyzed by fear. Of failure or of pain.

How can I predict what the future will be, anyway? I can’t know what I’m capable of unless I actively try to be capable of something.

I’m still in the midst of this process, but so far what I’ve learned is painfully obvious. I can’t think about the finish line. I can only think about the step right in front of me. The concept of RACE DAY (or birth day or publication day) is too big and too overwhelming to take in or do anything about. I can hold it in my mind as a general goal, but I can’t dwell on it, or I won’t move an inch.

In my second pregnancy, I couldn’t allow myself to think about delivering the baby. It was too scary. What I could do was find that wonderful doula and midwife and go to my meetings with them. I could gather all the gear and clothing we would need. I could spend time with my older son. When labor started, I could breathe through each contraction.

When writing, I usually work in 2500-word chunks. That’s about ten pages a day. I don’t have to finish the book that day. I don’t even have to write very well. I just have to write ten pages. One page at a time.

With every training run, I have to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other. Completing that mile. Finishing that run.

In childbirth, as in writing, as in running, it’s guaranteed I will do it imperfectly. It’s certain that I will embarrass myself. But the only way to try to complete the journey is to just take the next step, and to trust that in this way, one step at a time, I will be prepared when the time comes.

I don’t know for a fact that I’ll be prepared. I’m still scared that I’ll screw up somehow, or worse, that I’ll do everything perfectly right and end up failing anyway.

But rather than being paralyzed by that fear, I’m forcing myself to complete the tasks that are necessary to prepare, one task at a time. To just take the next right step and trust that things will work out.

It may be the most rudimentary and obvious lesson in the world, but it’s still taking me a long fracking time to learn it. Things happen one step at a time.

One contraction at a time. One mile at a time. One page at a time.

And one thing I do very well damn sure know is that I’d rather be taking the next right step than standing still.

Living in New York City, I meet a lot of parents who place a high value on their children’s school performance. That makes sense to me. We all want our children to succeed. We want them to feel challenged, to take risks, to set goals and meet them, to learn how to solve problems creatively – in short, to grow into productive, interesting people who have earned the right to be proud of themselves.

I worked hard in school. I felt I had to. My parents made big sacrifices so that my sisters and I could attend a public school in an affluent town, but when it came time to apply for college, I was competing against students whose cultural and educational background far outshone my own. So I understand the importance of working hard. For families like the one I grew up in, academic achievement can equal a ticket to a less stressful life.

Hard work is not what bothers me. What bothers me is the unnecessary pressure people put on kids to perform in a numerically measurable and conventional way. And why? So we can use an award or a test score to prove that we’re superior parents?

I don’t even want to touch the tiger mom issue here. I get the reasons why some parents want their children to be high achievers. I want my kids to be high achievers, too. I just don’t want them to kill themselves trying. I don’t want them to claw their way to the top of the ivory tower and then jump off once they get there. Because seriously, what is the goal? What are we trying to prove?

My son goes to an excellent public school. The other parents and I chat sometimes about what our kids are up to. Invariably I get asked about summer camp, about what reading level my son is on, about afterschool activities. I used to think I should care about these things. When my boys were babies, it was all about who was talking first, or walking, or who played the most meekly on the playground, and I fell into the trap of comparing them to other children. Then one day my son – who at that time had an undiagnosed sensory processing problem coupled disastrously with a speech delay – picked up his toy stroller and bashed it over the head of another kid. That day, I let go of my need to compare him to others.

The fact is that my son is different from other kids in a lot of ways: extremely sensitive, emotional, and physically strong. These differences would be overwhelming enough to him without me trying to shove an arbitrary performance expectation down his throat. Instead, we just try to let him be who he is, and celebrate that. We understand what he knows, what his abilities are, and we challenge him to reach for the level that is next for him. Not the level that we think other kids are on.

Sometimes he’s way above where other kids are and sometimes he’s below. Doesn’t matter. He is where HE is, and has his own path to follow. So far, the effect of this choice, for both of our children, has been a very deep confidence and sense of dignity.

