Bird on a Wire

Y'all, this morning I went for a little jog - 3 miles - and it was really a grind.  Last January, my husband and I ran a marathon - that would be 26.2 miles, and now it's a struggle to move my butt 3 miles.  Not too cool. But I'm still doing it, because if I stop, I'll never start again.  Have you ever let yourself get totally out of shape and then tried to start again?  It's hell.

It's really hell after you turn 30, as I found out when I decided to get back into shape several years ago.  I had been pretty fit during my late 20s, and then the day I found out I was pregnant with Finn I decided that I didn't need to bother with exercise for a while.  That little honeymoon lasted 4 years, since after he was born I was breastfeeding (love the weight-loss, eat all the cookies you want bonus of that!), then pregnant again with Gus, then breastfeeding again, then just too busy to exercise.  When Gus was about 2, Matt and I noticed that we had become very, very slack and could not run a mile even if there was a wild bear coming for us, so we hit the pavement.  It was so, so miserable and painful to bring our bodies back from the brink like that, that we have tried to stay somewhat in shape (sometimes more than other times) ever since.  With 40 looming like an exam you don't want to study for, I know that the next hiatus I take from exercise will be a permanent one.

Anyway, so I drag my body around, pushing Ruby in the stroller or, very occasionally, on my own, and I actually like it now, so that's a plus.  Today, I was alone - Ruby is starting at a little preschool and I had ONE free hour (!), so I got out my Ipod and hit it.  Where am I going with this?  Well, one of the songs that came up was Aaron Neville's version of Bird on a Wire, and it reminded me of an entry that I wrote on the blog that I kept while Matt and I were training for the marathon last winter.  You can read it right here.  That was before we had Ruby, and I remember having a very emotional breakdown on the run as I listened to the lyrics of that song.  I was thinking so much of my dad, who has lived with Parkinson's for 30 years and for whom we were running the marathon.  But it was January, and we had just passed our court date and knew that Ruby was our daughter, but we still had to wait 6 more weeks to go and get her.  It was so hard, knowing that she was there, not being loved by us, even though I knew she was being cared for and loved.  And I also felt (and still feel) brokenhearted for her to have lost so much already.  That's a loss that she will always carry in her life, no matter what we do or how happy and perfect the rest of her life turns out to be.  At the time, before knowing her like we do now could balance out the facts of her life up to that point, I think I was more focused on that sad year when she lost her family and suffered so much.  I had a lot of trouble with the fact that I could not protect one of my own children from sorrow, even though, obviously, without that sorrow she would never have been mine.  The lines of the song where he talks about things having been paid for always choke me up, because, as I wrote then about my dad, that's what we want to do for the people we love.  And sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't, but either way, you try and hope, fingers and toes crossed, that it's the effort that counts.
(Now go grab a kleenex and listen to some Aaron Neville!  Don't even get me started on "I Bid You Goodnight.")