Drafting

As spring was winding down, I told my therapist that I was dreading summer. Both of our girls have summer birthdays, Mark’s birthday is on the first day of summer, followed by our anniversary, then the anniversary of our first date which both of us recalled with 100% accuracy unlike the date of our wedding. When that is over, that dreaded day in September shows up and hits like an annual head-on collision.

“Maybe,” she said, “you can not look at the whole summer but section it into weeks and then it won’t seem like too much.” I said I didn’t think that was possible, because even though I’m paying her to help me with this exact sort of thing, sometimes I am pissy and tired and want to pay her to make all this go away.

The kids’ birthdays have their own particular sting as every year Mark and I would reminisce about their entrance into the world. How when I was pregnant with Maggie, Mark sat next to the phone in the lab for weeks for fear that someone else would answer it and forget to give him the message that I was in labor, how we walked the halls of the hospital to speed things up and I kept stopping at the waiting room to watch the Cubs game, how Will’s labor started during Sunday Night Football and the doctor was running between two woman, the other who screamed relentlessly, how my nurse was so annoyed at her for the ruckus she was causing, and it was her who delivered Will because the doctor couldn’t get to my room in time, how The Circle of Life from Lion King was playing on the radio when we were driving to the hospital to deliver Mallory. When the doctor arrived and asked who was watching our other kids Mark said, “Since this is our third we figured it was going to be quick so we left them in the car but they’ll be fine because we cracked the windows,” and he and the doctor laughed and laughed while I laid there like a bloated extra in a buddy movie.

After outrunning it for over two years, I tested positive for Covid when I got home from our beach trip. It knocked me flat and it wasn’t until ten days later that I tested negative and could go back to work. If I was ever sick I could tell by Mark’s eyes if he was worried about me. He knew when to take Tylenol versus ibuprofen versus naproxen, he always pushed water and sleep, he researched everything, and if he had any questions he would find somebody at the med center to answer them. What I wouldn’t have given for those eyes to have been there to nurse me back from Covid.

There’s a term in cycling called bonking which is when your body has depleted it’s store of glucose. It happened to Mark a few times and he always made sure he stayed hydrated and kept glucose tablets in his bike bag, his work bag, we even had them at home. The body experiences a hypoglycemic crash which hits suddenly causing light-headedness, nausea, sweating, and shaking. You literally cannot go on. Sometimes Mark would go on a long ride for fun or charity and come home and tell me about a bonking incident. He always said it quietly and seriously, like everything was going fine until somebody ended up prone on the ground.

After I got over Covid I was walking early one morning when a cardinal darted in front of me. “That you, Fisher?,” I asked because if cardinals are dead people he’d definitely be the darting kind that enjoyed scaring the daylights out of me. It landed on a branch overlooking the creek and I said, “Listen, I’m bonking here. Besides missing you every waking minute of the day, there’s a horrific war in Ukraine, a pandemic, inflation, half-naked Vikings going on trial for trying to overthrow the government, melting runways, massive fires, and now monkeypox which I know nothing about but that sounds unpleasant.” I don’t think that cardinal was you-know-who because he flew off leaving me with my bonk, and even a reincarnated-bird-Mark would hang around for clarification on the monkeypox thing.

When I was a little girl and there was no air conditioning, my siblings and I would impatiently wait for the call from Mrs. Glaser who lived down the street saying it was okay for us to come and swim in their backyard pool. We could never go without Mom and she’d sit in the hot sun with her feet in the water and talk to Fran until it was time to go home and start dinner.

There’s another term in biking called drafting. It’s when somebody takes the lead in a pace line and reduces the wind resistance for everyone behind them. When they tire out they move to the back of the line and someone else takes over. Everyone benefits from the work of the lead cyclist, and how did it take me this long to figure out that my mom and dad were drafting the six of us through summer for decades? That Mark and I drafted our three kids and now my daughter and her husband are doing the same so that somehow we grow older fiercely believing that there is nothing better than the long hot days of summer.