As a teacher, I worked with many third graders who either couldn’t read at all or could barely make it through a sentence. Often these kids had been left back at least once, if not twice or three times, and were older than the other students in the grade. As part of No Child Left Behind, they were tested at the beginning and the end of the year using standardized assessments designed to measure reading competence at a third grade level. I was told to prepare them for the state assessments using test-prep materials that they couldn’t read at all. (I taught phonics in secret instead.) The tests were graded on a 1-4 system: level 1 being the lowest result and level 4 being the highest. My students, of course, would test at level 1 in September.

Over the course of the year many of them learned to read. They moved from a pre-k reading level to a second grade reading level. That’s four years in eight months! Then they would take the test in April and score a level 1 again, or possibly, if they were lucky, a level 2. After all that work and all that growth! It killed me. There was no measurement in place to test them according to where THEY were, to show how much THEY had learned.

In a larger sense, this dynamic made the students who scored level 3 or 4 at the start of the year a better investment, since their test scores were more likely to show improvement and to raise the school average. So my students, who needed the most help, received the fewest resources. Even the Title 1 funding which they were entitled to use on the basis of their low test scores – for remediation, tutoring, special books and extra support – was allocated to the higher-performing students. My students were grouped together into one class and forgotten. (This practice – called tracking – happens as early as kindergarten in many schools, and is a subject for a different post, but it makes me want to punch the whole world in the face.)

Next fall, my oldest son starts first grade, and unlike lots of other kids we know, he’s not reading. Fortunately, we live in a strong school district, and he won’t be tracked into a low-performing class because of that fact. Still, I know plenty of parents who fret actively about the school achievement of their small children.

Guess what? I don’t care. My son did not go to summer camp. He did not work with a tutor to improve his phonics skills. He did not spend his summer memorizing flash cards or doing logic problems. He went on vacation. He took the training wheels off his bike. He learned to swim in a pond. He played superheroes with his brother. He went to Sesame Place and the beach and the aquarium.

Want to know why?

Because he’s six years old. And he deserves a childhood where my compulsion to impress the neighbors doesn’t overshadow his right to dick around the city and have a good time. His brother, who is three, has the same rights. He starts pre-k in the fall, and I do not intend to start coaching him about letters and colors.

I’m fortunate because, as a teacher, I’ll be able to diagnose what’s missing in my kids’ education. If something comes up that’s truly not being addressed at school, something that is interfering with my boys feeling successful, then I can help out. If first grade winds down and my son still isn’t picking up reading at all, yeah, I might step in and give him a hand.

If my kids want to learn to play piano, if they want to join the swim team, I’ll be there. I’ll be on the sidelines for every meet and in the audience for every performance. Secretly I hope they don’t want to do more than one activity at a time because I fear the curse of over-scheduling. But hell, if they really want to go crazy with extra-curricular madness, I’ll be there.

What I won’t do is force my children to outperform their peers for the sake of my ego. I don’t care that my kid can’t read yet. I don’t care what school he gets into. I expect him to work hard and to challenge himself, but I don’t care if that doesn’t manifest itself in a test score. My children are proud of themselves for who they are and all the wonderful things they know how to do. They’re excited about learning. They’re intellectually curious and creative, and they are happy.

That’s more than enough.

All my life, I’ve been a helper. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it does backfire.

I feel other people’s pain on an almost sonic level. Walking down the street can be an overwhelming experience for me. I look into someone’s face and I see the monsters lurking beneath the surface: grief, insecurity, regret – all the roiling emotions most people keep under wraps in order to get through their day. If I were to make direct eye contact with everyone I met, I would probably explode from the force of all that feeling. I just can’t shut it out.

This may be one reason why I like living in New York City. Here you’re not expected to make eye contact and converse with strangers. You keep your head down and mind your own business. I’m grateful for that, since otherwise I would not be able to stop myself from getting sucked into everyone else’s sorrow.

