This morning I crept out of my bed at 5am. I managed to extricate my arm from underneath Rose without waking her up, tiptoed past Ed, who had been at work until past midnight, and held my breath when I found Eli snoring in a pile of pillows in the middle of the floor. Somehow, I got downstairs without someone following me for the first time all week, and forced myself onto the treadmill, ready start my long run for the week.
As I ran, I gave half my brain over to Stephen King's Doctor Sleep (which is AMAZING!!!) and the other half tried to fashion the perfect Facebook status update to whine about how piecemeal this long run would have to be: "My 23-mile run this morning: four miles on the treadmill, three miles with the jogger, thirteen while the kids terrorize Suzanne's dog, followed by three more miles with the jogger. Any dad's 23-mile run tomorrow morning? Bye honey, I'll see you when I get back."
But if I'm being honest, that's not fair.
I have friends whose husbands and children would not miss a finish line. Whose spouses come along for destination races. Whose kids hold up signs saying, "Run Fast, Mom!" and "My mom is faster than your dad." While Ed packed up the kids to meet me at the end of a half marathon once (two kids and approximately seven years ago), it's not something I need or even want. In fact, sometimes I think it would be just one more thing to worry about on race day: "Congratulations, you just qualified for Boston. Now how about taking a couple of these kids off my hands?"
What I am grateful for, is the village that allows me to run the marathons.
I trained for my first marathon in the fall of 2007. Ed had to be at work before his attending physicians back in those days, and he left early, so I'd get Bryce and Annie off for school, stick Isaac and Maren in the jogger or put them in front of the TV while I ran on the treadmill. Then, on Saturdays, Ed would get up with all of the kids (on one of his few days off), so I could go out and run 16 or 18 or 20 miles in the sticky Texas predawn. When Isaac got sick that fall, I didn't abandon my plan; I borrowed a jogger that would accommodate his cast from a friend, and kept up the training.
When we moved to Utah, I got spoiled. There's a huge community of runners here, and I made some of my first and my best friends on the road. We'd meet up nearly every morning and pound out six or eight miles while solving the world's problems. On Saturday, I'd often meet up with my running group, who were unfailingly positive and supportive, and who made the miles fly by while Ed stayed (once again) at home with the kids. He even gave up his fledgling ward basketball habit so I could meet Michelle on Tuesday and Chelle on Thursday. We had just gotten to the point where the older kids would let Ed sleep on a Saturday morning when Rose arrived and we started back at square one.
These days, although I may be the one running the races, I'm not the only one who puts in the work that goes into running the races. Truth be told, I only run the races to justify the 70 minutes running time each morning, the 20 miles on Saturday (or Friday, if someone has something going on Saturday). Most runners love to cut back in the winter, but not me. That time is a lifeline. And while there have been plenty of mornings (especially lately, since Rose and Eli have supersonic sleep hearing) when I end up on the treadmill with kids watching Daniel Tiger at my feet, and even more when we head out with the jogger (we are regulars at the 7-11 in downtown Holladay, where I bribe the kids with Cheetos and the promise that we will undoubtedly see more doggies before our 8.5 mile loop is over), there are also lots and lots of mornings when Ed sacrifices his own sleep so he can get climbed on for an hour (or three) by two toddlers while I go out for a run. Sometimes I think it's the only time I truly feel like myself these days, and he recognizes that.
I love him for it. A whole lot.
Today, the village extended beyond just Ed. I got into a groove on the treadmill, and decided to do the planned jogging stroller miles on the treadmill instead, and Maren and Isaac entertained Rose and Eli while I slogged away in the basement. My friend Suzanne kept the little ones while I pounded out the second half of the run. Her sister even set out a Gatorade for me at her house up in Harvard-Yale so I didn't have to carry water. There are other days when a friend will drop by, take one look at my harried expression, and say, "Why don't you go out and run for an hour without the kids." There's the babysitter who drops everything, comes over, and plays with the kids. There's my mom and my godmother who always make sure I get in my Balm of Gilead, my canyon runs, when they visit in the summer.
