Empty nest milestone: the first semester away

As of January 2014, I've gotten through the first semester with Ky away and the first lengthy break back home. Some thoughts about this first step into my empty nesting journey:

I miss Ky less in the day to day than I thought I would, though my "life" misses Ky more than I expected to. 

Truth be told, I actually enjoy having the freedom of guilt-free time to do what I want, work as late as I want, go running at odd hours and to schedule things back to back to back without break. Single parenting an only child means that you're all they've got - you're the one they talk to, ask questions of, eat with, wish goodnight before bed. When I wasn't home, Ky didn't have that sounding board and companionship. Guilt used to flood me like acid when I couldn't get out of a commitment and Ky would be left with a microwave leftover dinner (more likely microwave popcorn) and Tumblr or a TV show. Sometimes Ky would call me at work to ask my advice or complain about a terrible day and my mind would spin, trying to switch gears from work to Mom-mode, and I was never the Mom I wanted to be at those times. 

And grocery shopping (or not) is so much easier. I'm a creature of habit in the kitchen, and $30 in produce and a little meat can get me through a week or more without a hitch. It's actually nice to not feel I have to be inventive with dinner, or even make dinner if I'm not hungry, or eat at 10pm if that's when I get home. Added bonus: if I buy a treat, it actually lasts until I finish eating it myself!

However I feel a lot more loneliness in the life-sense than I was expecting. I didn't realize how much Ky anchored me. How wanting to be a better mother and better example for my child actually made me a better person. How much of my definition of myself hinged on the fact that I had someone in my life that was half (or more) of the reason I did things on any given day. How Ky gave me most of my direction and purpose. 

I guess I've realized that as a parent I've grown like a bonzai tree branch around my role as a mother, and with my child subtracted from my day to day life, I'm this weird twisted shape standing alone, not seeming to make any sense without the scaffold I'd been wrapped around.

I always thought I had an incredibly strong sense of myself and sense of purpose as an individual. If I do, I can't remember how I expressed those things just yet. Part of my journey - if that word doesn't make it sound too hokey - is remembering how that rusty machinery works.  

Having Ky back for break has been a huge relief. I feel like things are just as they should be. I don't know how I'll feel next week, when college starts up again and Ky gets back into the ins and outs of dorm life, committees, classes and friends - and I get back to the ins and outs of an hour + commute, two jobs and the hectic rush of trying to fit in one too many obligations to fill the hole I don't want to acknowledge in the center of my life.

Winter running versus treadmill

Last winter I made a concerted effort to run every single run outside, rain or snow or ice. I did a month long running streak and spent plenty of icy evenings after work, headlamp strapped over my winter cap, reflective vest, mittens, slipping over the frozen snow. I dug it. It was something new, a challenge.

This winter? I feel so over it already. 

I ran on the treadmill for the first time in my life yesterday. Dragging Ky to the gym with me took about 80% of my energy and the 20% I had left was good for 6 really, REALLY boring miles. Ky's face popping up in the mirror behind me, trying to catch my eye to sign "can we leeeeeeave???" and me looking anywhere but at that place in the mirror, toughing out my whopping 7 miles per hour, realizing my running clothes have a kind of perma-smell that I never notice when I'm running outside, wishing I hadn't forgotten my bottle of water, wondering why the woman on the treadmill next to me looked so much more graceful than me.  Good times. 

I'm now reclining with my coffee wondering if today's run is better served by 2 foot snow drifts and frozen sidewalks or the boring, stinky, dry treadmill. 

I think I'm going for the snow and ice.

Empty nesting : traveling alone

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I can do to turn things around in the funk I've been in lately. 

Here's a short list of things that seem to work for me:

1. Consistent running
2. Planning travel
3. Immersing myself in my latest obsession (whatever that is)
4. Cleaning out my (literal) basement and closets
5. Cleaning out my (figurative) basement and closets by catching up on communication and other things I've let lapse.

Lately I find my mind keeps getting snagged by #2, planning travel. I absolutely love daydreaming about travel, investigating foreign cities from a distance, picturing myself not just visiting there, but actually living there. Somehow this is what travel seems to turn into for me. I want to imagine living there, and spend my time there doing the things I would do if I lived there.

