Better to have played and lost

Thankful Friday
So this past weekend was Eli’s first baseball tournament of the summer, and after a heartbreaking loss in the semi-finals all I could imagine writing about was the agony of defeat. How real it is, and how visceral. How evident it is on the face of a 10-year-old boy.

And also how curious it is that I personally – a grown woman and merely a spectator – can feel like I’m in mourning for days about an 8-7 loss in a 10U Little League game.

Not that I’m alone in caring about such things. Shoot! The entire pre-2004 Red Sox nation was prostrate with despair every September for nearly a century. Tue, the Sox weren’t 10-year-old kids, but they weren’t the fans’ own flesh and blood, either.

Anyway, back to the only thing I could imagine writing about being the agony of defeat. Well, since I started thinking about this post, a few things happened:

1. We took Boo to the pet ER because she could barely breath. The vet told us she has heart failure and drained over 100 cubic centimeters of fluid from around her organs. We put the $300+ charge on a credit card and took her home to see how long we can keep her purring comfortably.
2. The week was over in a flash, and suddenly it was Thursday night, and time to stop whining and concentrate on Thankful Friday.

So instead of focusing on the agony of defeat, I thought I’d say a few words (a very few, because this week has wiped me out and I'm exhausted!) about the thrill of victory. And the thrill of almost victory. The thrill of playing your heart out with teammates. The thrill of fielding a ground ball cleanly or sliding into third base.

And what in the world the thrill of playing team sports has to do with our cat.

Why We Compete
I'm sure I've recommended this Washington Post series called "Why We Compete" a dozen times already, but here it is again. There are eight stories in the series; each explores a reason that humans compete: money, ego, opportunity, curiosity, tradition, community, identity and andrenalin. It's the last four that really interest me, particularly as they pertain to team sports. Those are the things I love about playing soccer and softball; they're what I love about being a Giants fan or watching my kids' teams.

And while I could go on and on about tradition, community and identity in team sports, adrenalin is the word of the day. It's what I'm thankful for today: the thrill of winning, striving, making the play; the rush of rounding third and going for home when the throw is on the way.

I'm grateful for clutch plays where your team is depending on you, and for the sweet cameraderie of being picked up by your teammates when you falter. For the rush of competition tempered by the solid, grounding goodness of knowing the game and feeling your body play the ball just right.

I'm grateful for that top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling of pure, heady anticipation when your kid's at bat with everything on the line or pitching, for god's sake, in the bottom of the sixth, even though it means your heart is pounding right out of your chest.

As Dale wrote to me today, "I like the raw emotional feel to it all... " And maybe I'm projecting but I felt like there was a whole lot of something in that ellipses.

Better to Have Played and Lost
Back when I was planning to simply write about the agony, I was wondering how to explain why I allow myself to get so emotionally caught up in this stuff when it feels so BAD after a tough loss. I didn't high hopes about explaining it well, and was reminded of the conversation I had the other day with a friend who doesn't have kids and doesn't want any. I was trying to explain to him that being a mom is the most profoundly wonderful thing about my life despite, for starters, diapers, tantrums, frequent heartache, crushing accountability and near-complete loss of self.

But just today (here comes my second unauthorized quote of this post), my sister Maurie responded to my post about Boodles by saying, "Everyone should have the chance to love an animal so much that it hurts."

So simple, Maur, and so true. And so it goes with baseball.

We'll be back.

Ninth life

I have never been a pet person.

So what am I doing on my belly stroking this cat’s bony frame, cooing in her ear as she struggles for each raspy breath?

My voice quivers when I call for Hugh. We gather keys, wallet, cat and head out the door. Boo barely weighs a thing. She rests her tiny chin on my shoulder and hooks her too-long claws into my shirt.

The waiting room of the pet ER is cold. I can’t stop thinking about Kai’s sleepy smile when she wakes up to find Boo snuggled up next to her.

The vet draws out 155 CCs of fluid that’s pressing on Boo’s lungs and heart. She breathes easy again when it’s out.

