Chasing the high.

I thought I had found a tenuous balance in work and motherhood. But when I stopped moving forward, I started running.

I was not thinking about my stomach bared to the world—slightly stretched from carrying three big babies past their due dates. I was not thinking about my face flushed tomato-red in the July heat or how my knee might feel later. I was not thinking about the quality of the baby’s nap or the weekend to-do list hovering above my head. I was running. My watch vibrated to signify the invisible mile marker I was passing—seven miles—and unbelievably, I kept running. I made it back to my car another half-mile later, triumphant, sweaty. The longest run I had ever completed. Success! I had forgotten what it tastes like. 

The first parenting lesson arrives in labor before your child does: breathe through it. If you tense against the contraction, the pain increases. So does the feeling of endlessness. If you lean into the tightening, controlling your breath as it is the only thing you can control, the wave rolls over you. You emerge. This essential lesson boomerangs back, again and again, in sleep regressions, in toddler tantrums, in kindergartener defiance, and I assume, in all the troubles I haven’t gotten to yet. I find the lesson helpful for running, too. Many hot, hard runs would have ended abruptly were it not for the grit I’ve gained in six years of parenting. The only way out is through.

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“Moms are not okay.” If there is a dominant message about parenting in a pandemic, it’s this one. It’s dominant, because it’s true. Women accounted for a majority of the decrease in the labor force in the first year of the pandemic, even though they make up less than half of the U.S. workforce. And 65% of working women say that pandemic has made things worse for women in the workplace and that their ambition has declined. When you consider the existing gender disparity in parenting and domestic responsibilities, it’s not hard to imagine how the pressures of the pandemic could splinter the brittle support systems women relied on. Here’s the thing: as all of these headlines have marched past me during the last 18+ months, I’ve been wondering where exactly I fit in them. 

“​​I used to think moms who could work part-time and mom part-time were the ones who had it made. But I now know the cost is extremely high,” a friend texted me this week. She’s new to the both/and world I’ve settled in for the last six years. I am primarily home with my small children. But I am also committed to working, which has meant patching together small chunks of preschool childcare hours, nap times, 5 am writing sessions, desperate texts in search of daytime babysitters, and voice-dictating copy to my notes app while doing grocery pick-up. I’ve presented ad campaign concepts to the creative team with a sleeping baby snuggled against my chest and I’ve done phone interviews from the side of a plastic kiddie pool while my toddler splashed around. I started this hybrid work six years ago, when a happy accident pregnancy before we were quite “ready” launched me into motherhood.

I wanted both. I desperately wanted both. You pay a price of some kind no matter which path you pick (full-time work, full-time SAHM, part-time both)—unless you’re a man. I’m not sure men are held to this kind of accounting. So I chose the option that gave me some of both (the visceral sweetness of being close to my babies! the happy flush of professional momentum!) and for a long time, I still thrived. Then the pandemic arrived definitively in March 2020 via school closures, twenty weeks into my third pregnancy, and my work life fell apart. As the weight of the pandemic and my belly grew heavier over the following months, I accepted the sudden drop in my freelance assignments as part of our collective societal burden. I made uneasy peace with my brain fog and dried-up ambition. And after the baby was born, I gave myself three months of maternity leave to be free from feeling bad about the work I wasn’t doing. 

Ever an achiever, I felt it was time to crawl out from under the collapsed tent and find the stakes again. I marched into 2021 with goals, plans, an accountability partner. Let me skip ahead nine months to tell you that I have run into walls and tripped over my own conflicting desires and truly made no progress at all. I’ve been working, writing, but not moving forward. It felt better when I was pregnant and newly postpartum, because I had an excuse. It even felt better in the first year of the pandemic, because the upside-down world was new. But then I felt my excuses reached their expiration date. Truth is, I am not a full-time working mom having to juggle a 40-hour workload in addition to the new responsibilities of the pandemic.

I have margin and I feel like a failure for not doing more with it. Only 23.9% of working mothers in the US work part-time. I’m part of that smaller cohort. Surely I could have fit more work in this year when so many other working women didn’t have a choice. Surely I should be farther along by now. I am thirty-two years old, a writer, and for the first time ever, I feel like a poser saying so.

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Ballerinas don’t run, they instructed me as a little girl in dance class, and so then and for many years afterward, I did not. In fact, I didn’t think I could run even if I tried. My only two attempts at running were at the enticement of two respective boyfriends, once in high school and once in college. My effort and aspirations sputtered out before we even hit a mile; the high school boyfriend resorting to playfully pushing me along from the back like a broken down car. Each first run was the last one.

