The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That's what we're told right?
But it's the thought that counts.
No. Not really. No it isn't.
If you could have done better, could have put in more effort, intended to do more, but you didn't, so you just grabbed something really quick for that friend's birthday party, gave your $1 at Safeway to end childhood hunger, and then went home and felt better about yourself, you're going to hell.
Just kidding.
I actually don't believe in hell, not the red devil with a pitchfork in eternal flames hell, anyway.
I do believe that heaven and hell are here. Children are molested. Women are raped. Innocent, good people are murdered in the streets completely randomly. Every day. Meanwhile, children are born into lives of privilege, never knowing suffering. Women go to good colleges and become top executives or doctors with proud middle class families. And innocent, and not so innocent people live out their lives without harm or pain coming to them, ever.
I do believe that it is the job of those who either have never known suffering or who have survived suffering and come out of it to help those still suffering.
I come from the latter category. I have lived a life painted in both bleak and bright colors, in both vibrant reds and violent ones. During some periods of my life I suffered greatly and, turning to my left and my right, only saw others who suffered alongside me. There seemed to be no end. There seemed to be no help.
But I got up each day, I worked through my darkness, and others did come along who were able to help push me up and out of a dark cave.
Now, having survived, having found a firm footing, I have wondered what I can do to turn around, reach down, and lift others up. I have wanted the cause I fight for to be a personal one. Abused children? Maybe. Abused women? Perhaps. Uneducated people looking for a chance at education. Definitely, and I made that my career choice.
In terms of volunteer work though, something to which I could purely give, without asking anything in return, nothing had spoken to me. Honestly, I did not look as hard as I could have.
Then a friend at work happened to ask me if I wanted to do the Avon walk for breast cancer with her. And a light came on.
This could be the beginning of volunteer and charity work for me, I thought. I can do this. I can fight for this. This is real to me.
Breast cancer, and cancer in general, has been a constant in my life. When I was still a teenager my grandmother had a breast removed because of breast cancer. Around the same time, I myself had to have a benign lump removed. My mother has been through two bouts of cancer. An aunt is now recovering from a double mastectomy. Yes, breast cancer was something I could take on with an open heart and a fighting spirit.
Why Avon and not Susan G. Komen?
Avon is another constant for me. It rang true when my friend spoke its name. My mother discovered Avon sales and depended on the profits from those sales while she was recovering from cancer surgeries and chemotherapy. Avon felt right.
I also had only just begun to run five miles daily again (after taking more than two years off to have a baby) when my friend asked. Running and walking have also been constants in my life. They are my favorite forms of exercise. Yes. Yes, I could do this.
And so I will. I run daily for my life and my health. In three months I will walk for the lives of others. I have already received the support from those closest to me and received financial commitments from many others. I have never fundraised before, and the idea of harassing people for money is terrifying to me. But the idea of actually accomplishing my goal, $1800 by July 11 in order to be able to participate in the 40 mile walk, is exhilarating.
So I make the calls. I send the messages. I train daily. I face my fear.
I have been described in the past as not very outwardly empathetic. I do not deal with others' pain well emotively. I do not know how to sit with someone while they cry, while they suffer. I am bad at commiserating over hurts and harms. I tend to address my own painful past very matter of factly, and as a result I address the pains of others in the same way. What can we do? How can I help? What do you need? Let's act. Let's do. Let's get up and go. Oh, you just want me to sit and listen? To offer kind words. Ugh. I'm horrible at that.
But I can walk. I can raise funds. I can spread the word. I can fight.
I am great at fighting.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Running For My Life
I run four days a week, sometimes five, five miles a day. I walk or hike one or two days a week. I take one day off. Saturday. Because I leave home for work at 7 AM and get home at 6 PM. And I'm freaking tired.
I run for my life. I was in the best shape of my over thirty years of life when I got pregnant with Celaya. I was running five days a week, five miles a day, and biking or hiking on the weekends with my husband. I felt awesome. I got pregnant. After two years of trying. Two years of being overweight, generally nonchalant about intentional, regular exercise, and making excuses about why when, I finally changed it all about six months before I got pregnant. I buckled down and took a healthy (Weight Watchers) approach to eating and exercising. My body had been unhealthy. My health had been out of balance. I had an unhealthy relationship with food, and an unhealthy relationship with exercise. It took a long time to retrain my brain.
Case in point,
Tonight when I got home:
"How many enchiladas do you want, Shanna."
"One."
"One!?"
"Yea. One. I'm having beans and broccoli, too. I had a half a cheeseburger, french fries, and half an ice cream cone last night. I don't need a plate full of enchiladas tonight."
"Ohhhhhh! You had half a cheeseburger twenty four hours ago, so you can only have one enchilada tonight?"
