My mother and I are running. It’s a cold day, though warm for the season. We run a course that the city built near her house. It’s two half-mile loops on either side of a drainage creek, with a narrow metal bridge, painted green, arcing between them. Leafless birch and oak and poplar trees line three sides of the course; a four-lane highway bounds the fourth, on the other side of the parking lot. It’s mid-morning, and the sky is a watery blue; it’s not overcast, but the sun isn’t very strong either. In our shorts and long-sleeve shirts we’re comfortable with the wind at our backs, but when we round the end of a loop and are running straight into the wind, even my mother, who is rarely cold, gasps for breath.
My mother is a runner. Because she was born a breech baby, my great-grandmother used to say that she came out feet first and kept going. Though 5-foot-3 and, like me, built with broad hips and shoulders, she has run a marathon and a half-marathon, and at 44 she runs and wins races at her annual professional conference. She runs on wet beach sand and root-spiked mountain trails and, if it’s the only chance she can get, on the paved roads near her office. Though I’m four inches taller than she is and 19 years younger, she still runs faster and stronger than I do.
I don’t consider myself a runner, though I’ve been running off and on for eight years now. My mother and I haven’t often run together. At 17, when I began running, I didn’t want anyone to go with me, especially my mother. I’d jog at the track at my college after dark, or around our neighborhood. I ran to lose the weight that made me hate myself. It was shameful labor; it wasn’t fun. Later, I’d swim or bicycle or walk for exercise, and then I was away, traveling, in graduate school, working on the West Coast. I got out in the world and my shame began to lessen, but by then I was thousands of miles from my mother. I was running on my own in other cities, in other countries.
Only once did she and I run together before I moved away, and that was when I was much younger. Then, I think running was something my mother did, in part, to be away from her children. But one evening she invited me to run with her. I was 11 years old; it was the last day of school for that year. Summer lay stretched before me like a promise that could not be broken. Outside it was dark and cool. I had never run with her before-I didn’t know if I could keep up-but I laced my gray, worn tennis shoes and joined her, already stretching, in the street. She put first one foot, then the other, on the bumper of her car, warming up her hamstrings. I stretched my legs also, imitating her. We began to run.
I was surprised. It was not the tough race I had feared. Instead, it was as though we were skimming the surface of a large, dark pool, sailing over the night streets with no effort at all. I felt warm blood pumping through my legs, my feet lightly hitting the road. We didn’t say much. A lot of time passed, or maybe it was very little. We rounded the last block and ran down a hill under a streetlight’s glare, toward a park where I often played. Then we turned to walk toward home.
Growing up, those moments of solitude and companionship with my mother were what I desired most, and they were rare. My young, single mother was a whirlwind of energy, anger and determination. As I child I loved her passionately; I believed she could do no wrong, and I wanted to be just like her. As I matured-at 9, 10, 11 years old, and into early adolescence-I adopted her interests, her beliefs, her politics, much of her worldview. In part it is natural for a girl child, especially the eldest child, to model herself on her mother, but I believe I also thought that if I could be just like her, then I might fit more seamlessly into her life. I could be less strain on my overwhelmed mother, who worked every day, went to school, raised children, had relationships. Yet, aiming to be like her was a struggle: I was still a child, with a child’s experience and limitations, and trying to match her placed me in a competition in which I started out 19 years behind, always trying to catch up.
When I grew up and moved away, I went far-first to Asia, then to Seattle. I separated myself a great distance from my mother, geographically and then in other ways. I tried to find out who I was, distinct from her. What was my history, my art, my way of learning? I filled many notebooks and the ears of some friends with stories of growing up her only daughter; at times I fought angrily with my memories of her. But I also began to live a life separate from her, with relationships and experiences of which she knew little. I began to define myself in my own terms. I still admired her, but, with the extreme perspective that a young person takes, I was adamant that I was nothing like her.
During that period I usually came home twice a year, a week in the summer and another during the holidays. When I flew in from a busy quarter at graduate school, or a period of unemployment in a new city, or when I came in with all the “culture shock” highs and lows of having just been on the other side of the world, my mother and I would try to connect in some way for the week that I was living with her. Some days we’d both be planning to run, and she’d invite me to join her.
By my 20s I thought of running not so much as weight control but as a way to ease daily anxieties, to blow off steam. The compressed time and unspoken thoughts of those short visits made running with her feel suffocatingly close. Being so close to her body, unable to get away, having to keep up, only accentuated the pressure I felt. I ran with a scream in my head, deaf to her words, saying little in response, arguing with her in my own mind but trying so hard not to hurt her. After four miles I was exhausted, but not because of the workout my muscles had received. As much as I longed for closeness, it was as though we were pressing similarly charged ends of two magnets together. With persistence we might approach each other, but a tangible distance kept us unable to touch. I thought it might always be this way.
Time passed; it had been almost five years since I had left home. I had been working and supporting myself for a couple of years, and before that I had followed my curiosity, traveling alone in Asia, studying languages, getting a master’s degree. In some ways I thrived on the continually changing experiences. Still, I began to long for a sense of home, and in doing so, I wondered about the place from which I had come.
What was my home? What had it made me? How would it feel to live near my mother again, now that we were two women as well as mother and child? I felt strong, but I also felt tired. Would it be possible to return to something familiar, where I did not so often feel out on the edge, so exiled from the place where I had been born? Could I take back with me the strength I had found and make a home for myself there?
I wanted to try, but even resolving to do so didn’t assuage all my fears. I feared that if I lost the geographic distance with my mother, then I might lose myself as well. If I was back in “her world,” then what I had learned on my own might lose all meaning, receding under the weight that her definitions and experiences had carried for me as a child. But I needed to make a home for myself, and I didn’t want to do so thousands of miles from my birthplace. I decided to return.
In the years that I’ve been growing up, my mother has been, too. She’s more gentle and forgiving, an advocate of acceptance rather than control. When I and all my boxes arrived last fall, she let me live with her while I looked for a job and an apartment in a city nearby. I gratefully accepted her help, but at the time I feared being dependent on her. I conscientiously cleaned up after myself and bought groceries every now and then.
Meanwhile, I prowled her house in dark moods, tensely waiting for the time when I would have to spring up shouting, asserting my independence for all I was worth.
It didn’t happen. She waited out my dark moods. She planned time to be with me. She told me she was happy to have me back, and I started believing her. When she had a break from work and class, we went to movies together, and to cafes. We had time to ourselves without the looming threat of an airplane departure. And, on some sunny weekends after I had started a new job in a city close by, I’d come for a visit and, together, we’d go for a run.
On this sunny morning, the wind sharp and cutting, we lope around the course. We’ve run a couple of miles before we start to warm up; I’m still fine in a sweatshirt, but that’s the moment when my mother pulls off her thick long-john top and runs wearing the jog bra underneath.
We’ve kept going as she tugs the shirt over all her long silver-streaked hair, and I catch a smell of her salty sweat in the clean winter air. The sun seems more intense now, and I smile. I’m not trying to catch up; I’m not in a race at all. There, under the warm sun and running beside her, I love her.
