A couple of days ago, a magazine editor friend of mine was talking about what made a particular runner worth covering. “She’s the mother of two kids,” she said. My lips pursed. This woman had schedules to juggle that I did not, but why were her miles somehow more special?
I’m childless by choice, so the comment didn’t hit a maternal wound. But it clearly rattled something. Later that day, Twitter altered me to the book tour of a new anthology, Tales from Another Mother Runner. That little something clicked again. I opened the link. There were pictures of women, smiling and sweaty, after a good hard run. The camaraderie was palpable, and I realized that as a non-mom, I felt left out.
It wasn’t that long ago that I shunned women’s only races on the premise that women didn’t need a “special” event. Then I ran one and nearly wept at the abundance of love and support floating through the field. Now, I felt excluded on a technicality.
Of course, no one was excluding me but myself, so I signed up to go the reading. At the appointed hour, I climbed in the car, then climbed out. It’ll be a bunch of women talking about how hard it is to get out the door with kids and work and all, or how running makes them more patient with their children or the joy of seeing a child holding a sign at race, “Go Mommy!” I couldn’t contribute. I went anyway.
The place was packed. Women of all ages covered the benches and stood in the racks (the reading was held at a Fleet Feet running store). One woman breast fed a newborn. The only child in the room. Another brought her husband. The only man in the room. My mind wandered to my friend Beth.
Beth and I met at a group run hosted by our local running store. We bonded over our different-but-same love of running. I relish speedwork. She hates it. Yet there was nothing better to either of us than a steady-to-fast 10-miler on Thursday mornings.
Beth is a mother of teenagers, a boy (17) and a girl (15). Most of my mother running friends tend not to bring up their children (is this intentional?). Beth was no exception. But when I asked, she seemed surprised and delighted. Week after week, she regaled me with the drama and joys of teenhood: the challenge of the college search; her kids’ success in basketball (the boy) and soccer (the girl); the difficulty of raising a quiet son (is he OK?). We laughed when I confessed to having similar thoughts about my uncommunicative husband.
Kid chat over, we moved on to my freelance writing job. Beth was fascinated by the people I interviewed (who are you talking to today?) and by the places I’ve been (Congo, wow). She took me into a world I will never know. I opened a window for her on a life she will never lead.
I moved across the country two months ago and stared at the crowd wishing Beth could’ve joined me. The hosts of the evening—runners, authors, and mothers Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea—got things stared. It seems silly now to think that I expected all the book’s stories to be populated with children. The first reading was about a woman who participated in a naked 5k. (“I realized if the bouncing started to bother me, I could make little T-rex arms.”) The second was a delightful story of a new mother taking issue with the world “jogger,” a term I’ve smiled through as well. The third was a moving story of a reluctant runner whose mother died when she was five months pregnant.
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I drove home thinking about my friend Beth, and about Rachel, the mother of six I sat next to at the reading whose stories of adoption filled my heart, and the tales in the book. They are about identity, loss, love, resilience. I thought how talk of children is, at its core, a conversation about family. A topic I can relate to, even contribute to. Or, as was often the case with Beth, I could just listen. We fall into different clans—mother, marathoner, run-walker, masters—but we’re all one big tribe.
That would seem like the end of the story, except I woke the next morning to a tweet from Sarah Bowen Shea: “were so glad you joined the #motherrunner fun.” (More weeping.) So I did the only thing that seemed right. I skipped my run and sat on a spin biking reading stories written by mother runners.