Just a few months ago I would have eaten the whole damn cheeseburger, all the fries, the whole ice cream cone, the bagel I had for breakfast at work, two slices of pizza I had for lunch today (I probably would have added a sparkling juice and a cookie), and still had two enchiladas, twice the beans, none of the broccoli, and two or three glasses of wine tonight. Because I have lived a life of eating until I'm more than full.
I would walk a lot. I have always been active, walk, bike, swim, hike, but never intentionally, aggressively, purposefully, for my life. I have simply always enjoyed being active. But never active enough to counteract all my eating.
I really should have gone into competitive eating.
Instead, I realized I have always eaten way too much. I haven't necessarily been eating the wrong things. I have always loved fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains. But I have also always eaten at least double portions, and added all the ice cream, pastries, sour gummy bears, and the occasional fried food on top. I loved food to the point of sick obsession.
It's the way I grew up. We went grocery shopping on pay day, splurged on all the cheap, fatty foods, bought meat and carbohydrates in bulk, and threw in some apples, oranges, and bananas for good measure. All of our vegetables came in a can, except iceberg lettuce and tomatoes for the infrequent ranch dressing topped salad. My mother cooked the way her mother cooked the way her mother cooked. My great grandmother was raising a family during the depression. You filled up on starch and gravy. So that's what we did. We were working class, and we made do with what we had.
I has taken me decades to break those bad habits. I was doing great before I got pregnant. Then I went crazy with fattening up like a Thanksgiving turkey; I put on 75 pounds, and my daughter was born showing signs of diabetes.
Then I was afraid to lose too much weight too fast and lose my breastmilk, a problem rampant in my family history.
Well, I breastfed for the full year, maintaining a healthy weight for my baby, and a (ahem) more than healthy weight for myself.
So here I sat, more than a year after weaning my baby, staring her second birthday in the face, still weighing in at more than thirty pounds over my BMI.
Because that is what this has always been about: a healthy weight. I do not care about my weight per se. I look at super skinny women and think, "poor thing. Have a sandwich." My brother and I argue about "hot" women that I think are far too thin to be healthy. I never aimed to be skinny, and I still don't.
I do want my daughter to see me as a role model of health, in contrast to the yo-yo dieting women I grew up watching depriving themselves of treats, taking diet pills, looking for the next get thin quick fix to lose weight fast to fit into those jeans even if it means lying down flat on the bed to pull the zipper up while I suck it in as much as I can.
No thanks.
I run for my life. I run for my daughter's life. I still indulge in a half cheeseburger. I still have Cheeseboard pizza with my coworker on Wednesday nights. I have my little dark chocolate bar filled with speculoos (from Trader Joe's. If you haven't had it, run and get some now.) I have two glasses of wine on my nights off. I get my gummy bears when we go out to the theater. I enjoy all of my treats. But depending on what they are, I enjoy them rarely, or in small portions. For the most part my diet consists of lean meats, healthy grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables, fuel for my body. My daughter eats the same way. In fact, she picks through my salad with her own little fork, plucking out pieces of avocado, tomato, or spinach, asking "mama, take the stem off?" And for the last two months I have steadily worked my way down ten pounds. My daughter does "exercises" with me at park where we stop toward the end of my run, twisting and bending into yoga poses along with me. I feel fit. More of the cute clothes in my closet fit. I feel proud. I feel alive.
I am not shooting for some date. I will not do this until I hit a certain weight and then stop. In fact, I worry what I will do once I get down, twenty more pounds, into a healthy BMI range. I have no intention of continuing to lose much more weight beyond the top of that range, but I have no intention of quitting my routine. I will keep up this routine for the rest of my life. I plan to run well into my next pregnancy, as my doctor has said I can. I hope my daughter asks to jog with me some day when she's old enough. And until then, she sits patiently, playing with her toys, in the stroller.
I love jogging. I get runner's high. I get into a zone when I run. I feel invincible, both physically and mentally. There is no problem that seems too difficult to overcome, not even my brother and husband harassing me while I write to come and play monopoly. Nothing.
So I will keep running. For my life. For my daughter's life.
And so I can enjoy that half cheeseburger, those slices of pizza, that ice cream cone, and still have one enchilada.
And two glasses of wine.
I run for my life. I was in the best shape of my over thirty years of life when I got pregnant with Celaya. I was running five days a week, five miles a day, and biking or hiking on the weekends with my husband. I felt awesome. I got pregnant. After two years of trying. Two years of being overweight, generally nonchalant about intentional, regular exercise, and making excuses about why when, I finally changed it all about six months before I got pregnant. I buckled down and took a healthy (Weight Watchers) approach to eating and exercising. My body had been unhealthy. My health had been out of balance. I had an unhealthy relationship with food, and an unhealthy relationship with exercise. It took a long time to retrain my brain.
