First law of thermodynamics

My friend Nigel called the other day. He was in the San Francisco airport en route home to New Zealand after having climbed Mt. Rainier outside Seattle. “I crested the rim of the summit crater,” he recounted, “and I felt I couldn’t go on.”

A 15-year-old memory that had been buried deep in my cortex — beneath memories of child birth, mothering panic, and hellacious airplane trips with an active toddler — came back in pieces, as if I were an amnesiac. I suddenly remembered that view from the crater rim over to the actual summit — the highest part of the crater rim — of Rainier, a 14,410-foot dormant volcano. I remember it seemed infinitely far away across the snow-filled crater floor beneath a deep blue sky.

Nigel made it, he said, just as I had, slogging behind my then-boyfriend. As Nigel talked, I sat on our screen porch, phone in hand, and was transported back briefly to that summit with the glorious view of Seattle, Puget Sound, the Olympic Range, Mt. Baker, the stump of Mt. St. Helens. I had been there just a decade earlier.

“So do you have any adventures planned?” asked Nigel, a globe-trotting political science professor whom I met in 1994 while climbing 18,510-foot Mt. Elbrus, also a dormant volcano, in southern Russia.

I looked down at the small roll of fat bulging over the waistband of my shorts and suddenly felt like a drop-out. Where once I would have replied, “Yes! I’m entered in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in a month,” or “We’re trying to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks this summer,” I replied: “Uh, we’re going to Maine next week; I might play a little tennis.”

There was a detectable pause on the other end of the phone. Nigel once told me that I was one of the fittest people he knew. I didn’t just enter the Leadville 100. I won it. I once climbed five of Colorado’s 14-ners in a weekend. And when Nigel and I climbed Elbrus, I didn’t just summit it. I was the first one in our group of five — all men — to make it. Then, with time to spare that afternoon, I skipped up its 18,442-foot sub-peak.

Now here I sat 13 years later with a goal of playing a little tennis, maybe walking on the beach or doing a 20-mile bike ride. And I felt like two people: the Previous Peg who knew what blood tasted like in her lungs, and the current version — also known as Samantha’s mom — who would like nothing more than eight solid hours of sleep and an afternoon reading a good book without hearing the word, “MOM!” shouted every five minutes.

As Nigel talked about his climb up the snowfields and glaciers of Rainier, I started wondering if Previous Peg would ever return, even for just a brief visit. Will I ever find the motivation — or desire — to push physical limits again? Or am I destined to watch my tummy roll grow larger, like tree rings building out each year?

I’d like to think that version one will return, once Samantha is older. If for no other reason than to still fit into my clothes. For now, I have slid into the role of Samantha’s mom, and I don’t have the energy to be both people. It seems as if the first law of thermodynamics applies to parenting—that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. While some days it feels as if all our energy has been utterly destroyed, I realize it has simply been used to create a stubborn, strong-willed, six-year-old whose current life goal is to become a horse rider.

Although I always thought I would pine for adventure, I don’t. At least most of the time. Friends no longer call inviting us on bike rides or backpacking trips. I still enjoy riding for a couple of hours or going for a short hike with only adults.

But to go out for too long feels selfish, as if I’m disrupting the family equilibrium — sucking up all the energy for my own personal good, when it’s Samantha who needs it so she won’t wither.

In truth, Andy and I have both withered. But I like to think of it as lying dormant.

Camping

As a kid, I hated camping. Camping meant bugs. Camping meant no TV. Camping meant we weren’t cool enough to stay at Howard Johnson’s.

Other kids got to spend their vacations swimming in HoJo’s indoor pools and eating hot fudge sundaes in the restaurant chain’s turquoise green booths. We spent ours under the roof of a green canvas L.L. Bean tent, the design of which hadn’t changed since George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge. And we ate whatever my mother could cook on the two-burner Coleman stove, set up on a picnic table at whatever campground was the site of that summer’s vacation. Mostly, we ate spaghetti.

