A Glorious Freedom Page 3

  Lisa: How much longer was it until you ran a marathon?

  Christy: The next year! When Every Mother Counts received the marathon spots, I started to train. And then it came back to me—what I loved about running when I was a kid, all the things that my dad tried to instill in my sisters and me about health and fitness and being strong. Even more motivating was the way I’ve been able to connect running to my organization and our mission—in that distance is a big barrier for women and childbirth around the world. So we’re able to communicate that every time we run.

  Lisa: And now you are running your fifth marathon just a few years later. And you’ve qualified at the age of 47 for the prestigious Boston Marathon.

  Christy: It’s something I love. It’s become a kind of meditation. It’s part of my work, part of my mental health. Setting a goal, training, learning about my body, taking time for myself to just be disconnected and outside and on my own—all of those things have become not only appealing, but also necessary. I need to have that time for myself and it has allowed me that. Now I would never say, “I run.” Now I say, “I’m a runner.” And that feels good.

  Lisa: What advice would you offer to older women who are just getting started with running?

  Christy: I’d tell them, “I didn’t like it at first either.” Not that you should do something that doesn’t feel natural or right! But you have to do it enough times to break through the part that feels difficult. I think most people are not patient enough to do anything long enough to get through a difficult transition. I also learned from reading that book Born to Run—it’s a beautiful book, and part of it is about how running is such a human act—it’s what humans have done from the beginning of time. Our species evolved to run and to run distances. We’re such a sedentary population now. The book also discusses how running is play. You go back to being a child and remember that you used to love to run! And so I try to just think about running differently.

  Running is also one of the ways you can do something. You can raise money and awareness, you can get people to be involved, and you can be part of a team. I feel like almost anyone can go from couch to 5K, and so we try to partner with races where there are different distances so people can feel like, Oh, I can do that, and they can start there. By not committing to something that’s too big, slowly you start to see that when you surpass your last mileage, you will find yourself saying, I never thought I’d be able to run this far. I can’t believe I ran 16 miles! The power of your mind is so intense and so strong that if you tell yourself that you can’t, then of course you can’t, and you won’t. Conversely, if you tell yourself you can, you will find joy in pushing yourself further.

  We don’t allow ourselves to get to the threshold very much as a society. I think it is super exciting at any phase of your life to be able to push yourself to the edge without hurting yourself. It’s really exhilarating and brings that life force into a really practical place. I think you learn so much about yourself and about others by putting yourself to that test.

  Lisa: You had a busy decade. You founded Every Mother Counts, you ran five marathons, you produced and directed three documentaries, and you’ve been raising two kids. How would you characterize the experience of the last decade?

  Christy: I have more energy than ever before, and that’s in part because I feel so passionate about the work I do. It’s so rewarding on a daily basis, and it feels like everything I do in this space with the organization feels so rewarding and needed. To have that sense of purpose, not in a fleeting way but in a real consistent way, is really exciting, and that’s probably the most different than in any other time in my life.

  When I was younger, I had those feelings for brief moments, but now I feel like my world is in sync. And I don’t mean in the sense of balance, because I don’t really like that word very much, but I mean in the sense that I’m standing here in my office and I can see where I live a few blocks down, and I can see my kids’ school, and I can see that this hub of Every Mother Counts is growing and resonating, and all of it feels like concentric circles.

  I think in our lives, generally, there are these phases and you know when you get through this phase, there’s that phase. And I don’t see this phase ending. It’s like being a mom—once it happens, you are in it forever. And as long as I am healthy and able, I want to give back. I understand that my health is a privilege. I am grateful in every moment that I have the capacity to breathe, that I have two arms and two legs, and the mental capacity to think things through, and the communication skills to connect with others. Because I travel a lot to places where people don’t have privilege, I think about my own a lot. There aren’t many days when I am not very, very grateful.

  made art as a means of exploration and therapy. She spent her life drawing, painting, and making evocative sculptures but didn’t garner the world’s attention until she was 70 years old.

  Born in Paris in 1911, she spent her childhood in an apartment above the showroom where her parents sold tapestries. On the weekends, her family would head to their countryside villa for antique tapestry restoration work. There Louise learned to sew and paint by repairing the missing elements on damaged tapestries. In her early years, she struggled with her father’s ten-year affair with her live-in English tutor. She felt betrayed by both her parents—her father for abandoning her, and her mother for tolerating it.

  Louise never intended to be an artist. Her passions were mathematics and philosophy, and she studied them for twelve years at Paris’s Lycée Fénelon, followed by a stint at the Sorbonne. When she came to the realization that math offered no certainties, she “turned towards the certainties of feeling.” Between 1932 and 1938, she studied art under a number of teachers, paying for her classes by working odd jobs.

  In 1936, she met an art history student named Robert Goldwater. Within two years, they married and moved to New York City. She began making sculptures in the late 1940s and was ahead of her time, anticipating movements—human form, installation, minimalism—that would become popular in the years to come. However, when her father died in the early 1950s, Louise disappeared from public view. During this time she was immersed in psychoanalysis, but she didn’t stop working. When she emerged from her long hiatus in her 50s, her new body of work was strange, questioning, and abstract. And the critics noticed.