So here is me, saying thank you to my village. And most especially to my husband, who, as we celebrate seventeen years of marriage tomorrow, shows that he values me and understands me every time he spends a Saturday morning making pancakes while I pound out mile after lovely mile.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Book Review: Wish You Happy Forever by Jenny Bowen
Author: Jenny Bowen
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle
Content Alert: Descriptions of neglected children
Jenny Bowen was a successful Hollywood filmmaker when she came across a story highlighting the plight of Chinese orphans. Although she had already raised a son and daughter, she and her husband soon found themselves filling out adoption paperwork. When they adopted Maya, they were shocked at her condition, and took delight in watching her overcome the challenges that the difficult first year of her life presented. Bowen knew that she couldn't adopt all the baby girls who needed families in China, but she had a flash of inspiration-- she would change Chinese orphanages so they gave babies and young children the kinds of social interactions they would have if they had families. And then, she went out and did it, forming the Half the Sky Foundation and eventually partnering with hundreds of orphanages in China.
I've been a fan of Half the Sky's mission since I first read about it three years ago when we were in process for Rose's adoption. My kids were not lucky enough to be in an orphanage where Half the Sky operates, and when Bowen describes going into rooms where the babies were tied to cribs or propped in walkers, that's what I remember from Rose and Eli's orphanage. I also know that with love and attention, these kids can overcome so much of the understimulation of institutional life. Bowen tells her story openly and honestly-- her voice as a filmmaker really comes through here. There are times when she faces criticism and seems a bit defensive, but overall, this is a person and a mission that I have supported in the past, and now feel even more compelled to give a bit of my financial support. It's interesting to see how Bowen's work has changed as the orphan population has shifted from virtually all "healthy" baby girls to girls and boys (especially boys) with special needs. I am grateful to organizations like Half the Sky and to the brave people in both China and America who work to make sure that as many children as possible can find families to love them.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Book Review: Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
Author: Michael Lewis
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: swearing, and possible outrage at the things Wall Street insiders will do to make a billion bucks off the backs of unsuspecting investors
Remember how, back in the day, you'd see pictures of traders on Wall Street, and they'd be wearing brightly covered jackets and waving their hands in the air, and the whole room they stood in was filled with little bits of paper? Well, that's not how it's done any more. Like everything else in the world, stock trading has become computerized and automated. Remember the housing bubble? Remember how people got loans they had no business getting and those loans were chopped up and sold to lots of investors who stood to make a whole lot of money off of them? Remember how you felt scammed when you found out about it? Well, there's also been a scam running in the stock market for the last half decade. When automized trades took over, there was often a second or a half a second of lag time between when the traders placed the order to buy and when the sale actually took place. High-frequency traders, capitalizing on their faster connections (and we're talking nanoseconds and microseconds here) have swooped in, and inserted themselves in the middle of a transaction. So you might want to buy a stock for $30.50 and you find that you actually bought it for $30.51. No big deal, right? It's just a penny, but high-frequency traders are making billions of dollars off of their scheme (which reminds me of the time when I tried to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert using 3G on my phone and ended up way high up on the balcony even though I put in my ticket request seconds after they opened up for sale, since scalpers were sitting at their computers doing the exact same thing, and to get the tickets I really wanted, I would have had to pay Ticketmaster AND the scalpers).
Anyway, Michael Lewis focuses on a band of geeks, more "Head of the Class" than Wall Street, who band together to bring down high-frequency traders. I read this book solely because it was written by Michael Lewis, who could probably make a book about changing diapers seem interesting. And he does a wonderful job explaining to lay readers about techie kinds of issues that the vast majority of players on Wall Street didn't understand themselves. It's not quite as compelling as a story about a poor orphaned kid who's adopted by a rich white family and then goes on the play in the NFL, but it is a pretty entertaining tale nonetheless.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Book Review: The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content alert: abuse of slaves, mob violence, one very mild sex scene
I wish that I had reviewed The Invention of Wings two months ago when I read it and when I was riding high on the narrative. Now that so much time has passed, I worry that I won't do the book justice with this review. That said, here goes:
On the day Sarah Grimke turns eleven, her parents give her the traditional birthday gift for children in her late 18th-century Charleston household: a slave of her own, in this case, ten-year-old Handful. Sarah breaks with tradition when she tries to free Handful that night, and later promises Handful's mother that she will make sure that her daughter does not die a slave. The story of The Invention of Wings is told by both Sarah and Handful. They grow up as unusually close confidants, both bound and restricted in separate ways by their race, gender, and social class. Sarah yearns to become a lawyer, and and although she's smarter than her many brothers, her father doesn't take her seriously. Eventually, the women grow up and the realities of their position as women in the south drives a wedge between them. Sarah moves north with her younger sister and becomes involved in abolition while Handful stays at the family home in Charleston and plots ways to free herself and her mother and sister.