Once it was pitched, which took the better part of an afternoon, the tent was spacious enough for four to sleep side-by-side. My parents each slept on air mattresses with matching flannel L.L. Bean sleeping bags, while my sister and I made do with cotton mattresses dug from the musty alcoves of my grandparent’s attic. These were covered with old muslin sheets and scratchy, moth-eaten, wool Navy blankets once used by my grandfather during World War I.

But our vacation home was not entirely without luxury. In an uncharacteristic moment, my father — a man who takes his Scottish heritage seriously — splurged on the tent’s matching green awning that made it look as if it had a porch. If it rained during our camping expeditions — which it invariably did—my father would put on a dark blue wool balaclava, sit in a lawn chair under the awning, and read Chekhov. Or worse, he would fish. We were expected to do the same.

My mother would shut herself in the car and read back issues of The New Yorker while my sister and I threw ourselves in despair onto our itchy wool beds.

“I hate camping,” my sister said over and over again. I moaned in agreement.

By far the worst part of the whole experience was the fly-infested outhouses from which emanated the worst smell I had ever encountered. While our parents read, my sister and I would see how close we could get to the offending structure before the odor overpowered us, then scurry away. The very thought of setting foot inside it induced constipation. Only once, when I was eight and we were driving cross-country to see friends in Minnesota, did we ever stay at a campground with flush toilets. That campground also featured a swimming pool, tether-ball, and four-square court, plus a bunch of other kids to play with. It was in Indiana, and I didn’t want to leave.

By our teenage years, we would have sooner done time in prison than gone camping. Camping was boring. Camping was for kids. Camping was barbaric. Camping was beneath us. We required daily showers and regular changes of freshly laundered clothing.

Sometime during college, though, camping became cool. On Friday afternoons in the early fall, we would load a friend’s Ford Bronco with sleeping bags (mine was a North Face bag purchased at EMS with my summer earnings), foam pads, and a two-person tent into which four of us would squeeze. We would head north, where someone always knew someone who owned land in Vermont, although it was never easy to find. I liked it out here, despite the fact that most of the time I was cold, hungry, and not well rested. But we were different than the loafer-wearing, pearl-earring set back on campus.

I liked camping so much that I changed majors — from art history to geology, which I naively assumed was like Camping for Credit.

One summer, the geology department unwisely gave eight of us the keys to a van and a week to reach the required summer field camp 2,000 miles away in Red Lodge, Montana. The goal was to see as much of the country as we could — from Niagara Falls to the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the Grand Tetons — on the $75 our parents had paid the department for gas and whatever other money we had squeezed from their wallets. On that five-day odyssey, we drove west, discovering places most of us had only read about, and pulled over when we were tired — in corn fields and state parks, in town parks and beside the road. It wasn’t exactly camping in the strict sense, more like a cheap way to sleep.

I continued camping even after I was gainfully employed. Yes, it was a cheap way to sleep, but it was the sense of promised adventure that was camping’s allure in early adulthood. A night sleeping in a tent was almost always followed by a hike up one of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, an all-day mountain bike ride around Utah’s Canyonlands, a raft trip down Class V rapids in West Virginia, or a day spring skiing in New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine.

My camping excursions stopped when Samantha was born. It seemed natural to stop when she was a baby. Who wants to dig for diapers by headlamp? Find the bottle in a cooler at 2 a.m.? Or make a convincing argument that the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t like to live in forests like the one outside the tent’s walls but instead prefers darker evergreen forests in hills where no one in their right mind would never camp ...

But Samantha is almost seven now, and we haven’t incorporated camping back into our summer routine. The bugs have something to do with it. Black flies sense that I am a giant feast, and no level of DEET keeps them at bay. But it’s not like the bugs didn’t swarm me before she was born. It’s just that I’m not willing to put up with the discomfort of camping with no reward. And there’s not much promise for adventure when Samantha asks, “When can we go home?”