I don’t like doing things I’m not good at. This is why I avoid sports, karaoke, furniture assembly, parallel parking, and frosting cakes. It’s why I decided I was not a runner. The inverse is true as well, though, and so I poured my hard work into the few places where I excelled. Although I had always wanted to be a writer, my original dreams were literary—I picked out a pen name at age six. Instead, I found myself writing ad copy and developing brand strategy for an advertising agency and liking it. Being good at it. I found a hunger for a career I had never imagined. Choosing, then, to step off the path I was on came with a cost. It has been a cost I would pay a thousand times over for what I’ve gained, but I think it came due for real sometime over the last year or so. Professionally, this should be the time I rise, but instead I feel like I’ve been treading water, or as type designer/author Jessica Hische aptly put it, stuck in “power save mode.”

Against this dismal backdrop, I started running. Mid-summer in South Carolina is a terrible time to pick up running. It is unbelievably hot and even more humid. The bookends of the day are the only times for a run that aren’t brutal; inconveniently, they are also the hardest times of day to get out the door with three little kids. My first runs were so disheartening I almost quit. It was hot and slow and hard. Who can say why I kept on going except that at least I was going. A run offers three gifts: a beginning, a middle, an end. A whole narrative, neatly resolved every time.

The miles got easier and the satisfaction of watching my progress inch up with every run became intoxicating. I signed up for a 10K. I started going to bed earlier and skipping a glass of wine on the Friday nights before my Saturday long run. I ran in the rain, I ran alone, I ran in between Zoom meetings during the baby’s nap. Still intensely challenging, the running became glorious—a blissful hour at a time that righted my pandemic-muddled and sleep-deprived brain. Most gratifyingly, I was getting somewhere. There is runner’s high and then there is the high of progress, of achievement. Comfort me with my Strava stats and all that.

In her memoir Hold Still, celebrated American photographer Sally Mann noted this about how motherhood impacted her career as an artist:

Why it took me so long to find the abundant and untapped artistic wealth within family life, I don’t know. I took a few pictures with the 8 × 10 inch camera when Emmett was a baby, but for years I shot the under-appreciated and extraordinary domestic scenes of any mother’s life with the point-and-shoot…I missed so many opportunities, now tantalizingly fading away in the scrapbooks: the puking, the pets…and the toilet training, the never-ending toilet training.

Maybe at first I didn’t see those things as art because, with young babies in the house, you remove your “photography eyes,” as Linda Connor once called the sensibility that allows ecstatic vision. Maybe it was because the miraculous quotidian (oxymoronic as that phrase may seem) that is part of child rearing must often, for species survival, veil the intensely seeing eye.

I know for sure that the intensely seeing eye was different from the one I used to quarter thousands of school-lunch apples and braid miles of hair through my decades of motherhood. I had to promote this form of special vision and place myself, with deliberate foresight, on a collision course with felicitous, gift-giving Chance.

A “veil over the intensely seeing eye” is perhaps another way to describe the fog that descended on my work sometime last year. Running, with its instant high, its literal mile markers, and its satisfying sense of completion has been the only thing to briefly pierce it. When I’m running, I am clear-headed and optimistic. I am grateful, focused, challenged, alive. (I am also miserable, sore, thirsty, exhausted at times—but in service of an immediate goal.) My best work moments have felt the same way. To be clear, so have my best parenting moments over the last six years, offering lasting purpose, direction.

So am I chasing good work or am I just chasing a visible record of it?

There’s such an obvious metaphor in the relationship between my running and my writing I can’t stand it. I know the answer is to keep going—the only way out is through—but I’m not sure where I’ll emerge. Is this merely a slump or this is a slow petering out? I know for certain I could not be a runner without first becoming a mother. I didn’t have the inner grit yet, the belief in my own body’s abilities. Maybe someday I’ll say the same about my career as a writer.

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current status

reading :: Childhood in an Anxious Age (The Atlantic) // This May 2020 feature is fascinating. Alternately terrifying and reassuring, the article argues that our current approach to child-rearing is exacerbating the very problems we’re trying to avoid. Childhood anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have soared in recent years; parental response has been to further insulate children from distress, including the mild, ordinary discomforts of daily life. The result of all this well-intentioned accommodation is increasingly anxious children who are growing up ill-equipped for normal ups and downs and are now suffering from “failure to launch.” (Some of the real-life examples cited are mind-boggling.) Author Kate Julian points out that the problem is made worse by the untenable exhaustion and stress of modern, time-starved parents: we continually trade long-term gains for short-term relief. The article reminded me of Kim Brook’s 2018 book Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, which describes how radically American culture has changed in what we consider safe and responsible parenting, in how we assess risk, in how we unintentionally harm our children by trying desperately to protect them. I recommend reading both.

loving :: Thanks to my decade plus of ballet, clothes that resemble ballet class attire feel like coming home to my body. Even if you didn’t grow up in pointe shoes, though, this long-sleeve bodysuit from Banana Republic is a solid fall staple. The ribbing and ballet neck are universally flattering, and it comes in a range of beautiful neutral shades.

drinking :: Bow & Arrow Time Machine Rouge // My husband and I took one sip of this wine and immediately looked up at each other. It’s very special. An Oregon blend of Pinot Noir, Gamay, and Cabernet Franc crafted in a style that pays homage to the humble wines of the Loire Valley, the wine is ethereal, elegant, and fresh.

