I used to be a runner.
Before I was a runner I was definitely not a runner. I hated running. I made myself do it out of an effort to be healthy (by which I actually meant to be thin) but it was always an obligation instead of a desire. Then in my twenties something changed and running turned into an activity I loved. I felt strong and accomplished. Running cleared my head, my footfalls drowning out the perpetual whirring of anxiety and self doubt churning through my mind. Over several years I kept adding on mileage: 10k, 10 miler, half marathons and then finally a full marathon. Eventually when I got pregnant my mileage dropped dramatically. Then I had the baby and it dropped even more. I developed a chronic pain condition a couple years after my son was born and I stopped running entirely. If I were to set out for a run today, I doubt I could make it even a couple of miles before having to call it quits.
I’ve read a lot about how women lose themselves in motherhood. This is partly inevitable. Parenting an infant in particular is all-consuming. You can’t help but work your way through the dark tunnel of that first year and come out the other side irrevocably changed. It is true that in time, pieces of who you were return, but you can never go fully back to being the same person you were before you became a parent. I once described it like this:
my mind a blank slate
as though I’ve birthed a new me
along with the baby
That sense of loss is obviously not helped by how little maternal support there is in this country. Yes, parenting requires so much time and effort, but the lack of affordable childcare and paid parental leave, plus an imbalance in parenting expectations and commitment in many partnerships exponentially expand the difficulty of raising kids.
But I wonder if some of that feeling doesn’t stem from a problem with the basic way we define who we are. From an early age, we are encouraged to conceptualize ourselves by the things we do. What are your hobbies and interests? What are you good at? What do you want to be when you grow up? When our interests shift away from the activities that had previously defined us, or we have to take a break from them to make room for other changes in our lives, it often feels like we have given up a part of ourselves instead of, more accurately, simply changed the way in which we spend our time.
Even within the writing world we are asked to define ourselves in narrow terms. Are you a poet or a fiction writer? Genre or literary? Though you may cross over into a variety of mediums, there’s still the question of what best defines your style. In a world that increasingly demands we develop our own personal brands, what type of writing would you build your brand around? What kind of writer are you?
I didn’t really start writing until after I became a mother. In some ways, I suppose I was always a writer. From a young age, writing was a hobby of mine. An interest. It was a thing I was good at. But it didn’t become a pursuit until I became a parent. The limitations that parenthood put on my time and energy brought with them a clarity: If I had such little time for myself, I wanted to spend it in the most fulfilling ways possible. For me, that meant writing. At first I fit it in wherever I could manage, like during my son’s nap time or later at night, after he had gone to sleep. But as my sense of myself as a writer became more defined, the space I created in my life for writing expanded. I am lucky to have family and a partner who support this effort, but the most important part of forming a writing habit was choosing to write instead of doing something else, and then allowing other parts of myself to fall away. I suppose you could say I lost those parts, but I prefer to think I let them go so a different version of me could grow and flourish.
I don’t know if I will ever start running again. Sometimes when I am out walking the dog, someone will run past me and I’ll feel a pang of jealousy. We are less than a month away from the Baltimore Running Festival, and though I know this will sound ridiculous to anyone who is not a runner, a part of me is sad that I won’t wake up this Saturday morning and set out on an 18-mile training run. I was a runner and then suddenly I wasn’t anymore. I used to be one person and then I became someone else. I am nearing forty and I don’t expect the next decade to look exactly like this one. In all likelihood, my life as a runner will be confined to my twenties. When I was twenty-eight, at the height of my running fitness, I went to bed early and gave up my Saturdays to long runs instead of bottomless blood mary brunches. I made a choice and in time I turned into someone who would have been unrecognizable to my younger run-despising self. But I didn’t look back at the ways I had changed over the course of that decade and felt as if I had lost something. At twenty, we don’t lament that we’re no longer the people we were when we were ten. So why now, at the tail end of my thirties, does it feel like everyone wants to classify change as loss? It is true that I am not the same person I was before I became a mother. Hell, I am not the same person I was before the pandemic started. We can’t help but be changed by major life events. We can’t help but lose ourselves a little over time, shedding parts of ourselves as if we are snakes who have outgrown our skins.
My son’s favorite toys are what he calls cars with eyes and mouths. They are basically hot wheels from the Pixar Cars universe and they make them for even the most minor side characters. Having inherited his father’s collector gene, my son wants them all. We buy them in lots off of eBay and dole them out at holidays and his birthday. We gave him half a dozen this spring when he broke his arm and had to have surgery. He loves these toys and can tell you the names of every single character he has, even though some have less than a minute of screen time in only one of the three Cars movies. For a long time, he would “play” with them by carefully lining them all up on a shelf. Then the next day, he would slowly and gently line them up again in another part of the room.
“Don’t you want to drive them?” I asked. “Maybe make them race?” But he was too afraid he would break them. If they moved too fast their wheels might fall off. If he played too hard they could get scratched or dented. I sat down next to him on the floor and explained that though it sounded impossible, one day cars with eyes and mouths wouldn’t be his favorite toys anymore. He would grow up and something new would become his favorite. I told him he should play with them as fully as he could now while he still loved them more than anything in the world, and though he didn’t believe me that a day would ever come where he didn’t love these cars, I think it gave him permission to let go of his worries and really enjoy his toys. He started driving them all over the house. He now sends them smashing into each other and soaring off ledges. He is no longer afraid to let them get a little banged up, but he’s also not at all convinced that his love will fade. And why should he be. It is impossible to look ahead and see how many versions of the self can exist inside a single person.
“I am always going to love cars with eyes and mouths,” he told me one day.
“Oh yeah?” I replied.
“Yeah,” he said and shrugged, his palms turned up toward the ceiling. “That’s just who I am.”
You can read more about my shift away from running and the development of my chronic pain condition in “The Road to Here,” originally published in Red Fez.