ever-fixed mark

No, not that kind.

I’m continuing with “running” theme. Although, when you look at the supposedly deleterious effects of masturbation from this page–”nervous system damage, neuralgia, pains in the system, premature death, rheumatism, spinal weakness/problems” — they correspond pretty well to how I feel after a good run.

Since becoming a mom I’ve run less and less. I do have plenty of alone time, actually, but there are so many other things begging for my attention when Aitch is otherwise occupied: namely, those things that pay the bills. I’ve tried to get creative about combining responsibilities–running with Aitch, running with Dog, running with Aitch and Dog — but it hasn’t worked out the way I’d planned.

I’ve had some OK runs with Dog and/or Aitch — actually, much better with Dog, as he doesn’t become bored and whine after a mile. Dog is a fantastic running companion as long as he’s off-leash, but to find a place that will accommodate us both I have to run in the woods. I used to love trail running in high school but am not always in the mood for it now. It requires a lot of attention to the surface, usually involves hills, and carries a greater risk of a sprained ankle than running the flats. To do a quick couple of miles on streets around the house, I have to put the unfortunately-named Gentle Leader on Dog. (”Take me to your Gentle Leader.” “Our Gentle Leader will take us through a guided meditation today.” “We are preparing a display of synchronized calisthenics for Gentle Leader’s birthday celebration.”) Dog pouts and tries to rub off the collar by placing his snout in the crotch of any human in sight, but it prevents him from pulling without causing any pain at all. I would highly recommend it to anyone who tries to walk a baby and a dog at the same time.

It makes the run better, but not necessarily effortless. Dog and I are both still scarred from the Great Bridge Incident of ‘05, in which I had planned to run with Dog down to the beach (about 3 miles) to meet a friend and her dog. After a nice beach walk, the friend would drive us home. I had not reckoned on Dog’s fear of non-traditional road surfaces. He gets wiggy around boat docks, boardwalks, wooden walkways, and anything with a grille. As luck would have it the barrier island is connected to the mainland by a metal bridge, which wigged him completely. Dog hunkered down, quivering, and refused to move a step in any direction. When I tried to pull him along, he tried to slip his collar, potentially disastrous given the traffic on the bridge. Luckily my friend drove by a few minutes later, spotted us, and picked us up.

Anyway, between the Dog’s neuroses and the running stroller, which pulls to the left, I find that running with an entourage is exercise, but it’s not really running. It doesn’t fulfill the purpose of a long contemplative engagement with one’s thoughts. This weekend I came to the realization that if I want to carve out some alone time for a run, I’m going to have to do it during an hour when no one is expecting anything from me. That’s right: I need to become an early-morning runner. So for two mornings in a row I set the alarm and hit the pavement by 6:00 a.m. Did you know it’s dark at 6:00 a.m.? No, really. Completely dark! So I had to run in the gym rather than outside, but I still managed to get it in. 4 miles yesterday, 3 today (my morning to wake up with the baby; I was trying to get home before Husband was forced to get up with him, because although Husband is gracious about it, there’s no reason he should lose sleep just because I choose to run). We’ll see if I can sustain this for more than a few days.

Benefits to running early: It’s finished. The rest of the day is mine. I don’t need to think about, worry about, or plan exercise for the rest of the day. And I only need to take one shower, as opposed to two.

Cons to running early: By 9:30, the joints that had run effortlessly at dawn had stiffened to the point where it took me one Mississippi… two Mississippi…three Mississippi…four Mississippi to rise from a seated-on-floor position to chase Aitch, who was already halfway up the stairs trying to avoid picking up his Legos. By 10:30, I was starving. By 11:30, I was already sleepy. By 12:30, I was recalling events of the early morning as though they had happened days ago, in that jet-lagged way. By 1:30 my body temperature had seemingly dropped to 96 degrees Fahrenheit, for no apparent reason. And of course there is the whole, well, getting-up-early drawback.

Who will win…tired-of-being-fat me, or just tired me?

When I was in high school, I liked to play tennis, so I decided to go out for the tennis team. This was something new for me — a formal athletic pursuit that was not set to background music — so I attended the informational meeting with some trepidation. When the coach informed us that each practice started with a mile run, my tennis career came to a crashing halt.

The next year, though, my gym teacher decided to base a 9-week course on Ken Cooper’s book Aerobics. In those days, “aerobics” just meant exercise that forces the body to use increased amounts of oxygen; the whole concept of calisthenics in Spandex had not yet been invented by Jane Fonda. So the content for this particular gym class consisted of running a mile every day.

At first, I could barely run ten steps. But by the end of the class I was running a mile in 7:30 and loving it. You’d think that this would have given me enough confidence to go out for the tennis team, but instead, high on endorphins, I went out for the cross-country team.