  Around the time her husband died in 1973, her work hit a new high. She accepted honorary degrees and commissions for public art. Then, her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—the first retrospective of its size that the institution had ever held for a woman—made Louise Bourgeois, then 70, famous worldwide. As part of this exhibition, she published her diaries, took press inquiries, and was openly autobiographical in a way she’d never been before. Her retrospective left her with a confidence that propelled her work to continue to evolve until her death at age 98 in 2010.

  BECAUSE LOVE LET ME BE

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  When I was 25, a palm reader decreed that I wouldn’t fall in love until I was 40. She grabbed my hands, fingered the stories stitched into my palms, and made her pronouncement from the window seat of a San Francisco café. “The lasting love of your life won’t arrive until you’re 40.”

  Forty?!?! My heart sank. “Are you sure?” I asked. Palm readers had been eerily accurate about my life before, and this prophecy felt like a punishment.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m getting a very strong reading on this.”

  I walked away shaken. I didn’t want to wait for love. Five years into a great relationship, I thought I’d already found it. I’d met my boyfriend working at our college newspaper in Santa Cruz. I loved his wry humor and the way he’d narrow his brown eyes into a winking squint. I’d brought him home to meet my parents three weeks after we first kissed. One month later, we were nestled into the damp couch on my front porch when his face turned serious. He said he loved me. I loved him, too.

  I followed him to San Francisco. We moved in together, cared about each other’s
parents as our own, and wrote longing letters to one another when we were traveling alone.

  At 25, I assumed that we’d always be in love, that he’d always cook me homemade ravioli and I’d always get him tickets to underground rock shows. The palm reader’s words haunted me that night.

  But as my 20s continued, I also needed more than our relationship offered. My boyfriend became a political reporter in D.C. and then in Sacramento, and I became a rock critic in Seattle. We left each other in separate cities often, with the promise that our situation was temporary. I got lonely without him and explored temptation in the corners of the after-hours parties I inhabited with my punk friends. I drank enough to pretend that those illicit kisses evaporated from memory with the smog of cigarette smoke.

  After eleven years together, my boyfriend asked me to marry him as we stood under an umbrella in DUMBO. My heart leapt with excitement. But then I found myself twisting my engagement ring diamond side down when he wasn’t around. I loved him, but the flashy rock was an audacious symbol of adulthood I couldn’t embrace.

  And yet, when my fiancé announced one year after our engagement that he’d fallen out of love with me, I wanted nothing more than to patch the sinkhole between us. But by then it was too late. We were living in silos. We saw a therapist who told us, after one session, that our relationship was over. My fiancé did the honors the day after Valentine’s Day. We were on a drive between our cities and he asked to be let out at the nearest train station. He wanted to go back home, alone. I didn’t talk to him again until a mutual friend’s funeral nine years later.

  I didn’t want to be 32 and single. I didn’t want to figure out where to take my vacations or how to manage bills by myself.

  I went through rough patches. I missed my ex terribly. I’d cancel on friends because it felt better to watch episodes of America’s Next Top Model and cry my eyelids shut than to pretend I was enthusiastic about being a single lady on the dance floor. On Valentine’s Day, I’d ache to become invisible until February 15. And when the latest in my series of three-month relationships had run its course, I stumbled out of yet another apartment, heartbroken.

  But over time, I began taking healthy risks and gained confidence.

  After working as a rock critic for a decade, I quit the music business. I hated drinking too much and being around other drinkers all the time, and I realized a good night’s sleep grounded the anxieties that had been building in me for years. I let go of the glamour I’d associated with dating musicians, whose attention spans shrank the minute they returned to their tour buses.

  I also had fun. I had flings with men whose lives intrigued me. I lived out weekend fantasies with an air guitar champion from Los Angeles, a Danish rock star, an Australian concert promoter. And then I got sick of having sex with transient matches and started saying no to anything that didn’t feel right for the long term.

  I got lasting intimacy from my friendships with women, friends who were also single and excited to drive down to Los Angeles for a psychedelic rock festival, my car loaded up with their mixtapes. These women would spend weekends with me floating down the Russian River, or evenings looking at the stars from a rented house in Stinson Beach. I’d never felt love like this with friends before.

  I developed a unique bond with my sister when we started taking annual adventures together, trips I previously would’ve taken with a boyfriend. We ate piranha in Buenos Aires, slept in Gram Parsons’s Joshua Tree hotel room, and visited the hoarder home of an Elvis obsessive near Memphis.

  I realized I’d spent my teens and 20s trying to close the gap between myself and the boys I’d met. I’d hitch myself to what they were accomplishing and hope that by proxy I could earn accolades, too. I had a fire inside but no idea how to channel that burn on my own. I’d confused being aggressive about sex and love as being assertive in the world at large.

  It wasn’t until there was no man by my side that I understood what I could do alone. I didn’t have to contort into a portrait of what my exes needed me to be. I could make spontaneous decisions about my career, my lifestyle, my travel plans.