As you can imagine, this is problematic on a number of levels. For one thing, who asked me to intrude on their innermost feelings? Very few of you, it turns out. More than one person in my life has felt undermined by my inadvertently searching gaze, as though by shining a light on the hurt spots I’m accusing them of being weak. (For the record, that’s not what I mean to do.)

For another thing, it’s exhausting. To absorb the feelings and needs of other people requires immense energy, and when I direct that energy outward – particularly toward people who don’t appreciate or reciprocate it – I have very little left for myself.

Last year, my husband and I were talking about this phenomenon. We sometimes call it the “Helen Helper” syndrome, and for most of our lives, neither of us could help ourselves (pun intended) from compulsively assisting any and every person we met.

New in town? Kevin and I would give a personalized guided tour of the city! Just had a baby? We’d clean your house, make you dinner, and buy you a boatload of presents, even though you didn’t even get us a card when our kids were born! Have a problem you need to talk about? We’d spend hours on the phone with you, nodding, offering advice you wouldn’t take anyway, and cleverly deflecting any questions you might attempt to ask about how we’re doing!

It got to the point where I couldn’t even tell why I was helping anymore. It was just a habit. I couldn’t tell whether I was even of any use, or when I was overdoing it, or when, by helping, I was manipulating. I began to suspect that I might be helping to avoid something. Myself, for example. So I proposed to my husband that we try a radical experiment.

For six weeks, we would help NO ONE.

But wait, that’s a bit extreme. What if an old lady is crossing the street, and drops her grocery bag, and oranges go spilling out into the gutter? Can’t we help her pick them up?

Nope.

What if it’s just a small thing, like a neighbor needs us to watch their kid for a couple hours while they run an errand? We can’t do that?

Nope.

What if an old friend calls, crying, and needs a shoulder to lean on? We’re just supposed to abandon her and let her deal with it on her own?

Yup.

Because chances are, she’ll get over it. She’ll find somebody else to help. She’ll figure out a way to take care of it herself.

And that was the big lesson. For 6 weeks, we didn’t help anyone, and SOMEHOW THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE MANAGED NOT TO COLLAPSE.

What the fuck?

Do you mean to tell me I’ve been exhausting myself this whole time and nobody even needed me to?

I expected people to be mad at me, to stop wanting to hang out with me, to be disappointed, to feel let down, to judge me, but the fact is, NO ONE EVEN NOTICED.

I bet friends of ours who are reading this (if you’ve made it this far, God bless ya) didn’t even know we were doing it. It had just about zero impact on the rest of the world.

But for me, by forcing me to sit still and observe those moments when I felt the urge to be helpful, this exercise illuminated the following somewhat harrowing facts:

I help people when I feel anxious.

Helping makes me feel useful, which means you won’t get rid of me, which I secretly fear everyone will do once they realize they don’t need me. I explored this theme in I’ll Become the Sea before I even knew how much it applied to me.

I help when I feel rudderless. It gives me a temporary direction. But it also distracts me from asking what I really want to be doing, what I need to do, in order to feel fulfilled myself.

I help when I feel sad. It’s a distraction. It keeps me away from my own feelings.

I help when I’m angry. To show that I’m a really good person. To prove that I’m better than other people. And then I get even angrier when it’s not reciprocated. (Um, duh.) This is a pretty bad one.

I help when I feel insecure. When I’m afraid of being questioned or examined and found lacking, I offer help to deflect attention away from myself. I help in order to not be exposed. I’m not proud of this one at all.

The more I make this publicly known, the less I’ll be able to get away with helping for the wrong reasons.

Because sometimes, I do help for the right reasons. Because I have the space and the ability. Because it’s someone who has helped me and is guaranteed to help me again in the future and so our relationship is equal and balanced and the helping is mutual. Because someone is in need and my heart is clear and open and what I have to offer is limited and truly contains no expectation of a return.

I needed a little break to figure out which was which, to become more conscious in my choices about when to help, and why.