In my daydreams and plans I picture myself on a commuter train, or in a small pub somewhere listening to music, people watching and writing in a journal. I picture going on hikes, finding a nice place to sit back and think or walking through the aisles of a grocery store. And yeah, I also do touristy things once I get there, but it's not what pulls me in to a new place when I'm sitting in my bed at home, staring out at the snow in my yard, imagining a new place to discover.

Traveling alone or as a single mother to a growing child has never fazed me much. It's always felt as natural to me as walking around my own town by myself, and I feel like my mind has always worked perfectly well in that way. Maybe also after 18+ years of single parenting, I don't automatically think of wonderful times and the creation of memories in terms of turning to another person to share them. 

Ky has a lot of jumbled little kid memories of the different places we've lived and traveled around the world (Ky's memories are of 'the place where the toothpaste tasted like soap' and 'that place where you told me not to pet the dogs' -- if I ask if Ky remembers our beach house in Moorea, I might get: "Is that where I dropped pineapple and the ants ate it for days?") -- and I love this, love that those memories are of those day to day experiences that are important to a kid. 

Had I put any forethought at all into becoming a mother, I might have pictured this as the ideal life for us. At 21 I had almost never pondered the question of whether or not I wanted children or marriage. Those were questions for someone older than me, perhaps someone closer in age to my parents. Someone who had gotten all the adventures, crazy times, horrible mistakes and good stories out of their system. When you were ready to have children, I might have thought (had I put any thought into it at all), you were also ready to wither on the vine, relive your best days and finest hours only while drinking one too many glasses of wine at a dinner party thrown by equally has-been friends, and morph into the pudgy, friendly, boring-yet-responsible template of the parents you remember having when you were small. And that wasn't me, not 21 year old me.

I grew up in a huge family, inner city, blue collar, no money. We went camping for vacation, none of us had ever flown in a commercial airplane and we were only vaguely aware that a larger world outside our neighborhood existed. My fantasies about this larger world came from the only source of "global" information a kid could get about it back in the 70's - National Geographic. And the larger world, according to National Geographic, was apparently contained within tiny, colorful villages in Africa, where everyone was constantly topless, and dancing, and puncturing their skin and stretching their necks with beautiful beadwork and metal rings. And my god, the advent of seeing pictures of Jane Goodall actually LIVING there, not only making herself at home in this exotic place but forging an entire profession out of sitting under trees watching animals and contemplating life... this was everything that I could possibly imagine wanting for myself. 

I could not imagine that there was any life for me that didn't include a fate similar to Jane Goodall's. Being discovered by some crusty, foreign museum director. Having my earnest potential shine through. Through unclear, hazy mechanisms being transported to a continent that very literally could not be more different than my 2 bedroom apartment housing a family of 9 in an ethnic neighborhood of an overpopulated city. Being paid (or not, I didn't care) to sit under trees, wash my hair in a stream, be observant, think, ponder, put ideas together, write, watch, listen, walk barefoot, quietly soak in the word and let my observations mix, meld and reform what I had thought I'd known the week before. I could not think of any future that did not include that.

Fast forward to finding myself 21 and pregnant. How could I already be in the stage of my life that required me to be past all of those adventures, past all of the war stories of excitement, fear, struggle, triumph... without ever having tasted that life? To me this fate was unimaginable. 

I pretty much couldn't live like "old people" without living first like myself. And a baby was very definitely on the way. Therefore, I supposed, I must live the life I anticipated, expected, fully ran towards - but AS a mother. In the end Ky and I did live some form of that life. Now that I'm 40 and officially "old people", I can flip back through my mental photo album of Ky and I on the deck of our tiny house in Moorea, cooking in our campsite on the Osa Peninsula, shivering in our townhome in Aberystwyth. I can flip through images of myself studying on trains and planes and in pubs, a sleeping Ky on my lap, getting my degrees and always volunteering for any and all data and sample collection that involved leaving the country. 

Traveling around the world as a single mother came naturally to me, and the infrequent times Ky's dad had summer visitation time and I had some solo time, traveling alone actually felt exponentially easier, safer, and freer. When Ky and I would arrive someplace new, my thoughts were mainly about Ky's safety and comfort. My main vulnerability was my child. When I had the luxury of traveling alone, the realization that I could focus on my own experience felt like an unexpected windfall. I almost didn't know what to do with that much freedom (almost!)

