Having it all?
I wasn’t sure I was going to post today, as I spent nap time watching the Olympic marathon instead of writing. (Hurrah for my TiVo, which lets me watch what I want during my extremely limited viewing time, and means that my son has probably seen less than 100 commercials in his life.)
I don’t run very much these days, but I’m still on a running email list. I’ve known these people for years, and consider them my friends. Recently, a few of them were commenting that they wished they had started running marathons when they were 30, so they could have seen what they could do before aging started catching up with them. Well, I still dream of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, but it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s not just the time that the training runs would take from the rest of my life, it’s the idea of spending a weekend chasing after my boys AFTER having done a 20 miler in the morning. I ran about 7 hilly trail miles last week and I was toast afterwards.
When I find myself getting frustrated at the things that I can’t do because of the commitments of parenting, I remind myself that the boys will only be in this very needy stage for a short period of time, a small fraction of my expected life. According to official statistics, I can expect to live almost another 50 years. As one of my friends likes to say, you can have it all, just not all at once.
And yet, there are doors that can’t be reopened once closed. Kids grow up. Taking 5 years out of the workforce shouldn’t totally change the options that are available for the next 45 years, but it all too often does. I hope that I’m still running 20 years from now, but my knees or something might not allow it. Or I could drop dead next week. So I’m not willing to totally postpone things that are important to me. This means I’m often overcommitted, often tired. But I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