I’m still working on this. But now, when I offer support, I try to do it freely, with no strings attached. It turns out there are plenty of opportunities to do this – more than enough.

The rest of the time, when I feel like being Helen Helper to others, I ask myself if I need help instead. Often, I do. So I give it. Or ask for it.

Oddly (or perhaps obviously) I think I have actually increased my net contribution to the world in this way. It’s a cleaner, more honest approach – one that is based on mutual respect and acceptance instead of anxiety.

I like it a lot better this way.

Two years ago I worked with a ten-year-old student, a girl who was the kind of person that lit up a room when she walked into it. Smart, funny, kindhearted, hardworking, creative, athletic, beautiful: someone any teacher would be thrilled to instruct.

There was only one problem. She apologized for everything. She said she was sorry when she forgot something, when she was a minute late, when she made a minor mistake in her work. She said she was sorry before she answered questions, or if she stumbled over a word, or if she bumped into me accidentally. Sometimes she said she was sorry for things she didn’t even do, or to fill a moment of silence. And when she said it, she would back away a little.

Here was a girl with a loving, attentive family who adored her. She lived in a nice community. She was (and is) a lovely person, with nothing in the world to be sorry about.

And yet she apologized. All the time.

I started paying attention to other women around me: my friends, my own family, strangers on the street. Myself. I started listening for that word. And you know what? If a church bell were rung every time a woman or girl in my city apologized for something, we’d all be stone deaf by now.

I’ve blogged before about women apologizing on the way out of a bathroom stall — because they were peeing, and it took too long (!!!). That was just one example. When I listened to myself I realized that I was constantly apologizing, like my student, for things that were infinitely forgivable and in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. The impact of my minor transgressions was almost nonexistent.

But the impact of my constant apologizing? I wondered about that.

What are we telling ourselves when we, a hundred times a day, shrink back from the people around us and say we’re sorry?

If you are a lady and you’re reading this now, I challenge you to commit 24 hours to just listen, to yourself and the women around you, and count the number of times you hear the S word. Then ask yourself whether each of those sorries was really necessary.

For my student, I set up a Sorry Jar. Every time she apologized when she hadn’t actually done anything hurtful, she had to put a quarter in. Then, at the end of the week, she had to make reparations and buy herself a gift with the money.

I think it helped break the habit.

For myself, I made it my New Year’s resolution to reduce my apologies. Now, when I’m late or requiring extra effort from someone, I say, “Thank you for waiting,” or “Thanks for your patience.”

It may seem like a small thing, but I know I hold my head higher now.

It’s okay to make mistakes. People do it all the time and somehow the world keeps on spinning. We don’t have to apologize for our existence.

I save my apologies now for when I’ve truly hurt someone. They mean more that way all around. And I feel better and stronger for it.

By saying thank you instead of apologizing, I’m sending myself and the rest of the world a message:

I exist. And I’m not sorry for it.

Cinderella Man on YouTube

Yeah, I know, I’m not supposed to like Eminem. By his own admission, he’s a misogynist (“I’ll be nicer to women when Aquaman drowns and the Human Torch stops swimmin’”). He’s nuts. He says mean things about Michael J. Fox. (Who DOES that?) But I can’t help myself. I think he’s great.

For one thing, I wouldn’t have run a single step of the last half marathon training if it weren’t for the Recovery album. That record was the only thing in the universe that made my feet keep moving. Often, listening to those songs and running, I would actually cry.

Yes, I know. I would cry listening to Eminem. That is ridiculous. But how could you not shed a tear when Marshall Mathers says, “I look fat”? What other dude do you know who would put that lyric into a song?

That’s why I love Eminem. What other people won’t do, he has the balls to do. That might mean saying something hilarious but completely sick about women, or it might mean rapping with your whole heart about contemplating suicide, about missing your best friend who has died, about your addiction, or about your desire to “fuck the whole universe.” (Ha!) But that’s the thing about him: he says these things in full earnest. He means every single word. It might be ugly, it might be funny, it might be disgusting, but he’ll say it if he means it.