When Ky became a teenager and Ky's dad (now married with several younger children) was more able to spend weeks at a time parenting, I suddenly found myself with the regular freedom to travel solo. At last! Perhaps 16 or more years had gone by since my days of sleeping on the beach with friends in Mexico and I knew I couldn't go back to those days and relive them as a 30-something year old adult. It wouldn't work. But I still felt as if I were being pulled by something inside of me toward the places I'd always imagined traveling alone. 

Before I got pregnant I dreamed almost solely of living like Jane Goodall in East Africa. After Ky was born I couldn't pull that image up too clearly in my mind because it was... I don't know, too personal? to me as an individual. I had to put it away. So while I vowed to not let being a young mother keep me from my dreams, in the end we seemed to travel and live pretty much everywhere but there. 

And when I found myself in 2012 having hit rock bottom emotionally and stagnating in my career, and Ky's dad with an entire summer of visitation, something inside of me dissolved and I felt that same strong pull inside of me. East Africa. I had to go. It wasn't even a question of if I should go, but just that I was being pulled halfway there already and just had to work out the rest of the details. So I went, and so I stayed for 3 months, and so I had every adventure and then some that I ever imagined and so a new branch of my life grew. And so 2012 became one of the strongest years of my life. 

And you probably couldn't have told me that I had any more to learn about traveling alone before I left, but I think I learned about 1000x more than I even knew was missing.

So after all of that roundabout reminiscence, I find myself feeling down and looking at the list of things that seem to lift me when I get to this point in my life.   

1. Consistent running
2. Planning travel
3. Immersing myself in my latest obsession (whatever that is)
4. Cleaning out my (literal) basement and closets
5. Cleaning out my (figurative) basement and closets by catching up on communication and other things I've let lapse.

And I feel so pulled to travel again. I feel that same magnet pull that I've always felt, and with Ky in college, I can't help but realize my "young empty nesting" is probably going to take me back to the roads and work and friendships I made in East Africa. 

Was 2013 a good year? Will 2014 be better?

It would be hard to beat 2012. That was my year. It should have been transformative (that triumphant compilation of hard work and reward, like the Philly run scene in Rocky) but I'll have to settle for it just being a really, really good standalone year. 

To be completely honest, 2013 was something of a let-down on a personal level.

Ky graduated highschool and left for college, and that part of life had its own set of highs and lows. 

But most of what I'm exploring here is the me that is supposed to exist beyond parenting, and if I try to look past the parenting to whatever else exists in me... I wasn't a stellar performer at life this year. 

2012 was one of those low-lows & high-highs years. I was depressed, hit rock bottom, gathered up some courage from somewhere, took the plunge and was a complete bad-ass. 

I rode the high of that summer of success for... what, maybe 6 months. But as 2013 got into gear, I was spinning my wheels. I was still coasting along nicely from 2012, but I wasn't generating anything new. 

And that's where I found myself all of 2013, and where I find myself now at the opening of 2014.

I keep wondering: is this normal? Do normal people work so hard to achieve something, and then have this amazing experience, a month or two of peak performance, and then ride the high of that for a while before plummeting again? I don't mean emotionally, but in actual life experiences? 

I keep thinking about 2014 and all the "one word resolutions", "bucket lists", "This is the year of ______!!!!" and potential mantras. And it just makes me feel pretty tired. Surely one year should come along in which I think: "I'm in a really good place. Nothing huge, just nice. I hope this nice place keeps existing for a long time, so I can enjoy it some more." Instead of feeling like I'm gearing up for something huge (again) or gearing down from something huge (again). 

Running and depression

I started running in 2011 when I was working at a high-intensity, world renowned, much sought-after Institute with such atrocious working conditions that mystery illnesses and drinking problems (my own on both counts included) were practically part of the working culture. I used to get stomach cramps on the stairs on the way up to my workspace, and the particular smell of the hallways that I'd initially loved - an old-world museum storage room smell - started triggering my gag reflex. 

