No Finish Line

to the twenty-fourth edition of Tiny True Stories! I’m so glad you’re here. This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less and little letters of recommendation. If you want to get right to that story, scroll on down past the picture!

I’m tempted to apologize for falling off my monthly schedule. But we are all just hanging on for dear life, right? Dear life. We traveled twice in October, which is an incredible privilege and joy (and also both kids got hand foot and mouth disease, woo), and also I just finished unpacking from those. In November.

Anyway it’s also been hard to write in general, because who CARES that I am busy with the logistics and loveliness of travel and children when people are being grabbed off the streets and children are being tear-gassed, and our government is trying to starve and harm so many because being poor is your fault, apparently. Two people we know and love dearly are dealing with cancer. And I write some version of this every time, don’t I? It’s so tempting to continue to say, well, this is always the way. Your brain gets numb and wants to check out. And you cannot check out.

During the pandemic there was this website called Window Swap (I just checked and you can still look at it!) where you can watch video feeds of real views out people’s windows all over the world. This morning I looked out an apartment window in Russia, where some kids were playing soccer, out the window of a moving bus along a river in Cork, out a ground-floor window in Spain at some construction barrels, at a road busy with mopeds in Kathmandu, and at a garden in Michigan, which made me homesick. It’s easy to say these things mean nothing but to each of us these are everything.

Here is my window for you.

I mentioned in previous newsletters, but I tore my ACL earlier this year and rehab has been going well but it takes FOREVER and doing it well is like a full-time job. Here is a story about my son and I learning to walk at the same time.

No Finish Line

The distance from here to the nice condos two blocks away is .3 miles. I’ve never run a marathon or a half marathon, but if they sold those bumper stickers with .3 on them I’d put one on my car. .3 miles is my goal distance. I know every step of this course. The neighbors two doors down have a fancy car and a fancy boat, but I never see how fancy because they are always covered by brown tarps. When my daughter was little and learning to walk, we had to cross the street before we got to the tarps because they scared her. She didn’t know the shapes of boats or cars and instead pointed at them and cried, wondering what monsters hid beneath. But at Christmas time she forgot about the monsters when the neighbors hung large colored bulbs on their fence, and we would walk back and forth, back and forth, so that she could touch every one. At .1 miles, the house at the end of the first block is orange with purple shutters. A man and his adult son live there, with their old shaggy dog tied up out front. The son sits at a window on his computer, and the dog naps in the browning grass. Sometimes, the father comes out and plays his bagpipes, joyfully and badly, so loud they echo for blocks.

When I was nine months pregnant with my daughter, my hour-long walks through the neighborhood grew shorter, and shorter, until at the end I could only walk the .3 miles and back before I started cramping. After giving birth, I was only able to walk one block, .1 miles, to the orange and purple house and back. In a few weeks, I could walk a block farther, to the run-down house with a busy, overgrown garden. The garden was wild, always a bit weedy, but full of color and bees. When my daughter learned to walk a bit farther, we always stopped here so she could point out every color: yellow, purple, red, white, green.

Now, my son and I are learning to walk at the same time. He’s fourteen months old, and I’m 442 months older than that, recovering from ACL surgery. When I learned I’d torn my ACL completely, all my recovery instructions seemed impossible to follow while caring for two small children. Keep your leg elevated and wrapped, ice on and off every 20 minutes, avoid the stairs unless absolutely necessary, sleep as much as you can. In another life I could have followed these directions well. Yes, I needed to ice my knee every twenty minutes. What can I tell my daughter, who asks me every twenty minutes if I can play outside with her yet? For how many days do I have to tell my daughter no, when she pulls on my hand after dinner and asks me to dance with her? How long do I wear the ace bandage, which scares my daughter so much that she asks me over and over if I broke my leg and stops herself from hugging me because she does not want to hurt me? I tell her no, my bones are okay; it’s just a tendon, like a big rubber band holding the bones of my knee together. “Tendon” is a new word for her, so she starts saying that I hurt my “tender” and I do not correct her.

After surgery I lay on the couch, icing my knee, and my son is just starting to pull up, and wants to walk. He makes his way toward me, hand over hand, stepping sideways, and rests his head on my arm for a second, before pulling on my pinkie, asking me to get up and help him walk. Right now he can walk better and stand longer than I can. He doesn’t understand when I tell him I can’t, and he starts to cry.

Instead my son walks in loops around the coffee table. He needs to hold on, then he doesn’t need to hold on as much. Soon, I also do not need to hang on as much to my crutches, and I can make my way down to the floor to play with him. The distance from the edge of the couch to where I sit on the floor is 10 steps. My son practices this again, and again, each time smiling as if it’s the best thing he’s ever done. Soon he starts to ask to go outside, and soon I can take him. He holds onto one finger and we go a half a block. He examines the neighbors’ covered boat, pokes the tarp, unafraid. In a few weeks, we make it together to the end of the block. The dog is now gone, the father and son moved out, and the orange house is being gutted for a renovation. Someone has ripped almost all the purple off. Neither of my children notice.

Soon we make it .3 miles, past the garden, past the nice condos, all the way to the end of the next block, to a small dip in the sidewalk for the curb cutout. My children both run up and down the tiny ramp, screaming as if it’s a roller coaster. “Yay!” my daughter says, “Your tender is better!” I don’t tell her it’s going to take as long as an entire pregnancy before my knee feels normal. My son doesn’t know it’s going to take a little longer for him to walk without holding my finger, longer still before he can walk without falling, then run.

This is not an inspiring story, or a story about will or trying. I don’t want to tell the story that we worked hard and overcame our whatever. Instead all we do is put one foot down, and then the next. My son reaches his hands up all day long, asking for help, wanting to get from here to there. He doesn’t know the feeling of loss of ability yet; he only moves forward. He and I both know the feeling of want. Of standing on the edge and wanting to go further, do more, and you just can’t do it. He feels the “yet” at the end of that sentence, his bones filled with yet. I try to feel it, too.

.3 miles, and then a little further. Now I start to gently pull my finger away from my son. He only needs it for a second. When he walks toward me, he laughs with the joy of walking, then collapses into my arms. This is a race without a finish line. We’ll walk the whole way. We rest when we need to.

1. Wear cropped tops if you want. I thought for sure I would never, EVER wear them (and still, long live long, cozy tops), but even though my belly is the softest it’s ever been and I’m the biggest I’ve ever been, I’ve been liking wearing crop tops. Your body is your home; decorate it however you like.

2. Let your kid and her friend destroy your living room to make a fort so good they both cry when they have to stop playing.

   

   3. Enter the giveaway for (or better yet, preorder!) my friend Portia’s upcoming book Homebound, a queer space odyssey (blurbed by Madeleine Miller!!) with tons of 80s nostalgia and gorgeous writing (Portia is also a poet!). I can’t wait to read it!

One foot then the next. Until next time,

Jill