Browsed by
Category: family

Running with Children

Running with Children

Comments 0 Comment

The flakes started flying before the race started. That would be the 5K Run with Santa — the first race I’ve run in, well, let’s just say it’s been a few years!

A little over three miles — doable, even for a walker in the suburbs. But my already conservative pace was slowed even further by the slick spots on the road. Luckily, my running buddy was Claire, whose last race was the Marine Corps Marathon but who matched her cadence to her timid mama’s.

Timid was putting it mildly. I worried the whole time about wiping out, ending the race on crutches or worse. One middle-aged woman went down within the first few minutes. “Don’t worry, Mom,” Claire said. “She just ran into a cone.”

The last few tenths of a mile, though, the pavement was wet, not snowy, and Claire and I kicked it in and dashed (sort of) to the finish line.

Children do many things for their parents (as parents do for their children). They care for us, make us laugh and introduce us to the future. Yesterday I was thinking how they make us face our fears. We will do things for them we don’t do for anyone else. And in that sense, they keep us young — they keep us, quite literally, in the running. 

Getting the Tree

Getting the Tree

Comments 2 comments

We’re several weeks ahead of schedule, but the girls were here and the weather was fair, so yesterday we drove  to Snicker’s Gap to cut our Christmas tree. After Leesburg, foothills appear on the horizon and the road curves up to meet them. Soon after that, I spot the familiar hillside, parceled in fir and pine.

I breathed in the evergreen scent, took in the scene, livelier than usual this busy weekend. As with any annual tradition, I was measuring, calculating, thinking about where we are now compared with this time last year. A better place, I decide, shoulders relaxing as we trudge up the hill.

The trees are healthy and plentiful, and there is variety in each plot. Old trees and young trees, tall and short — giant blue spruce and scraggly pine seedlings — all share the same southern slope. As I watch the girls stride ahead I realize they aren’t the only ones who’ve grown up. The trees being cut today were babies when we first came here.

We have lived through an entire Christmas tree life-cycle: 10 years of rain and sun and wind and snow. Ten years of growing pains, of hour-long car trips here, some coerced, some not.

And still we return to saw the trunk and topple the tree; to drag it, lash it and bring it home. We drive west to seek the southern slope. We mark the years as best we can.

Haunted House

Haunted House

Comments 0 Comment

The stairs creak, the floor groans — night sounds of the empty nest.

When the house was full of children I used to joke that we didn’t need those fake cobwebs, we had the real thing. Our house was messy because we were too busy to clean it.

The house is tidier now, but trick-or-treaters will be the only kids I see. No one to carve the pumpkin (though Celia helped with that last week when she was here for fall break). No one to watch “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and laugh at Bram Bones. No one to borrow my eyeliner for drawing a fake mustache.

Luckily, the house is haunted. Not with evil spirits, but with good ones. All the years, tears, giggles — all the drama — it’s here somewhere; I’m convinced of it. And on this day of spirits, it doesn’t take much imagination to find it. 

Marathon Girl

Marathon Girl

Comments 1 comment

Her first achievement was signing up, a marathon of its own, requiring hours online and the drive to submit her name ahead of tens of thousands of others.

And then there was the training, which began in March and involved a byzantine schedule of long runs and short runs building up to yesterday’s 26.2 miles (excuse me, 26.6 miles, according to her Garmin).

For some reason, she decided that the training should also include a triathlon, a swim-bike-run event that left her with a sprained ankle less than two months before the big race. But she pushed through that, too, with an air boot and lots of determination.

And finally, yesterday, all the hard work and determination paid off.  Not much more than a year and a half since she started running, Claire successfully completed the Marine Corps Marathon.

There were many moments I’ll remember, ones I didn’t photograph because I was too busy hugging her, but this is one that will stick with me.

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Five

Comments 0 Comment

I’m up early, but her birthday has already been underway for nine hours. Her 25th birthday. It’s happening in Greenwich Mean Time in the northern reaches of a tall, skinny country in West Africa, and in many ways I’m feeling very far away from Suzanne today.

But in other ways I’m not. I heard her voice less than 48 hours ago and, God willing (a phrase she’s begun to use with alarming frequency), I will again later today. I’ve had two emails recently and, within the past month, a rare and precious letter.

These, for now, will have to do. And I’m left where many parents of 25-year-olds are — to my own devices. Suzanne, after all, is her own person. They all are. And I am mine. Or at least I’m beginning to be again.

So what I think about today is not just that she is a quarter-century old, but that I’m 25 years a parent. Long enough to get the hang of it, you’d think. Not really, though.

(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

Family Day

Family Day

Comments 0 Comment

A year ago we hadn’t even visited Celia’s college for the first time. Now it’s her new home.

And today we drive up to see her. It’s Family Day, a convention I don’t remember from my own college years.

Though it was less than two months ago that we helped move her in, now it’s her school. She’ll give us her own tour, the kind you always want your children to give, the kind that comes from knowing and loving a place and wanting to share it as your own.

Gifts from Africa

Gifts from Africa

Comments 0 Comment

The human heart is a funny thing, what it withstands, what it does not. I’ve long since accustomed myself to Suzanne’s absence. She’s been in Africa well over a year now. She’s busy, happy, completely at home.

But last night, the worlds collided. Suzanne’s friend Katie came to visit “bearing gifts” from her recent trip to see Suzanne in Benin. Things Suzanne had bought and wanted us to have:

There was a leather wallet, a small wall hanging of a woman carrying a jug on her head and a set of hand-cast ladles made of an indeterminate metal (maybe aluminum?).

For some reason now, I can hardly look at these gifts without a tissue nearby. That Suzanne chose them with her own hands, arranged for their passage here — well, it just got to me.

It’s always that way, isn’t it? The small, thoughtful detail; a glimpse of the eternal within the everyday.


(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

Comments 1 comment

As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

Shopping Alone

Shopping Alone

Comments 0 Comment

It had been two weeks since I’d shopped for groceries. Two weeks of eating the ultimate leftovers, what’s left in the freezer after the kids have gone. But having exhausted most staples, I headed for the store.

I begin in the dairy aisle. No gallon of skim, just a pint of whole milk for my tea.

I skip the cold cuts, the Lunchables, the Fruit Rollups.

No candy or cookies or crackers. No goldfish! Kid cereal successfully bypassed, too; I go for the granola instead.

Meat, eh! Fish, double eh! I even pass on pasta. I settle on salad and one of those rotisserie chickens, the kind someone else cooks for you.

Before I leave I move through the produce aisle. The pears, I always bought them for Celia. The apples, those were for
Suzanne. Claire has always loved melon.

So I buy all three — pears and apples and
melon — just for the memories, you understand.

(Photo: 123RF)

Back to School

Back to School

Comments 0 Comment

They have new tennis shoes and big smiles. Their adventure is about to begin. But “they” aren’t mine.

It’s the first day of school in Fairfax County. But for the first time in 20 years it doesn’t matter. No kid of mine is boarding one of those big yellow buses. Or getting a ride or driving herself to school, either.

And this is fine.

I miss the little people my children once were. But I love the young adults they have become.

As for nostalgia, I’m channeling Alice Cooper:

School’s out for summer

School’s out forever!

(Celia on her first day of kindergarten in 2000.)