Last summer, we tested the waters with a modified backpacking trip to a hut on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range — modified because we tried to mitigate whining by driving to the summit, then hiking the 1.5 miles down to the hut. And hut is a misnomer. More like a lodge with remarkably odor-free pit toilets. (This should not have come as a surprise, however, given that one night for three cost over $200.) The place slept 90 in bunk rooms, and Andy, Samantha and I were assigned a triple-decker bunk in a room with five other people. Once the novelty of the bunks wore off, Samantha was too scared to sleep alone and ended up sharing the two-foot-wide mattress with Andy, who had been trying to sleep on the bunk above her. We were all grumpy the next morning, and the only adventure was hiking s-l-o-w-l-y back to the car.

Do we try a bona fide camping trip this year? My enthusiasm is low. But I do want to instill the sense that we are a family that camps, that enjoys the outdoors, and that seeks adventure. Not a family that watches TV. But I don’t want her to hate camping either — to associate it with bugs and bad odors, or think we’re doing it because we’re too cheap to book a room at the Sheraton (which would have cost less than our night in the “hut”).

If we could pitch a tent at Disney World, would she have fonder memories of camping? Or would she just remember that her parents were both very grumpy?

Maybe we should start by camping in the backyard. At least then a clean, odor-free bathroom is only a few steps away.

House guests

After my sister got married, she moved overseas with her husband. With the prospect of free lodging in an exotic land, my mother announced that she and my father would soon visit. For three weeks. 

My new brother-in-law went pale. In the end, my parents stayed for two weeks. And my mother has been the subject of significant ribbing ever since.

Now my parents generally keep their visits to a polite three days. Not that my mother wouldn’t stay longer if she could. My father knows that fish and guests stink after three days ... except when the purchase of plane tickets is involved.

My mother would live with us if we hinted at an invitation. She refers to our guest room as “her” room and seems deeply offended if we tell her that she can’t visit, as if we’ve put her out in the street without a warm coat.

This happened last fall. We were renovating our master bedroom and moved — for six months — into “her” room. She called to announce an impending visit (there is no asking, just announcing), and I told her that there was no vacancy — that we were living in the guest room.

There was a pause, as if she were waiting for me to say, “Oh never mind, you can come. Andy and I will sleep on the futon in the office.”

But horrible daughter that I am, I did not capitulate. They stayed at the local Comfort Inn. I felt guilty. Andy did not.

But there have been other times when saying “I’m afraid that’s an inconvenient time to come,” or simply “No,” hasn’t stopped her. Three years ago, she and my father made plans to fly to England from an airport near our house, not theirs. Yet they failed to advise us of their plans. A friend from Colorado had plans to visit us at the exact time.

Put off by their presumption that mi casa es su casa, I firmly said no, that I would not ask my friend to sleep on the couch (or futon) so they could roost here. I thought that was that. My friend arrived, and when we returned from a day trip, there was my mother sitting at our kitchen table.

“We were too tired to drive home,” she said in a wet-puppy voice.

Andy was outraged. I was mad. My friend felt awkward. I asked them to sleep on the futon, then felt guilty all night.

It’s not that I don’t love my parents. I do. Very much. And I know the sacrifices they made when my sister and I were young — eating fried clams at HoJo’s rather than at a nicer place with table cloths, driving us through freezing rain to reach the orthodontist, listening to us whine and complain through the drudgery of prep school, and fetching our tired selves from college, not to mention paying for it.

It’s just that their visits make me feel as if I’m being drawn and quartered. My parents like to think that they just blend into our lives when they visit. But in truth, it only works best when we — or specifically I — become part of theirs again. I feel torn between my former role as child under their care and my current role as adult with a child now under my care — a child who wants my attention as much as they want it too.

“She certainly runs the house, doesn’t she?” my mother will say in the middle of one of Samantha’s “Grandma-is-visiting” meltdowns.

“She does live here,” I say in Samantha’s defense. I want to have a meltdown too.