As much as I loved running, I was a lousy runner. It wasn’t my body type or cardiovascular capability, both of which are fairly well-suited to running. I was timid and careful; I held back. I was always last at the 2-mile mark, occasionally gaining a better position in the last part of the race. Other people puked at the finish line, tore ligaments, ran themselves into horrible repetitive stress injuries, but I was always intact and always having fun. And unlike baton twirling, cheerleading, or dance — my other quasi-athletic activities — no one ever expected me to smile, look good, wear makeup, or be the best. It was extremely freeing. I could just do something active for the sheer enjoyment of it.

So that was in 1980, and here I am 25 years later, still running. Still timid and careful, always conserving my energy, never going as far or as fast as I could; still without major injury, and still enjoying myself. I’m the same, but technology has changed. Now I can carry a little iPod with 500 songs on it (not its limit, just the limit of my music collection), rather than a chunky Walkman with a single cassette that needs to be flipped. There are hundreds of models of running shoes available, not just one version of waffle tread Nikes (take your pick: blue or red). And there are running bras. Hallelujah, there are running bras.

I can’t believe I used to run 7 miles in a regular old cotton Maidenform without even an underwire for support. The funny thing is I can’t even remember being bothered by it then, whereas I can’t tolerate even the slightest bit of bounce now. Of course my breasts, like every other part of me, are a bit bigger now than they were then.

Not that much bigger, though. I’m not even into D territory, much less double letters. So why is it so difficult for me to find a running bra? I mean, I understand that runners are supposed to exercise away their secondary sex characteristics, but what do I wear for support while I’m becoming abreastual and amenorrheic?

My goal is a simple one: I want those babies to stay in place while I run. No bouncing and no chafing, (which, incidentally, is the very worst pain I’ve ever known, even worse that the stomach cramps with amoebic dysentery I got in the Peace Corps. I haven’t given birth, but still). I’ve tried every bra I could find in every athletic goods store on the North Shore, plus several I’ve ordered from the internet, and results have been constant: bounce, bounce, bounce. I’ve worn “high-impact” bras that don’t provide enough support for a walk downtown. I’ve tried underwires and racerbacks, “masher” bras and “natural” bras.

I asked my fuller-figured friends for advice. Responses ranged from “sucks to be us” to “two bras, of course.” The last suggestion has worked out pretty well. I find that a regular Champion jog-bra as a base layer, with a racerback bra over top to hold it in place, is fairly effective. There is not too much bounce, although the effect is akin to wearing a whaleboned corset. It’s a wonder I could dance a stately quadrille in that getup, let alone run five miles.

I was not content, though, and continued to Google, looking for that Holy Grail. I finally came across the aptly-titled Last Resort Bra on Title 9. The marketing text warns that it “ain’t pretty,” which is an understatement — I have the white version, which is in a shiny fabric reminiscent of a ’50s girdle, and the picture doesn’t really do the hideous character of The Masher justice. But it does eliminate bounce, and is currently the only bra I will wear solo to run.

This morning, I woke up at 5:45 to run (more on this later), and went to the dryer to retrieve The Masher only to find that several of the twenty little hooks that go up the front had worked their way into a grille in the dryer, which I didn’t even know was there. As the dryer barrel continued to tumble, the bra had twisted upon itself, strangling several other pieces of lingerie and baby clothes in the process.

I think my running bra tried to commit suicide.

On the way home from Chicago, I took Aitch with me into a bathroom in O’Hare for a pit stop while Husband tried to buy an edible lunch for the plane ride. As I availed myself of the facilities, I kept up my usual steady stream of inane chatter, as mothers do: part sociability, part language lesson, part running commentary. You know: “We have to wait in line! OK, let me just wheel you over here! Oh, Mommy just loves automatic toilet seat covers! We’re so happy Mayor Daley has a friend in the toilet seat cover business! Mommy doesn’t care if Mary Daley expands O’Hare all the way to Iowa, as long as he keeps the automated toilet seat covers!”

After I had washed my hands, I wheeled Aitch around, avoiding various women circulating to and fro, and remarked brightly, “This is certainly a busy place, isn’t it?”

A woman paused at the entrance of her stall and responded, “Yes, it is,” but with an awkward look on her face as if to say, “Lady, you must be seriously starved for conversation.”

The year I turned thirty was a tough one for me. I had been back from the Peace Corps for several months and had a job teaching at a high school in a small town not far from the one I attended. My re-entry into the US was not going well. My old friends were taken up with their new lives; all social activity seemed to revolve around the unit of the married couple. People seemed more interested in fixing me up than in getting to know me.