  By age 38, I was focusing little energy on meeting a romantic partner. Of course, that’s when I met the guy the palm reader envisioned.

  I was working as the editor in chief of a popular San Francisco publication and building a healthy meditation practice. I was happy enough being single, but when a friend mentioned a handsome friend who loved books and movies as much as I did, I agreed to let her set us up. From the minute he walked into the bar, we couldn’t stop talking. He told me he wrote fiction and made furniture and played hockey. He was omnivorous and encyclopedic in his knowledge about music. By last call, I couldn’t believe this blue-eyed Midwestern guy with chiseled cheekbones was shutting down the bar with me.

  We went on two dates and then I left for a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I spent my days with the Buddhists facing every fear I’d stored inside. On the tenth day, we were instructed to forgive our mental tormentors, and I released the heavy hurts I’d been hoarding for years. But I also felt seized by overwhelming love for the Midwesterner. We met up the night my retreat ended, and he’d written me a poem for every day we’d been apart. I couldn’t tell him I loved him fast enough—but I waited two more days until he said it first.

  Two years later, when I was 40, we got married in Big Sur. He’d proposed to me at the top of the Fairmont Hotel—the same place, he knew, that my dad had proposed to my mom. Score one for the palm readers of the world.

  I have friends in their 30s who sometimes wonder if the partners they aren’t so sure about are the ones they’ll love for the long term. They’ll ask if what they feel is enough, knowing that by saying the question aloud, it’s probably not. But they don’t want to let go, for fear of traveling the world alone, for a clock that will strike them unlovable at a certain age. I feel their pain. I’d also been terrified that I wasn’t strong enough to be on my own.

  I realized, though, that some of us need to be solo explorers in our 30s. We need to go from pushing up against the borders of our 20-something relationships, suffocated by what we can’t have, to experiencing what we really want.

  That doesn’t mean being married at 40 is a fearless endeavor. Trying to get pregnant is so much harder than I expected. And occasionally I’ll get anxious about losing my husband to some terrible ailment as we get older.

  But in the end, falling in my deepest love at 40 has given me time to build my life based on who I am, instead of what I’m being forced to set aside. I understand that great uncertainty can foster great opportunity. And for those lessons alone I’m grateful that romantic love let me be until I was an age to really appreciate myself as much as I appreciate my partner.

  Jennifer Maerz is a freelance writer, an editor, and a beachcomber who now lives in Portland, Oregon. Her personal essays and articles about the arts and culture have appeared in RollingStone.com, Cosmopolitan.com, Refinery 29, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Stranger, and the Bold Italic (where she worked as the editor in chief), among other places. She can go through a box of black licorice like nobody’s business.

  calls herself “The Aging Adventurer.” In her 40s, she decided that she wanted a job outdoors and joined her local community’s recreation department. Since making that leap forty-three years ago, over time, Emily fell more deeply in love with the outdoors and began to traverse thousands of miles by foot and bicycle. She’s hiked over 2,000 miles along the Appalachian Trail, cycled 4,700 miles across the country, and trekked 192 miles across northern England, all after her 60th birthday—and that doesn’t include endless other adventures leading to the present day. Now at 85, Emily is the author of two books, including A Cotton Rat for Breakfast: Adventures in Midlife and Beyond. As the owner of Make It Happen!, a lifestyle consulting firm dedicated to challenging people to achieve their dreams, Emily tours the country speaking as an expert on creative aging, risk taking, and overcoming obstacles. She still gets outside (a lot!), and i
s currently planning her next bike tour.

  Lisa: You landed your dream job as outdoor recreation manager for Chesterfield County’s Recreation Department at age 48. Tell us about your journey up to that point. What had you done with your life before?

  Emily: I have a master’s degree in sociology and worked right out of grad school as a community organizer in a South Philadelphia neighborhood, out of United Neighbors Settlement. The neighborhood was mainly Italian, with large numbers of African American and Jewish populations moving in. It was a challenging job getting people to work together for the good of the community. After that, I worked for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations as a field representative. The new housing law had just passed, along with employment laws. I worked in many interesting situations trying to make those laws work at the grassroots level.

  Lisa: Why did you make the career shift? What led to it?

  Emily: I was an at-home mom for fourteen years. I got divorced at age 42 or so, and I took a job with the State Office on Aging working as a field representative. It was then that I decided I wanted to make my great love for the out-of-doors into a career. I went back to school for eight months, studied biology (plants, birds, mammals, ecology, insects, etc. . . . I thought I had died and gone to heaven!), and did an environmental internship at Glen Helen Environmental Center in Ohio for five months. Then I traveled across America interviewing for environmental jobs. I lived on $200 a month, camping and cooking meals over my camp stove, and letting my ex-husband care for our three children, then 10, 12, and 14 years old (that’s another long story). During this time, I also hiked down the Grand Canyon, canoed 200 miles on the Suwannee River, and spent ten days at a wilderness survival experience in Utah.