Then there’s the fact that we lead a different lifestyle than my parents did when they were in the trenches of raising children. I choose to work, and to exercise, as often as I can. My parents firmly believe that dinner should involve silverware and be on the table at 6 p.m. or shortly thereafter. And they don’t always agree with where I cut corners. My father once announced that he doesn’t consider pizza an adequate dinner entrée.

“What are you planning for dinner tonight?” my mother always asks between bites of cereal. When she was raising children, she always had a dinner plan, and she seems to feel that starvation is imminent if something isn't defrosting by mid-morning, or a grocery list isn't prepared. I usually regard dinner as something that can be pulled together in the 20 minutes before the appointed hour, and sometimes it involves the same cereal she was munching on for breakfast. But I have to say, she has never gone hungry in my home.

When either Andy or I dash off in the evening for a bike ride or game of tennis, my mother gets a worried look and asks, “When will you eat?

“When we get back.”

“It’s not good for you to eat so late,” she replies, still worried.

“It’s not good for me to not exercise,” I insist.

Then there are the comments about parenting style. “You act like you’re running a restaurant,” she chastises when I ask Samantha what she would like for dinner, macaroni and cheese or cous cous and chicken. “Just make her eat what you’re eating.”

Except I don’t know many 6-year-olds who eat take-out Thai food or spinach lasagna. And I refuse to subsist on mac & cheese.

In the hope that she might broaden her view, I point out to my mother that Andy, Samantha and I are reasonably happy and well-nourished. That Andy and I make a decent living and aren’t on the gov’ment dole. That we help the neighbors and the community when we can. And that Samantha doesn’t swing from the chandeliers, play loud violent video games, or yell obscenities out the window.

But perhaps if she did, my parents wouldn’t visit as often.

Large prey

The day after Christmas, Andy announced that he wanted to buy a new TV. Not just any TV but one of those giant flatscreen high-definition TVs that become the focal point of whatever room they lord over.

We didn’t need a new TV. We had two smaller flatscreen TVs in our kitchen and bedroom, and the “main” TV — the one in the so-called TV room — was a perfectly good Sony given to us by my in-laws nine years ago. It measured 27 inches on the diagonal and had a clearer picture than our other two newer TVs. 

While we were visiting my family in Atlanta over the Holidays, Andy, my father, and my brother-in-law were left unattended long enough that they set off on a trip to a local electronics store. Andy was soon captivated by the rows of gigundus televisions with such clear pictures that he could see if Peyton Manning's nose was running and whether his teammates had shaved or not.

“It would be nice to see the football,” Andy told me after announcing his desire to purchase one of these TVs. And not only the TV, but also home theater too, so he could hear the fans cheering all around, as if our couch were in a private box at Lambeau Field. And by ball, he meant any ball — football, baseball, tennis ball.

“You can even see the individual blades of grass,” he claimed, referring to the turf under whatever football game he had been watching while in the store.

“Oh?” I replied. “Why is that important?”

“It’s just such a clear picture.” He was almost giddy, and he isn’t the type to succumb to giddiness.

The conversation then turned to money. When I asked the price, he hedged: “Um, more than we should spend right now.”

With that, I figured we had put the topic to bed. But he was not ready to concede. “It would improve our Super-Bowl-watching experience,” he stated, as if I cared about that annual rite. “And I’ve been waiting for these TVs to come down in price.”

Not long enough, I thought. I just couldn’t understand his desire. Not that I’m immune to shopping impulses. But they normally involve shoes or sweaters at TJ Maxx, items that cost generally less than $50. We’re outdoorsy types, not barca-loungers. For the price of this much-sought-after piece of electronic equipment, we could ski in the Alps for a week.

Then there’s the issue of practicality, and Andy is normally the pinnacle of practicality. We haven’t replaced the toaster oven that he purchased in 1985 because it still works, and he wears shirts he’s owned since college because they still fit and aren’t threadbare. And we drive our cars until the engines are about to blow. Which is about to happen on our VW. At least in my opinion. Andy says that the car is merely temperamental. Fine, but $3,000 would be a nice down payment on a less fickle car.