But the doc says she has heart failure and kidney disease, and that the fluid will be back. Maybe within hours, maybe weeks. Old Boo is on her last life, but she’s purring when we bring her home at 2 a.m.

In the morning, I lie down with Kai and tell her that we had to take Boo to the kitty hospital last night.

Her eyes pop open. She knows Boo is old, old, old and slowing down.

“Is she back?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, “and she feels better. But she’s very, very sick.”

I watch a single tear slide from the corner of Kai’s eye. When I leave her to wake up the boys, she goes to Boo, who’s lying on the little rug by the new French doors.

Kai sits beside her, not crying, for a long, long time, and we are late for school.

Frankenstein's monster

Thankful Friday, Veiled
For us, so we could get by, I sold a piece of my soul to the devil. Now I spend most of my waking hours fulfilling the consequent obligations, and so the shoulds and wants and wishes go undone.

Why does this make me long for ditto sheets, still damp and smelling of ink?

Filmstrips in a darkened classroom, dust floating in the projector's light?

Spin-the-bottle in the fort in the woods?

Dodgeball and candy cigarettes?

The other day I got a fortune cookie with no fortune -- I was the only one. Hugh passed me an extra cookie but it also had nothing inside, which felt more sinister than the vaguely ominous warnings on a typical paper fortune. Two in a row, empty.

Someone close to you will say something that ruins your day.

I often think, while driving, that anything could happen on the road, that a car crash could wipe me out JUST LIKE THAT.

I think about the last things said to me, and by me; they're rarely good enough and sometimes quite tragic in their meanness or banality. I start to think of all I'd leave behind and unsaid -- no goodbyes, no apologies, no I love you's -- and then I chide myself for being maudlin and ridiculous. I drive on, thinking I should write this down so if it happens, if I do die in a car crash someday, at least I get credit for my premonition. And then I wonder, less dramatically, what the opening scene would be were my life to flash before my eyes.

Some early memory now buried deep in my unconscious mind -- mother, father, bottle, crib?

The hole in the sheetrock we'd squeeze through as kids to peek at Christmas presents hidden in the locked part of the basement?

No. It would be the window wells filled with damp leaves, the real life hide-and-seek hiding place that was also the place I crouched, trembling, in the recurring nightmare I had as a kid where Frankenstein's monster was on the verge of finding me.

I'm not really writing this to get credit for a premonition. It's so you'll know: I did my best, and loved you.

Home improvement

Thankful Friday
The kids were bickering in the back, and I was slumped in the passenger seat, brooding. This rendezvous felt shady – meeting after hours in the warehouse parking lot to buy stuff from a craigslist stranger. And besides, we didn’t have enough money to pay the guy.

But Hugh was determined. These were high-quality French doors, better than the ones we’d looked at in the showroom. And we were getting an amazing deal, he assured me; we could put it on the credit card and pay it off when our loan came through.

We found the warehouse but nobody was there. Hugh called the guy, and I half-listened to one side of the conversation. It made my brain hurt.

“Okay,” said Hugh after hanging up. “They won’t take a credit card so we need to go find an ATM.”

“What?” I sniped. “We don’t have that much money in the bank.”

We did some quick, angry math. Current balance versus pending mortgage payment, daycare, loan payment, bills...

“We shouldn't have started this project after finding out our equity line was cut off,” I bitched.

Stress vibes rose from Hugh's pores like steam.

I stared out the window, clenching my jaws and ignoring the babbling children while Hugh called the guy back. “How about $300 in cash and a post-dated check for the balance.”

I sank lower in my seat, thinking how stupid, stupid, stupid we were with our money, how immature and careless and dumb.

But even while I was sinking into a miserable funk, there was this little part of me thinking about how Hugh’s crazy schemes always seem to work out for the best.

And how if we did get this deck & kitchen project done, it was going to rock.

to be continued...