Every few months I'd go to my doctor asking for blood tests, sure that I had a thyroid problem. My skin was terminally dry, my hair was so thin I could feel my scalp with my fingers in even the thickest parts and my energy level was zilch. My blood tests were all normal though, and he'd always very kindly and gently suggest that maybe I was experiencing stress, and that a healthy way to find out would be to combine regular exercise with a wise and caring person to talk to, either professionally or casually. I would always tell him I had no time for (nor interest in) therapy and exercise, and I'd go about my exact same business again, only to return a few months later thinking that I might have a different metabolic disorder. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

Eventually my contract at the high intensity famous place came to an end, and by then I was in such bad shape physically and emotionally that I pretty much just embraced unemployment with absolute relief. Ky and I traveled to Europe for a few weeks and I absolutely reveled in having no cell service, no email emergencies, no stomach pains and nausea hanging like a pig-pen cloud around me. 

But then as so many other have discovered during times of unemployment, what starts out to be the best vacation of your life at some point turns into a sort of keening hopelessness as you lose even the unlikeable scaffold of schedule, and in my case my sense of myself as a useful human being. Yes, I was still a mother, a girlfriend, a daughter, a sister, a volunteer. But as someone who had always defined myself partly as a mother and partly as someone called to my particular profession, I felt like I'd lost half my identity. 

I drank too much and despaired quite a bit. A new kind of depression settled in as I realized that my much hated job and unemployment were two very unlikeable sides of the employment spectrum and I would very much like to be somewhere in the more agreeable center. Only I was too mired in depression to find the energy to get there. 

This is when I started running. Maybe it was the ghost of my former doctor's voice telling me that exercise would help me work out my issues in a healthy way. Maybe it was reading something about a happy person running. Maybe it was the desire to not have Ky see me sitting on the couch after school, still in my pj's, and instead to see a mother who was actively engaged in some seemingly useful activity. 

Whatever sparked it, I started running because I was depressed and I was desperate for some tangible accomplishment in my life. If I ran, I had done something with my day. If I ran 2 miles, I had tackled an obstacle that I thought was unachievable the week before. If I ran, I had something to talk to Ky about after school. "Oh, I went for a run and I saw this HUGE osprey catch a fish!"  I found some running message boards and joined them for a sense of community that I desperately needed. Often during my run was the only time I made eye contact with another adult in the course of my day. It gave me a purpose. 

I didn't enjoy running. I wasn't any good at it, and in the first couple of months I only enjoyed the feeling of being finished with a run for the day. But at some point, I think when my runs started taking a solid 45 minutes or so, something finally kicked in and I began looking forward to the hour I had to sort out problems, think of solutions, be somewhat honest with myself about where my life was going. Or to zone out and fantasize about what my life would look like if it were different, better. Sometimes I jammed in earphones and blasted music from a better time in my life. Sometimes I daydreamed. Sometimes I carefully brought out the real, painful issues in my life and examined them in bits and pieces, using the run-generated endorphins to smooth the rough edges. 

I stopped drinking as much, because it ruined the next day's run if I was dehydrated. I started gaining a tiny, small amount of confidence as I improved. I started signing up for 5K's and ultimately half marathons to gain some small amount of community. I never went to races with anyone, and I rarely spoke to anyone while I was at one, but just running in a crowd felt like company and community to me.

I made some huge decisions while running, and ultimately my life changed quite a bit. I stopped needing to run to get away from my desperation, and started needing to run as mind-maintenance. 

But something in the last year started going south again. Lately my runs have felt more like the forced march they used to feel like. I need them for emotional triage once again, and each one is an emotional roller coaster once again. I wish I didn't find myself back in this dark head space again. I wish I was joyfully running along the road each day out of happiness and an overabundance of energy, but I'm not. Not consistently. But I'm glad that at least this time I have a template for getting back to that good place in my head. I don't have to reinvent the wheel - I can use it as the tool it is, hard as that is to accomplish.

When I went running today I found myself taking an old running route, from the "dark times", from the times my head was in a bad place and 5 miles was the longest run I could imagine. Today even felt like that as I plodded along. Like 5 miles was a long, long distance and my head needed to be convinced to stick with it when it was telling my body to just stop, just walk, just lean on a tree and let myself fall apart. I did ultimately do that, in the park across the street from my house, against the tree I've run past several times a week for the last few years. 

But even as I did that, I was still grateful for the endorphin-softened fall and the knowledge that I can run it out again tomorrow, and the next day, until my heart and head catch back up with my body and my life can make it back to that good place again.