What was driving my typically budget-conscious husband to drop most of month’s pay on an audio/visual toy? Is it the 21^st century way of bagging large prey?

“Look what I brought home, honey! This should last us through the winter.”

Or is it his need to master something? To put it together, adding its remote control to the flock already roosting on the coffee table, and make it work despite the inherent complexity?

Or is it that Andy, and his male brethren, have, for the most part, been able to hang on to their childhoods more easily than women? And giant HD TVs — and home theater, ATVs, and even fancy lawn tractors — are simply the best toys around. They can get together on Super Bowl Sunday to show off their new toys the way they once gathered in the neighborhood to check out Ralphie’s new Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot, Range Model Air Rifle.

We women, we’re the ones poo-pooing their grand schemes and telling them, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Our childhoods feel like a lifetime ago, and now our days are consumed by keeping the nest in order, not adorned with expensive electronics. Three grand could go toward a season’s worth of groceries, a car that starts on demand, even Ralphie’s college fund. We kill the joy and feel self-righteous doing it.

When I returned from a business trip in mid-January to find a 46-inch Samsung LCD TV commanding the north wall of the TV room, I realized that I was more jealous than angry at the money “thrown away.” Andy’s inner child is alive and well. He can conceive of buying such big-ticket toys and enjoy them with no remorse.

My inner child left around the time our real child arrived, apparently leaving behind a surly grouch.

As I stood watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater — the neon tropical fish swimming by as if we were on the reef with them — I realized that I miss my inner child.

Should I go looking for her? Or will I find her somewhere on the screen of that big TV?

Beauty or a beast?

Tasked with outfitting myself for a Halloween party, and wishing to build my costume around a pair of rotten teeth purchased a few years ago for just such an occasion, I headed to WalMart.

Half-an-hour later, I had a complete trashy teenager ensemble — purple crushed velvet camisole with copious bust, push-up bra with molded foam cups and itchy lace trim, fishnet pantyhose on sale for $1, big hoop earrings, matching skull-and-crossbones leather-ette armbands, a red wig, and plastic high-heel sandals (la piece de résistance for $5.88). To all this I added a denim mini-skirt that I had sewn from a pair of Levis in 1980. The total cost: $40.

It’s cheap to look cheap.

Samantha, age 6, declared that I looked beautiful. I looked in the mirror and saw one of those women who strut through the midway at the county fair on a Saturday night. Is this who my daughter aspires to be? I find myself hoping that conservative and preppy comes back into vogue before she reaches an age when what she wears will really matters. To her, and to us. Or will she always have a natural attraction to styles that make her parents wince?

When I was young, my mother’s college friend — a woman we knew only as Olga — would send us boxes of clothes that her daughter had outgrown. Olga lived in New York City and was obviously a member of a socioeconomic group that could afford to dress its offspring in miniature versions of the same clothes that the adults wore to the country club and PTA meetings. My mother would open each shipment and ogle over the Pendleton wool plaid pants and camels hair coats.

My older sister and I would cringe, denouncing each garment as ugly, hideous, and something only old ladies would wear. We would sooner wear our pajamas to school than be caught dressed in any of Olga’s daughter’s cast-offs.

Instead, my favorite outfit was a leather-look vinyl mini-skirt, complete with fetching fringe along the hem, and a matching brown vinyl vest, also rimmed with fringe. I remember wearing this outfit as many days in a row as I could, and my mother didn’t seem to mind, probably because the skirt and vest didn’t require much maintenance other than an occasional sponging. My sister owned a similar outfit, except her vest had longer fringe.