The germ of an idea that had been planted in the Peace Corps–that teaching was not the right career for me, despite the fact that it seemed to be my only natural talent—began to flower in earnest in this rural school. I found myself constantly at odds with the students, the other teachers, and the administration. The kids, isolated as they were, had the usual hard lives and poor exemplars; white supremecist groups were rampant there, and one prominent skinhead was even on a School Board committee. Most of the staff felt it was more important to be a friendly, steady adult presence than to enforce standards of behavior and academic achievement. This approach felt wrong to me then and still does now, but who knows? I didn’t stick around long enough to examine the results of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I desperately wanted to move to a big city and change careers, but I held back. It wasn’t that I lacked the initiative or confidence to make a change; after all, my twenties had been marked by dramatic upheavals. Back to grad school! Change careers! Back to grad school again! Move to Florida! Join the Peace Corps! It seemed too late for another change. I felt that doing so would be an admission of failure, both as a teacher and a grown-up. A real adult would have stuck it out, made a success of it, settled down, accepted the suburban life that the majority of other Americans lived happily. But I was utterly miserable. I finally gave in to failure and started job hunting.

It was the beginning of the dot-com boom, and I was lucky enough to find a decently-paid job as a consultant. My new company sent me on a business trip to Chicago for a three-month gig. (I knew of Chicago, of course, but had never even considered visiting; I’m embarrassed to admit that I had to look up its precise location on a map.) I listened in amazement as my new boss explained that my client had rented me a corporate apartment downtown, and I could expense a rental car, parking, gas, food, taxis, flights home, even flights elsewhere if I needed to be somewhere else for the weekend. After the financial poverty of grad school and the Peace Corps, and the cultural poverty of the previous year, this was Nirvana. Theaters, restaurants, great architecture, beautiful parks, bars with atmosphere, and people who did not think a thirty-year-old single woman was an aberration were within walking distance of my apartment. My new job was challenging and interesting, yet much less stressful than teaching. It was like Chicago had given me a new lease on life.

Three months stretched into three years. I eventually met Husband and made the move official. Two more years went by in a blur. We eventually decided to move to Boston — why? We still can’t remember. Of all the places I’ve lived, though, Chicago will always be home.

Husband and I took Aitch back for a little vacation last weekend, to visit old haunts and mourn our urban past. My mother joined us for two days so we could go out at night. The trip was a big success, at least from Aitch’s perspective. He got to ride in a taxi, a bus, a swan boat, several toy trains, and the El (also, incredibly, my mother’s first subway ride ever). Admittedly, all of this could have been accomplished in downtown Boston, but we enjoyed it, too.

The city has changed a lot, but its essence is still there. Millennium Park, with its new Frank Gehry pavilion, is one of the big changes. I visited with trepidation; I like modern art, but Gehry is beginning to feel a little derivative of himself, and I was afraid the pavilion would make a monstrosity out of the park. See what you think:

I’m still not so crazy about the silver Gehry-thing. It reminds me of a particularly bad hairstyle I had in the ’70s, with rolled bangs. The whole concert lawn, though, is terrific; the fretwork criss-crossing overhead unites the space wonderfully. There is also a huge water fountain made of two giant towers planted on a promenade. Faces (of prominent Chicagoans, perhaps?) are superimposed on the towers, occasionally appearing to be spitting water.

The piece de resistance, though, is a garden of wildflowers and grasses situated on a rise in the middle of the park. In the center of the garden, the flora frames the skyline but obscures the street traffic, a very pleasing effect, and practically the only thing in Chicago I didn’t photograph.

All in all, it was a stupendous trip down memory lane and a great kiddie vacation to boot. There was only one minor fly in the ointment: the weather. Silly me, I had remembered Chicago as a chilly, even blustery town, particularly in the non-summer months. Obviously my memory was faulty; as it happens, Chicago is now sub-tropical, with temps near 90 even in early October. I either wilted in my fashionable fall clothes or sulked around Michigan Avenue in comfortable but un-chic running shorts and a t-shirt. Here we are, reflected in all our sartorial glory in the giant silver bean in the park.

The match meeting was held on Friday afternoon and, as we feared, the baby we had hoped to adopt was referred to another family. Although we were the first family to ask for the match, they were also interested in adopting her, and since they had been on the referral list longer than we, they got the referral. This has been terribly disappointing, but not terribly surprising. I’ve decided not to let it be a huge emotional setback. It’s not quite a loss, although it does bring back other losses.

I am, however, convinced that this ladybug omen stuff is just bullsh*t. Look at the enormous ladybug I spotted just outside our hotel room.

Thank you for the good wishes!