Fine, fine, fine

Thankful Tuesday

I was only half asleep when I started dreaming: Taavi was sinking fast into woodchips that were acting like quicksand; his body was already below the surface and his chin was going under. The horror of seeing his sweet little face disappearing was enough to wake me, thank god, but it took a good while to shake free of the vision.

Taavi is fine. Fine, fine, fine.

Taavi is fine.

Before that fucked up dream, I thought I’d made it through Taavi’s first emergency room visit unscathed.

I mean, I knew I’d been scared when I heard him howling in pain from fifty yards away, and that my heart was racing as I ran to catch up with Grant, who was running down the trail with my boy in his arms.

That the image of Taavi’s face covered in blood as Grant handed him over to me would have a place in my mind’s eye forever.

That it had taken a monumental effort on my part to appear calm for the sake of the kids as we sped from the birthday party to the emergency room, Hugh driving and Eli riding shotgun; me sitting in the back seat between Kai and Taavi, pressing my sweatshirt onto the wound to stem the bleeding.

That I felt ill when his head lolled to one side and his eyelids drooped and he said he was so sleepy and carsick.

That my hand trembled noticeably as I signed in at the ER desk, and that I stumbled over simple questions like “Has he been here before?” and “Is he sleepy?”

That I felt this close to desperate when the desk attendant said “Keep him awake” as my baby’s eyes were trying to close, so I knelt down beside him and stroked his cheeks and talked, talked, talked to distract him. I took a picture of his face to show him how he looked, and he asked me to take another, of the two of us. In both pictures, he’s somber and droopy and dirty.

But all that was over in a smudge of a time. Thirty minutes? An hour? Even before he was given a bed, he told me his head didn’t hurt that much anymore, and he wasn’t feeling so sleepy. They called us in and showed us to a room. I lay him down on the clean white sheets – dirtying them immediately with creekside mud and twigs and blood – and I took a picture of him from the foot of the bed.


“Oh, Taavi! You look so long and tall in this picture. You have long legs!”

“Let me see,” said Taavi in his famous monotone.

I showed him the picture and a smile lit up his face, punctuated by a giggle.

Oh, happy day! Everything was good then, all of a sudden and for the rest of my waking day. Taavi was fine, and happy, and goofy, and perfect. He was sweet and silly, and answered all the nurses’ questions bravely. He reached his grubby little hand into his pocket and pulled out the trinkets he’d picked up from the piñata at the party: a Matchbox car, a magnet, a chocolate coin. I unwrapped the coin for him and he licked the melted chocolate from the foil. He made faces for the camera and every time I snapped a picture he clamored, “Let me see! Let me see!”

The doctor finally came in and had a look, and Taavi was a good sport. He told her how he'd gotten hurt, and that “the blood went down to here” (his chin) and some got in his mouth; that his head hardly hurt anymore and that he plays soccer and tee-ball. The doctor said he didn't need a CT scan, and that she was going to use glue instead of stiches. We rinsed the wound under running water (that he did not like!), and then the doctor brandished a tube of glue. "You have to be as still as a statue," she said, and she held the laceration closed, applied the goopy glue and held it for a minute or so. Taavi semi-shrieked that it stung, but other than his lips he didn't move a muscle.

And we were done! Hugh arrived as we were waiting for our aftercare instructions, and it felt like a victory, a walk in the park, an amusing anecdote about parenthood. My silly-boy was A-okay, and I had funny pictures to prove it.

Then came that dream, the moment I drifted into sleep. So much for brushing it off.

Being a parent, like being alive, I guess, is just so... so much. If you've read The Unbearable Lightness of Being you know what I mean. The wonder and the tragedy - and the vast potential for joy and sorrow - are so powerful that if you think about it too much you'll go crazy, or just shut down.

Taavi, Kai, Eli, Caiman. They are all okay.

Knock, knock, knock on wood.