But when our appearance was required at a family event in Boston, where my grandmother lived, my mother would intervene in our clothing selections. At least until I was 12, when one fateful day, she threw in the towel. She had taken me to a local department to purchase “something decent to wear” to my weird aunt's funeral. The funeral was scheduled for Trinity Church in Boston, and my mother must have thought a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller might wander in off the street. But we were never close to Aunt Ann, my father’s older sister, and her passing was not an event that I thought warranted a fashion makeover. She had smoked eight packs of cigarettes a day and, little wonder, fell victim to lung cancer. She had also once had a frontal lobotomy back when that was the treatment for the mentally unhinged, and my sister and I were as emotionally close to her as we were to a floor lamp. Except for the floor lamp in my grandmother’s bedroom that turned on and off with a clap of the hands. We preferred its company to just about everyone on my father’s side of the family.

From the racks at Hovey's Department Store, my mother thought the perfect outfit for a spring funeral was a skirt and matching shirt with giant pink roses set against a light teal background. She insisted (insisted) that we buy it. I looked in the dressing room mirror and felt like one of Maria Von Trapp’s stepchildren dressed in a frock fashioned from the villa’s drapes. With hands defiantly on hips and snarly expression on my face, I insisted I would not wear it. Yet my mother bought it anyway. I felt completely and utterly defeated.

Then on the way home, we stopped at Zayre’s (like Ames, only lower quality, if that’s possible). There, I found a beige gauze skirt with matching t-shirt and brown faux leather belt. Now this was me! Wearing this outfit, I could hold my head high, smile at my fellow funeral goers, even chat up a Rockefeller, should one walk into the church vestibule. I'd like to think my enthusiasm convinced my mother to buy this outfit and return the other. In truth, the fact that it cost under $10 (to Hovey's $30) sealed the deal.

After that, my mother rarely forced her tastes upon me, probably because she realized it would cost her less money.

I choose not to fight clothing battles with Samantha. As long as her outfits are climatically correct and not too skimpy, she can wear stripes and flowers, glitter and leopard print. Not that I don’t wince or make comments. But I don’t put up a fight.

I’m confident that, thanks to peer pressure, her tastes will mature. As long as her peers aren't the ladies at the county fair.

Meow

When I entered high school in 1978, a girl could choose from three varsity sports, two of which — field hockey and cheerleading — had skirts as part of the uniform. I chose cross-country running, a sport for which I had, and still have, zero talent. But at least I could wear shorts.

We showed up every day for practice — the first sport that most of us had done, except for middle-school cheerleading. We ran long distances and short, and the primary lesson that I learned was how to suffer, that breathing hard did not mean death was imminent. By the end of the season, I could actually run three miles without stopping to walk.

But no one really taught us how to compete. The goal, of course, was to win. Or to run as fast as we possibly could. But we had no idea how to act as sportswomen. The other girls in every race were our enemy. Even the other girls on our team were the enemy. And we often treated them as such, in races and in life.

If we couldn't beat our competitors in a race, then we would trounce them off the field: for what they wore, who they hung out with, what they said, and where they were going in life -- but only behind their backs. We could be very, very cruel.

Thanks to Title IX, girls can now pick from a host of non-skirt-wearing sports. 

But has any of the mean-girl crap stopped? Can girls be proud of teammate who did well? Or only if they do well too? Has cat fighting remained a women’s-only sport?

Men seem to have the competition thing figured out. They compete on the field, against the clock, in the gym, and in the boardroom. But that's where they leave it. And they trash talk and tease with an innate sense of where the line is, or so a male friend tells me. Should a really good soccer player, cyclist, runner, lawyer, doctor, you name it, move to town, the others step up to the plate, try to keep up, and devise ways to excel themselves.

For men, a rising tide raises all boats.

Women seem to view the rising tide as a sign of imminent drowning. Rather than learn to swim, we stand there, water rising, making nasty comments about the tide-raiser.

Why do we care? And why do we pounce so brutally on a woman who dares show herself above the rest — in sports, in fashion, on the job? Must we compete in every venue? Do we fear our husbands, boyfriends, mates will judge us in comparison? Then flee, hoping instead to find the big-haired, big-boobed woman who once ran a successful Mary Kay franchise and now lives to decorate her home in color-coordinated basket arrangements? Does spinsterhood loom unless we have pot pourri in every bathroom and can still fit into our skinny jeans?

