Nobody likes a show off - #86

Especially when it just burns you out.

This week’s snow was wet and heavy, preceding the rains promised for this weekend. The ground and the houses were too warm for it, and you could hear loads of snow cascading down rooftops at the first sign of sunshine, slopping and slamming into the ground like wet concrete. The creek bed flooded with it, its sound roaring up the valley walls. I’d say that’s the last of it, but it never is.

The birds were already arriving to stake claim before the storm: robins, stellar jays, black-chinned and rufous hummingbirds — the latter identified just by the jingle of their wings. The rabbits had reappeared along with the marmots, and the weeds began their season of brickwork disruption. The mud comes and goes, the high-altitude sun baking it like fair skin. 

Two months ago I awarded myself with the right to be a mess within mud season. “How else should a person enter mud season but in their own delightful disarray?” I said. But I said their own and whose mess should I be mucked in but someone else’s? 

I should make a gallery wall of the photos Ben and I have sent each other from the ER. The latest addition has Ben still in his baseball cap, smiling from a gurney and covered in dirt. His arm is casted to the elbow for a suspiciously small injury: an open fracture of his left pinky. 

That's a very broken pinky.

I joked there went his high tea. But after speaking to the surgeon, there also went using his left hand in any capacity for the next two months. He’s not allowed to pick up anything heavier than a pencil, which means not only can he not ride or climb, he can’t work — at his job, in the wood shop, or on our house. I looked at my period tracking app. Our window for baby-making started that night. At least he can do that, I thought, and then texted him as much. 

We are spirited in our injuries. Since we’ve been together there have been two broken femurs, a broken back, a fractured shoulder, a different shoulder’s surgery, a torn hand ligament, smashed teeth, more than one concussion, burns, lacerations, and myriad other bumps and bruises. We are rough and tumble to the point that we may as well brand the wood shop as such. Welcome to Rough & Tumble Wood Work: where the only thing that breaks is the people. I even saw an advantage in his injury: we were taking in a foster kitten the next day, and if Ben couldn’t be out playing, he could definitely be home watching a tiny kitten to make sure it didn’t scale the monstera. If Ben can’t climb, no one can.

∑åœq    WESE1

That’s actually a note from the rascal himself, bounding onto the laptop. I assume it says something like, “I’m not leaving.” He quickly scaled the walls of his enclosure and decided the only proper place to sleep was between my and Ben’s heads. At bedtime, he pads back and forth over our pillows to give us each tiny little kisses before flopping down between us. His cuteness assault is working, and we are very close to raising the white flag of foster failure. 

And so my May is defined by care. Ben is wracked with enough guilt over getting injured that he’ll compensate where he can (proving to me last night that you only need one adept hand to turn a pepper grinder), but most things will be left to me until he gets a hang of squeezing jars against his body with his left elbow while the right hand twists the top. We’ve all been there, no?

The kitten can’t leave the bedroom without complete supervision. He’s too small, his bones too fragile to be attempting the acrobatics he’s made clear he is called to. The literal jungle gym we’ve created will be there when he’s ready. 

It would make sense that this too is the week I started going to a gym. Bouncing from skiing to mountain biking to dance to trail running (and of course to injuries) made it feel like I needed a more consistent baseline. If the plan is to have a kid, I am all set on endurance but deeply lacking in muscle. So I did what any girl hoping to bulk up does: I joined CrossFit. 

For as much as I’ve sung how easy it is to build community in a small town, CrossFit has this tiny hovel beat. Of course it does — that’s why people who do CrossFit never stop talking about it. Upon entry to the gym for the first time, everyone said hi. Everyone introduced themselves. And the very rules of the gym are that you can’t even put away your weights if someone hasn’t finished their set. No one is made to feel bad about anything. In fact, I’ve felt quite good about a number of things. I’ve never been so excited to do push-ups in my life. My anti-bandwagon self hates to admit it, but I think I love CrossFit.

The CrossFit excitement is well-timed. In previous Ben injuries, I’ve felt deeply compelled to not only be constantly available to him, but to be awesome at it. As previously mentioned, I’ve had many opportunities to see what I’m like in a caretaking role, specifically of Ben. All this investigation has come to one embarrassing realization: I cannot separate caretaking from showing off. 