(the day after)

How to live the life you want

Thankful Friday
Best Boss in the World likes to play the story of my interview for laughs. She tells everyone how I waltzed into her office wearing pearls (this is not true, though I was making an attempt at business attire and therefore looking like a fish out of water) (a fish out of water in an ill-fitting pant suit), and launched into a ramble about how I didn't really want a fulltime job, how I had healthcare experience but didn't actually like the industry, how I could do the job for which I was applying but didn't expect I'd like it all that much.

She didn't necessarily care whether or not I was passionate about healthcare. She was looking for a good fit, stylewise, for her team; a great writer; someone productive and smart and strategic.

But when she asked if I had any questions, maybe hoping I'd ask about the company's three year plan or their customer relationship management strategy or what metrics they used to track their marketing efforts, I asked if there was anywhere nice nearby where I could run on my lunch breaks.

When I told Hugh about the interview, he shook his head and told me not to worry, that something else would come along. But a few days later, in an early example of how Best Boss truly is the best boss in the world, she called and asked me how three days a week sounded.

This was in December of 2005. I started my new, low stress, three-day-a-week-even-though-it-was-advertised-as-fulltime job right after New Year's 2006.

A few short weeks later I had to ask for time off to go to San Diego because my father was, inconceivably, dying.

For all the ranting I do now about how I can't stand my job, I was pretty lucky to have it back then. Best Boss didn't blink an eye when I said I'd be missing an unpredictable number of days, and I quickly discovered that chance had plunked me down amidst some truly incredible, caring people. After Dad died, they gave me plenty of breathing room, but offered themselves up when I needed a shoulder to lean on. That plus the three day work week, the mellow pace, the achievable deadlines, and the Zen of long, solitary blocks of writing time... it was a gentle way to rejoin the real world.

Most people find themselves reflecting on what's really important in life when someone they love dies. They think about their priorities and how to honor them. But how often does life make it easy to do that? Well, that job made it easy to do, for a time. I was running regularly, and playing soccer, and spending time with the most important people in the whole wide world: my husband, my kids, my Mom, my siblings. I was outside revelling in the sun and the air and the trees, healing and becoming whole. Life wasn't perfect; I missed my father and ached for my mother's loss, and within a year Jen was dying. But I had my priorities straight, and I was living life as I wanted to live it.

It all seemed so easy. I felt wise and of an age. I counseled any overworked sucker who'd listen: go home at 5:00, I'd say, just do it. Never skip a lunch break - get outside and run! Just 10 minutes the first time out, and then a little further each day. Part-time work is the secret to happiness. Contentment is yours for the taking. If you don't have a job you love, a true vocation, then don't work so goddamned much. Play with your kids more, but take breaks from them, too. Grab some alone time every day. Find your bliss and keep it close; sip frequently and, when you feel like it, take big greedy gulps.

Grin as it runs down your chin.

I was just about ready to write a self-help book: How to Live the Life You Want. It would be all about knowing what was really, truly important to you and making room for those things in your life. About the value of relationships and how to tend them. About simplicity and appreciating the small, good things. About being, well... like me!

Maybe I got a little too cocky. Maybe I was setting myself up for a karmic bitch slap.

Or maybe I just forgot to watch my Achilles' heel: this goddamned compulsion to stretch, to volunteer for more, to say, "Oh, I can do that." The timeline's all a blur now, but somehow I went from three days to four to four and a half. From 24 hours a week to 36 to 45 or 50. From pretty good writer on a cool creative MarCom team to pretty crappy manager of seven people who deserve better. I have a headache every day from a toxic combination: computer eye strain plus corporate politics. My me time has dwindled to zero, my hanging with Mom time to sporadic Wednesday afternoons. I am not running, I am not writing (FOUR measly blog posts in all of April), and I most certainly am no longer boasting about my enviable work-life balance.

But enough of my whining. There's still this voice in my head saying just do it.

Just rewind.

Just run.

Just write.

Just find a way to get long, sunny afternoons back, to be there for Eli's first at-bat at 5:30 games, to skip through the playground with Kai, to linger over coffee with Hugh on the sunny new deck or steal off to a day-game at AT&T Park with him.

Just do it.