Why can't we rise with the tide? And be happy that someone in our midst is a success? Is it innate? Or simply a skill that we were never taught -- the skill of how to be a good teammate.

How great would it be to be on a team where everyone complimented us on our strengths and politely overlooked our weaknesses? Who cheered us in victory and defeat? And who openly talked about what each of us brings to the table? Might each of us actually flourish?

Hard to know. I have yet to find a team that works this way.

So if you'll excuse me, I'll go sharpen my claws on the furniture. Just to be safe.

New math: when 70-30 is 50-50

I married Andy for many reasons, but mostly because he’s not a typical guy. He finds hunting stories loathsomely dull and wouldn’t set foot in a Hooters even if the food was good. Or so he claims.

I’m not exactly a Cosmo girl myself. I have never had a manicure or pedicure, don’t pluck my eyebrows, and think Martha Stewart deserves her own special ring in Hell – a ring decorated with mismatched hand-me-down sofas (I have the perfect set!), wooden tables with water stains, and a floor covered in orphan Legos.

In our newlywed days, Andy and I did almost everything together, from pedaling away the miles on long bike rides, to watching movies (except those starring Julia Roberts). We even shopped together, sharing the same disdain of malls. Planning was easy. Whatever one of us wanted to do, the other did too. Mostly. 

So when Samantha was born six years ago, it came as quite a shock that our roles suddenly and sharply differed. Yes, I had some inkling over the nine-month gestation (actually, ten) that things would be different. For starters, I grew huge, topping out just 20 pounds shy of my 200-pound, 6 foot, four inch husband. I no longer walked, I lumbered. While Andy went on long bike rides, I sat on the couch and sulked, only managing a short walk (waddle) in the hours he was gone and thinking surely when the baby was born, our roles would equalize again. Ironically, my wedding ring no longer fit.

Five days after Sam was born, Andy left for work, his paternity leave over. Or so he declared. I stood at the door in a baggy t-shirt, two wet spots growing on the front, my rear-end filling out my elasticized-waist pants, Sam wide awake in my arms. What would this little baby and I do all day? We sat on the couch for hours, Samantha sipping slowly as if my breast were her own personal cocktail party while I stared into space (reading a magazine was anatomically impossible). When Sam wasn’t bellied up to the bar, we walked. I felt like Forest Gump, not so much walking away from something as trying to walk back into it.

I soon became insanely jealous of Andy’s 45-minute commute to work. He could listen to NPR uninterrupted, spend eight hours at work conversing with fellow adults, and use his brain as if it hadn’t been blown to bits by hormones, anxiety, tedium, and constant interruptions. His body hadn’t changed. He could still ride his bike at the same speed he always had. He even joined a tennis league.

That had been my life too. Now who was I? An overweight, overwrought, overtired woman incapable of speaking in complete sentences and who broke out into tears at the slightest provocation, like not being able to find the right sippy cup valves at the supermarket. Work for Andy must have been a relief, a step back into what life had been, a break from this creature who had taken over his wife, this creature who looked at him, jealousy brewing behind a pathetic mask that had a passive aggressive look of, “Why won’t you help me?”

No wonder he took up tennis.

Since those first months, we have taken many steps, collectively and separately, and just as many missteps. It has taken several years to understand and control my jealousy, trying to come to terms with the root causes — the misguided or unfilled expectations that led to it and the fact that, despite my feminist insistence that men and women are alike, we’re not. What I see as a 70-30 split of housework and parenting, Andy sees as 50-50.

Jealousy still rears its ugly head, and Andy calls me on it. I am not so quick to call him on his missteps, for confrontation upsets the domestic apple cart. And rather than dealing with it, I scurry about picking up the apples as I fume and ruminate. And then I write, first disparaging Andy, then realizing that I should disparage myself in equal share.