When we’re both moving about the world sans injury, we have a very fair distribution of chores, but more importantly, we’re also generous with each other and ourselves. The only things that get done with any real sense of urgency are either pet-related or weather-related. Clothes and dishes and papers pile up, each promising the other that they’ll do their assigned pile soon, and each waving the other off. 

But when Ben is injured, I go into monster mode. Everything is clean! Everything is picked up! I somehow learned to cook! The dog also got walked! That weird chore both of us were ignoring for months got done and done well and done by me and by the way here’s a smoothie I made you that you didn’t ask for but I intuited you would love! 

Part of the hyperdrive is inevitably that no one is in your way. There’s no way to say, “hey put that down, that’s my chore.” In fact, there’s no one even on the floor. Ben is in the basement on pain medication, so I’m whirl-winding through the upstairs like Architectural Digest is popping by tomorrow. Part of it is also the awareness that I now have twice the responsibilities, some of which I don’t even know how to do, like how exactly does one cut a hole in a rain barrel to install a gray water spigot?* So in an attempt to not get behind, I try to get ahead. But surely there is a murkier part, a part that’s eager to get the gold star, or worse, to prove they’re the only ones capable of getting that gold star. Ben doesn’t give a shit about putting away clothes when I’m injured. He has zero urgency for this task ever. There is a dark glimmer deep down inside that’s like I can do all this better. 

And I can. The problem is I can only do it for like, three days.

Ben is a true endurance athlete. He is a master of recovery, resting, energy reserves, and pacing. I am not. I am a burnout renegade who thinks the only way to get on a new train is to crash the one you’re on. I go too hard in nearly everything, and then wonder why I feel depleted. 

In one of my first CrossFit workouts, we were doing three rotating exercises for 12 minutes straight, the goal being to do as many rounds as possible. Before the coach started the clock, she looked at me and ordered, “Kelton, no more than 5 rounds. Got it?” I finished five rounds with 5 minutes left, and just as I thought to myself well she’s not gonna notice if I just do one more ro— “Was that five rounds, Kelton?” I nodded and sat down to stretch. 

She was pacing me. Me, the person who thought on their third day of Crossfit that they should do 120 push-ups. 

On what feels like the 40th round of injuries in our house, I am more aware of my need to pace myself as the caretaker. It’s easy for me to yell at Ben about pacing his recovery, but it’s more challenging to remind myself that I also need to take things slowly, and to also take care of myself. If I am wrecked, taking care of him becomes a challenge. If I rob myself of daily pleasures simply to accomplish chores he didn’t even notice needed doing, I have to ask myself what I’m getting out of that. Yes, it’s nice to have the Clothes Chair cleared of clothes. But it’s the Clothes Chair… and I’m wearing clothes I pulled off of it right now. 

Pacing is easier though when there’s someone to pace off of, when there are parameters that help you understand when you need to ease up. This time around, I have two in place: the first is actually CrossFit. It’s like they’re expecting you. And I am not one to RSVP yes and then not show. This means leaving the house, taking the 25 minutes to get there, the hour to work out, and the 25 minutes to get home. Two hours just for me. 

The other parameter is the kitten. As much as we’re meant to be fostering, he’s doing things like this:

Looks like a foster fail to me.

Because he can’t leave our bedroom unsupervised, I’m spending a lot of time in said bedroom, away from the dishes, away from the wood stacking, away from everything but writing and playing and relaxing. He is my pacer, and my pacer says HOLD ME!!!!!

This American society is not set up to support caretaking. It’s not set up to support injury. Actually come to think of it, it’s not even set up to support this kitten who would likely have faced euthanasia in an overpacked shelter. So we’re forced to set up systems ourselves. We rely on our neighbors to drive our spouses to the ER and stay there with them until they’re released. We rely on them to kitten sit when we have to drive said spouse to surgery. We rely on them in hopes they rely on us — to pet sit, to wrangle dogs, to staple pheromone packs to the Douglas firs in hopes of staving off the beetles. We rely on them so we can pace ourselves.

Injuries and crises and new lives don’t just call for pacing, they call for community. Because I’d say this is the last injury, but it never is.