I'm embarrassed to admit that until I was 2/3 of the way through the novel, when Sarah Grimke has moved to Philadelphia and makes friends with Lucretia Mott, I had no idea that the book was historical fiction. I knew nothing about Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who both fought for abolition and the rights of women and were the most popular speakers of their day. The Handful character is mostly fictionalized. Kidd's afterword to the novel is absolutely fascinating. I loved reading about how she went about taking the Grimke story and creating Handful's tale, and weaving them together. The book is powerful and well-written and a page-turner, and I think it would be a hugely popular and appropriate novel for book groups. I'm going to recommend that my girls read it in a few years.
Monday, April 21, 2014
Book Review: Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett
Author: Ann Patchett
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: language, drug use, mentions of sex
Truth and Beauty focuses on Patchett’s relationship with her best friend, the poet Lucy Grealy, who lost part of her jaw from a Ewing’s sarcoma as a child, and who ultimately died at the age of 39 in 2002. Grealy endured about 40 surgeries over the course of her lifetime, and when she wasn’t in the hospital, she was ambitious and hardworking, garnering many prizes and fellowships and shows Patchett and Grealy to have one of those great best friend kinds of relationships that people are lucky to come by once in a lifetime. However, the book also shows Grealy to have moments where she’s difficult and capricious.She constantly seeks validation, demanding Ann to tell her that she’s her very best friend. Jealous of Ann’s other friendships, she climbs into her lap at dinner and prevents Ann from having conversations with others at the table. She does things that would bug the heck out of me.
I’m sure that Ann would be the first person to admit that she was not a saint, but over the course of the story she continues to show love to Lucy– she nurses her after her surgeries and plays gatekeeper at the hospital. And as Lucy became more and more difficult and self-destructive in the final months of her life, Ann did her best to support Lucy even as she was pushed away.
While Truth and Beauty was somewhat controversial and Grealy's sister publicly criticized the book, saying, "Lucy was a uniquely gifted writer. Ann, not so gifted, is lucky to be able to hitch her wagon to my sister's star. I wish Lucy's work had been left to stand on its own." However, I doubt that I would have been introduced to Grealy's work had it not been for Patchett. I also think the book is beautifully written, and an enduring legacy to a female friendship that spanned the good times and the bad.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Book Review: One More Thing by BJ Novak
Author: BJ Novak
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: some of these short stories would be suitable to read to your nursery school class, others would be "headphones only" with strong language and sexual situations.
BJ Novak, one of the foremost comedy writers of our day, establishes himself as someone who's out for more than just laughs with One More Thing. This series of short stories is sometimes funny, sometimes absurd. Some of the stories work really well, others fail. My kids loved the one about the principal who wants to stop offering math at his school. There were some stories I wanted to skip entirely, but I read them all, like a novel, because that's how I do things. I may have enjoyed the book more if I had given them a little more time to digest.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Book Review: Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan
Author: Kelly Corrigan
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG or PG-13 for language
Layer #1: Kelly Corrigan is a woman in her late thirties whose mother drops everything and flies from Baltimore to San Francisco when she learns that her daughter needs surgery.
Layer #2: Kelly Corrigan is a woman in her early twenties who ditches her job at a non-profit to travel the world. She ends up in Australia, working as a nanny for a family whose mother recently died of cancer.
Layer #3: Kelly Corrigan is a young girl who adores her funny, larger-than-life father (the "glitter") and often resents her humorless mother (the "glue").