I like people who say what they mean. Embarrassing or controversial though it may be, I find that sort of directness preferable to talking a lot and saying nothing real.

I also like an underdog. And I like people who haven’t been underdogs for a very long time but still see themselves as underdogs.

I like the fact that as a white guy, Eminem creates a discussion about race that includes questions about what it means to be black or white. Back when I was teaching in Crown Heights, my black co-teacher and I used to wail, “Somebody! Please help me! I think my dad’s gone crazy!” to our class and crack each other up. In that situation, I was the white guy, put in my place – and often rightly so – by my black colleagues. I related to Eminem then, and to the humor/education/weirdness of trying to belong in a community that has every reason not to trust you.

I like that Eminem talks about class. But if you know me, you probably guessed that already. Songs like “W.T.P.” (White Trash Party) offer funny vignettes about normal, regular people, in the way that the Roseanne show did, and in a way that popular entertainment rarely does anymore.

Finally, these songs are just flipping propulsive and great. Try not to run faster with “Cinderella Man” blasting in your headphones.

“So Shorty dance while I diss you to the beat. Fuck the words, you don’t listen to ‘em anyway.”

Actually, I do. But heaven help me, I still love Eminem.

When I was growing up, I never pictured myself living in a city. Our town was a rural, far-flung suburb of New York, but I only went to Manhattan for school trips and even then it felt like visiting a foreign country.

Other people lived in cities. Crazy people. Fierce people.

Scary people.

In college I lived in small towns – Poughkeepsie, NY and Northampton, MA – both tiny academic enclaves amidst vast countrysides filled with all sorts of wholesome adventures: hiking, biking, fields of rolling hills, long rivers, cold lakes. And then there was a brief winter interlude at the Jersey shore, where daily visits to the ocean counterbalanced the effect of living among strip malls. Throughout these years it seemed obvious to me that my place was in the country.

But then my soon-to-be husband moved to Brooklyn. I followed, convinced I would eventually persuade him to migrate back to the suburbs at least. When we had kids, surely. But here we still are, fourteen years later.

My husband and kids and I just returned from a lovely vacation partially spent visiting family and friends in Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and upstate New York, and partially spent at a wee little shack in Cape Cod. That shack was tucked away in the woods on a narrow dirt road, and we passed our days swimming in the plentiful ponds and bay and ocean beaches of Wellfleet – my definition of vacation paradise. I loved it. There’s no doubt. I happily would visit there every year.

But finally, after all this time, I can admit it. I don’t want to live there.

For one thing, there are these:

Our first day at the house there were a bunch of bugs. The second day, more. By the final day, they were covering the ceiling, hanging out in the bed with us, scuttling across the floor, and like my friend pictured above, clinging to the screens trying to get in. I spent my morning runs whipping my sweaty hair around my face like a horse with a mane, fighting in vain to fend off the biting flies that stalked me on the Cape Cod Rail Trail.

Here in Brooklyn, the bugs are disgusting. But they at least have the courtesy to hide in the pipes.

During a screening of the final Harry Potter move at the Wellfleet Drive-In (It was great!) a man in a neighboring car offered a running monologue of responses to the film in a thick Boston accent (“Yeah? You and what AHHMY?”). That guy made me miss the city. Why? Because he was nuts. And that’s really the reason why I like living here.

In the country, the constant chaotic screaming in my own head really kinda stands out. Pair that with the eerie David Lynch-y sound of wind whistling through pine trees and I’m basically a shivering mess.

But in Brooklyn! Everyone’s crazy. Everyone’s loud. Everyone has a ridiculous accent. And almost everyone is doing something weird with their lives. In Brooklyn I can walk out my door and buy an ice cream sandwich at midnight ANY TIME I WANT.

Brooklyn is where the scary people are.

I must admit it took me a while to figure it out, but the fact is I’m one of them.

And I’d rather be around scary people than scary bugs any day of the week.