I must confess that I’m selfishly jealous of his tennis because it doesn’t include me, and that despite my occasional threats of getting a real job, I’m happy to work from home. Were it the other way around, our house might resemble a cross between Circuit City and Toys-R-Us, a complicated mix of plastic children’s toys, high-definition TVs, and a remote control that works every appliance except the washing machine. In the fridge? Milk and beer.

Instead, the refrigerator is mostly full of vegetables, as well as milk and beer. The washer runs perhaps too regularly, and I sit here writing blog entries.

It’s cheaper than couples counseling.

Settling Down

When my mother discovered that Andy and I were getting married, the first words out of her mouth were, “Good, maybe now you’ll settle down.”

Settle down? I thought. Like throw out my mountain bike, backpack, and passport in exchange for an apron and flowery house dress? She seemed to think that I rode my bike every day to impress someone, that I traveled because I was looking for something, or that I only scrambled up steep couloirs because I was chasing some boy. OK, maybe a little. But I genuinely love being outdoors -- skiing, hiking, cycling, even just walking. I spent my 20s and early-30s bicycle racing in the West, climbing almost every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado, slogging up the snowfields and glaciers of Mt. Rainier in Washington State and Mt. Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak. I skied every winter weekend and not on the bunny slope. Giving all this up and “settling down” would be as difficult as cutting off a limb.

But this is what my mother had done in the 1950s when she finally met my father. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946 and spent the following decade teaching elementary school. On weekends, she skied, hiked, and rode her bike, among other pursuits no doubt considered too vigorous for her gender. One summer, she traveled to Europe alone, studying in Oslo, Norway, and traveling the continent. On one expedition that summer, she hitchhiked on a freighter from Italy back to Norway.

She rarely tells us stories from this decade, as if this time of her life happened to someone else. Her mission, she said, was to find a husband, and after 10 years, it must have felt a bit desperate. Most of her contemporaries had met their mates in college. My mother had missed the boat and was adrift at sea, not really enjoying the voyage and doing everything she could to find a friendly port in which to anchor. The word "spinster" was probably uttered by mean-spirited relatives.

When she met my father in 1956, her wanderlust faded. She had found her port. They married in 1959, and my sister was born two years later. I followed two years after that. She shelved her blackboard chalk and threw herself into mothering. As far as I can tell, she was never happy again.

My sister and I were lucky to be born into the generation that believed it could do whatever it wanted. Although I always assumed I'd have children -- two girls two years apart like me and my sister -- I didn't particularly want to be a mother. Mothers did boring things like cook vegetables, hang laundry in the dark basement, darn socks, and nag. 

Fathers, on the other hand, left the house every day, had offices with windows overlooking the world, sometimes traveled, and made money. They talked to interesting people, told dirty jokes, and laughed. They were happy. I wanted to be like my father, without much consideration for who would actually cook vegetables, wash clothes, and do the mending for those two girls I would be having. My sister and I both attended the same prep school as my father, then went to his alma mater for college. Our classmates talked of law school, med school, and jobs in New York. No one ever talked of having children.

When Andy and I married in 1998, nothing changed in my life. I raced my bicycle up New Hampshire's Mt. Washington, I rafted Class V rapids in West Virginia, and I backcountry skied at night in a foot of fresh snow. We bicycled around Mallorca, skied in Zermatt, and mountain biked in Moab, Utah. No way would I settle down.

Now that we've had a child though -- a girl, but only one -- I wonder if my mother's unquestioning acceptance of her role wasn't easier than balking against its demands. I constantly juggle too many balls, and one invariably hits the floor with a thud.

But is it better to pick up a dropped ball than tediously tossing only one ball in the air over and over, year after year until I forget that I actually am capable of more?

I have settled down to a degree. My bike rides rarely leave the county, and when we ski, we stick to the easy trails, trailing behind our daughter. We still travel, but we stay in places with swimming pools and eat in restaurants that sell more kid food than cocktails. Although I neither work full-time nor wear the Mommy hat 24/7, I have to keep a few balls in the air, even if I no longer toss them as high. It's the only way I know who I am.