In Glitter and Glue, Corrigan paints a picture of her relationship with her mother. Her experiences living with a family in Australia who no longer have a mother help her get over some of the petty resentments she harbors against her own mother. Later, as she has her own health scare, her time in Australia highlight many of the fears she has for the future of her own family. It's a complex book, but one that I especially enjoyed as I've grown up and try to see my mother not as the harried mom of three small kids, but in a more mature, more generous light.
Friday, April 18, 2014
Book Review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
Authors: John Green and David Levithan
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Lots of cursing and talking about sex
Will Grayson is a high school junior living with his parents in Evanston, an affluent suburb north of Chicago. Everything about his life is normal and boring, except for Tiny Cooper, his larger-than-life (literally), flamboyantly gay, show tunes loving, offensive lineman of a best friend.
Will Grayson is also a high school junior living with his single mother in Naperville, a slightly less affluent suburb west of Chicago. Everything about his life is total crap, except for Isaac, the boy with whom he's been having an intense online relationship for the last year.
Will Grayson meets Will Grayson one night downtown when Will #1's (John Green's Will Grayson) fake ID fails to gain him access to a club and his friends ditch him for the concert. He decides to bide his time in a, well, a porn shop, where he runs into Will #2 (David Levithan's Will Grayson), who's discovering that his Isaac doesn't actually exist, and whose life appears to actually BE total crap, until both Will Graysons meet up with Tiny Cooper and their lives become intertwined by more than just a common name.
David Levithan is the master of co-writing novels, and John Green is the master of YA novels, so it's no surprise that this one seems to work so well. I didn't like Levithan's Will Grayson very much for the first half of the novel, but he grew on me, and Tiny Cooper's character is hilarious, stereotypical, totally over the top, and the glue that brings the whole thing together. The ending is totally cheesy, but it really worked for me. It's worth a read just to see the experiment unfold between the two authors, but I found the product pretty rewarding as a reader as well.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Book Review: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
Author: Jonas Jonasson
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
This book would be rated: PG-13 or R for violence
On Allan Karlsson's hundredth birthday, he climbs out the ground-floor window of his retirement home and makes a run for the train station in an attempt to escape the hubbub of his birthday party. He appears to be a sweet old man who doesn't even think to trade out his slippers for shoes before he slips out and down the road. But when he's asked to watch a suitcase for a young man who needs to use the restroom, it sets off a madcap adventure and everyone, even the reader, underestimates the experiences and aptitude of this doddering old man.
If Forrest Gump had been born forty years earlier, lived in Sweden, and lived to be a hundred, you'd have the story of Allan Karlsson. Karlsson's life intersects with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Truman, Johnson, and he climbs mountains, drinks with famous men everywhere, and gets thrown in jail innumerable times. Jonasson does a nice job balancing Karlsson's history with the adventures to preserve the suitcase, and the growing menagerie that surrounds Karlsson. The book is completely farfetched, but also pretty fun to read.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Book Review: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Author: Aravind Adiga
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Audible
Content Alert: murder and sexual assault
Balram Halawai started life in an Indian village-- the second son of a rickshaw driver with tuberculosis. As a child, he's innocent, naive, and smarter than all of his peers, but that changes as he moves from the prized pupil in his elementary class, to an underling in a tea shop who gives all of his money to his grandmother, to a servant in a wealthy home who rises through the ranks, to the murderer of his employer, to entrepreneur. This is Breaking Bad, Indian-style-- the portrait of one man as he abandons his morals as he ascends the social ladder.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about Indian culture and politics to comment much on Adiga's treatment of these subjects, but there were times when the book seemed satirical, with Balram a bumbling fool. The story itself dragged in places. We knew at the beginning of the novel, which is framed as a series of letters between Balram and a Chinese politician, that he would eventually murder his employer, and the story unfolded in such a straightforward manner, a Dickensian tale of modern India, that I was underwhelmed. I wanted twists and turns, I wanted surprises, and I got exactly what I would have expected from the first page of the first letter. The White Tiger illuminates a culture, but I'm not sure it's especially compelling from a storytelling perspective.
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