See Mommy Run

I was running one of my favorite loops from our house: an easy lope down Baltimore Canyon, a straight uphill grunt on Barbara Springs Trail to snaking, flat, smooth Crown Road, then up, up, up Huckleberry Trail, until I was finally on top of Blithedale Ridge where I could see the ocean in one direction, Mt. Tam in another, the city another, and green everywhere. I relished every minute, having gotten a one-hour hall pass in the middle of an unusually busy Saturday morning – come lunchtime, we’d be hosting my husband’s soccer pals and their families for a barbecue. At last count, 20 grown-ups, 15 kids.

At the crest of the last hill, I took off my sweaty shirt and ran with it balled up in my fist. I realized I was pushing the clock, so I picked up my pace, which
meant I was hammering down the spine of the ridge, zoned-out, when two bikers came whizzing around the corner, nearly crashing into me. One of the men laughed and said, “Hey, we just wanted to meet you!” His buddy skidded to a stop next to him, watched me run by, and called out, “Whoooee! Nothing wrong with that!”

I know I’m supposed to be offended by cat-calls, by strangers feeling like they can harass a woman alone on a mountain. But can I tell you how long it’s been since a random male paid me an unsolicited compliment? I even giggled a little as I pounded down the mountain. Those compliments meant something when I was in my twenties and had a true six-pack, and they mean more now that I am a forty year-old mother of two whose stomach muscles never quite recovered (or reconnected) after two pointy-looking pregnancies. Running is the one thing I still make time for these days, and so to have a compliment paid in the midst of it and because of it felt pretty damned good.

I haven’t mentioned that the big reason I had to boogey back home was that my husband needed to drive into San Francisco to the UCSF Fertility Clinic to produce a semen sample. When he returned, I’d give him a big kiss, pass on some barbecue instructions, and drive to the clinic myself where his jacked-up sperm would be inserted in me (in between our visits they’d sort through it, tossing out the bad guys, keeping the good guys, making it extra fabulous) just as our guests were arriving. This would be our second insemination after a year of trying to get pregnant with a third child, and we we’ve been having tough discussions about whether we think we want to take it to the next level—IVF (In Vitro Fertilization)—or not. We got pregnant immediately with our daughter, tried for a year and a half with our son, eventually conceiving him on our third round of insemination. And now here we are, doing it all again.

I think about getting pregnant pretty much every free second I have—analyzing our choice, imagining possible outcomes, considering the impact on our two children and our marriage—so I was definitely thinking about it when I roared around the corner into my two biking pals. Running home, I thought about how you just never, never know what the real story is behind the people you meet. How would these two dudes ever know that my wedding rings were off because I have some weird fungus on my ring finger, and that I was sprinting not as a part of a training regimen, but because waiting at home for me were a hula-hooping five year old, a chatty 21 month-old, and a sweet, hunky husband who trusts my maternal instincts enough to be on board with trying for a third, despite all the obvious practical reasons that it makes no sense at all? If we are lucky enough to conceive this month, it will be appropriate that conception took place in the midst of all that happy chaos—trail running and barbecue preparing and tricycling and hula-hooping—because that is exactly the kind of chaos that this baby will be born into. Life going full throttle, with a whole family ready to offer more love.