Wood, Wind, No Tuba. Joan Mitchell, 1980.

reading :: The Composer at the Frontier of Movie Music (NYT Magazine) // I listened to this profile on a quiet, rainy Sunday afternoon while making this sublime pork ragu. (If that sounds idyllic, know that I got interrupted by my four-year-old many, many times.) I am equally fascinated by Britell’s journey (Harvard-trained pianist > hip hop group > hedge fund portfolio manager > Academy Award-winning composer) as I am by his creative process and the “poetic intelligence” he brings to his work.

drinking :: Boulevardier // Essentially a negroni with bourbon standing in for gin, this strong, sophisticated cocktail is intended to be sipped slowly. As our half of the planet tilts toward shorter days and earlier, darker evenings, a boulevardier feels like the right drink to have in my hand.

reading :: Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler // What is the cost of careless words, tossed off in a teenage fit of anger? How do we forgive? What makes a good life? Tyler explores the widening ripples of our choices, proving as always how masterful she is at sketching the complex characters, complicated family relationships, and far-reaching decisions that fill all of our lives. It’s been a while since I read an Anne Tyler novel; flying through this one reminded me of what a pleasure it is.

listening :: If Beale Street Could Talk score // I cannot stop playing this gorgeous, lush, aching, evocative score. This is the work of Nicholas Britell, and it is just right for these beautiful brilliant yet melancholy October days. Sad girl rock like this album from Julien Baker and this one from boygenius. A pitch-perfect playlist for fall running if you want to feeeeeel some things — the songs your smart but moody high school bf would curate if he grew up to have great taste (they don’t all).

Washington, DC Foreclosure Quilt. Kathryn Clark, 2015.

loving :: Brown Sugar Simple Syrup // The third wave of coffee—much less the fourth wave—has not reached the shores of my small hometown, so on a recent trip to visit my parents, I found myself at Starbucks ordering an iced brown sugar oatmilk latte (lol). I’ve since figured out how to replicate the syrup and have staved off the 2pm slump with many at-home lattes. Here’s how: one part brown sugar to one part water, ground cinnamon to taste. Bring to a strong simmer and immediately remove from heat. Add vanilla extract and let cool.

eating :: Roasted Cabbage with Walnuts & Parmesan // I love cabbage, the wallflower of the vegetable crisper. Often misunderstood, generally cooked incorrectly, cabbage done right can become transcendent, sexy even. Anyway, this is one of those recipes that will convert cabbage haters so long as you roast the cabbage until it is truly caramelized and silky. Chef Joshua McFadden is genius here, as he is in so many recipes from one of my favorite cookbooks, Six Seasons.

the real feel

Buckle up for an unpopular opinion. I resent Halloween’s catapult from a singular holiday into an entire holiday period. From bridesmaid font bedecked “Basic Witch” merch to entire preschool fall curriculums that revolve around ghosts, spiders, and jack-o-lanterns, “Spooky Szn” has staked its claim. Once August is behind us, our cultural conversation zips briefly from Back to School to PSL to Halloween, where it settles for a good long while. I enjoy dressing my kids up in creative costumes for trick-or-treating as much as anybody, but I hate that so many of October/autumn’s glories (fiery falling leaves, harvest, apples, squash, cider, relentless blue skies, hayrides, bonfires, sweaters, soup) get vacuumed up by the Halloween machine.

Celebrating Halloween is not new, of course, but the expansion of the occasion into a six week-long season is. I know lots of people love Halloween and I know that I really don’t, but what I’m interested in is the reason for the shift. Is it just a new branch of consumerism, à la the commercialization of Valentine’s Day and Easter? Does Halloween season provide a weird “liturgical moment” in an increasingly secular world that lacks significance, structure, and community? Or am I just being a monster about all this? Email and tell me. 🙃

last words from someone else

Thanks for reading! Until November — make a pot of soup, stare at the blue, blue sky as much as you can, and wash your sheets on Friday so you can enter the weekend luxuriously and smugly.