Case in point,
Tonight when I got home:
"How many enchiladas do you want, Shanna."
"One."
"One!?"
"Yea. One. I'm having beans and broccoli, too. I had a half a cheeseburger, french fries, and half an ice cream cone last night. I don't need a plate full of enchiladas tonight."
"Ohhhhhh! You had half a cheeseburger twenty four hours ago, so you can only have one enchilada tonight?"
Just a few months ago I would have eaten the whole damn cheeseburger, all the fries, the whole ice cream cone, the bagel I had for breakfast at work, two slices of pizza I had for lunch today (I probably would have added a sparkling juice and a cookie), and still had two enchiladas, twice the beans, none of the broccoli, and two or three glasses of wine tonight. Because I have lived a life of eating until I'm more than full.
I would walk a lot. I have always been active, walk, bike, swim, hike, but never intentionally, aggressively, purposefully, for my life. I have simply always enjoyed being active. But never active enough to counteract all my eating.
I really should have gone into competitive eating.
Instead, I realized I have always eaten way too much. I haven't necessarily been eating the wrong things. I have always loved fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains. But I have also always eaten at least double portions, and added all the ice cream, pastries, sour gummy bears, and the occasional fried food on top. I loved food to the point of sick obsession.
It's the way I grew up. We went grocery shopping on pay day, splurged on all the cheap, fatty foods, bought meat and carbohydrates in bulk, and threw in some apples, oranges, and bananas for good measure. All of our vegetables came in a can, except iceberg lettuce and tomatoes for the infrequent ranch dressing topped salad. My mother cooked the way her mother cooked the way her mother cooked. My great grandmother was raising a family during the depression. You filled up on starch and gravy. So that's what we did. We were working class, and we made do with what we had.
I has taken me decades to break those bad habits. I was doing great before I got pregnant. Then I went crazy with fattening up like a Thanksgiving turkey; I put on 75 pounds, and my daughter was born showing signs of diabetes.
Then I was afraid to lose too much weight too fast and lose my breastmilk, a problem rampant in my family history.
Well, I breastfed for the full year, maintaining a healthy weight for my baby, and a (ahem) more than healthy weight for myself.
So here I sat, more than a year after weaning my baby, staring her second birthday in the face, still weighing in at more than thirty pounds over my BMI.
Because that is what this has always been about: a healthy weight. I do not care about my weight per se. I look at super skinny women and think, "poor thing. Have a sandwich." My brother and I argue about "hot" women that I think are far too thin to be healthy. I never aimed to be skinny, and I still don't.
I do want my daughter to see me as a role model of health, in contrast to the yo-yo dieting women I grew up watching depriving themselves of treats, taking diet pills, looking for the next get thin quick fix to lose weight fast to fit into those jeans even if it means lying down flat on the bed to pull the zipper up while I suck it in as much as I can.
No thanks.
I run for my life. I run for my daughter's life. I still indulge in a half cheeseburger. I still have Cheeseboard pizza with my coworker on Wednesday nights. I have my little dark chocolate bar filled with speculoos (from Trader Joe's. If you haven't had it, run and get some now.) I have two glasses of wine on my nights off. I get my gummy bears when we go out to the theater. I enjoy all of my treats. But depending on what they are, I enjoy them rarely, or in small portions. For the most part my diet consists of lean meats, healthy grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables, fuel for my body. My daughter eats the same way. In fact, she picks through my salad with her own little fork, plucking out pieces of avocado, tomato, or spinach, asking "mama, take the stem off?" And for the last two months I have steadily worked my way down ten pounds. My daughter does "exercises" with me at park where we stop toward the end of my run, twisting and bending into yoga poses along with me. I feel fit. More of the cute clothes in my closet fit. I feel proud. I feel alive.
I am not shooting for some date. I will not do this until I hit a certain weight and then stop. In fact, I worry what I will do once I get down, twenty more pounds, into a healthy BMI range. I have no intention of continuing to lose much more weight beyond the top of that range, but I have no intention of quitting my routine. I will keep up this routine for the rest of my life. I plan to run well into my next pregnancy, as my doctor has said I can. I hope my daughter asks to jog with me some day when she's old enough. And until then, she sits patiently, playing with her toys, in the stroller.
I love jogging. I get runner's high. I get into a zone when I run. I feel invincible, both physically and mentally. There is no problem that seems too difficult to overcome, not even my brother and husband harassing me while I write to come and play monopoly. Nothing.
So I will keep running. For my life. For my daughter's life.
And so I can enjoy that half cheeseburger, those slices of pizza, that ice cream cone, and still have one enchilada.
And two glasses of wine.
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