Ironman Revisited Part II

This is a revised version of a race report recounting my experiences racing Ironman Arizona in November, 2009.

Part II



Still cold, I tried to hurry through transition. The volunteers helped me get ready for the bike portion. I was unfocused on what I was doing and uncoordinated. I finally got out to the bike course, but I can’t seem to go very fast even though my heart is racing. Since I was dazed and not concentrating, my bike veered into orange cones on the road, the wheels flipped and I slammed down on my shoulder into the street. I scraped my knee and elbow and my shoulder hurt. With help, I continued on. I ignored the bloody wounds.
The bike route is mind numbing to go up and down it three times, past desolate empty land, the industrial buildings, ruined houses, and the garbage dump. It is fairly scenic near the top of the hill, where you can see desert vistas and rocky mountains. The road can capture the howling wind, making it hellish to ride a bike on. When I was bike training on it and going up and down numerous time, I have to shut off my mind from dwelling on the monotony and the distance that would otherwise make me feel like screaming. During the race, I had to concentrate on keeping myself fed and riding hard enough so that I didn’t miss the time cut-offs. Few spectators are out on the highway, so I didn’t even have that to keep my spirits up.
I distracted myself from the pain and monotony by watching the acrobatic maneuvers of a guy in front of me peeing while riding a bike. Somehow he must of managed to whip it out of his bike shorts, because pee was shooting off to the side. Normally people just let go and it streams all over the bike seat. I had never done this and never will. I try to stay well back of these people.
I finished the first loop at a speed of 13.6 mph, which was too slow. The first part of an ironman bike ride is supposed to feel good because fatigue hasn’t set in yet, but I felt miserable. This bike portion wasn’t going the way I had planned. If I didn’t make up time, I wouldn’t finish before the cut off. It felt like my first attempt in 2008, where the heavy weight of failure loomed. At least when you finish the lap at the Mill Avenue bridge, lots of people are cheering you on. It gave you energy to endure the highway again. If I could pick up speed, I had a fighting chance to beat the three and four o’clock cut-offs.
The second loop I picked up speed. It was like night versus day from the first loop. I felt much better and had an inkling of hope that I was going to finish the bike portion. I was pretty sure I was going to make the three o’clock cut-off at the bottom of the hill by the time I reached the top of the hill. A small victory.

I finished the second loop at 2:35 p.m. I was on new ground-an actual third loop, which I didn’t get to do the first race I tried, because I missed the three o’clock cut-off. I was excited. By this time, the shadows were getting long and the light was turning orange. The highway was getting more and more deserted. Most of the bike riders were done. This is mentally tough because I thought that the faster riders were better bike riders than me. I ignored the negative thoughts and just kept riding. I felt O.K, climbing the hill, but I was ready to be done. I beat the four o’clock deadline at the top of the hill by twenty minutes. As I was descending the hill, I saw people still desperately trying to beat the cut-off. One person was riding a hand cycle. I hoped that he made it.

As I was descending the hill, I was mentally preparing myself for the run. I passed the 109 mile mark. I was riding a bike farther than I had ever done before. The light was fading, but I was beating the sunset and the 5:30 cut-off for the bike. My shoulder hurt, my butt hurt and my quads hurt, but the memory of the pain was fading. I had broken barriers in myself and was on my way to being an ironman.
As I came into transition, I saw my coaches cheering me. We had been on a long journey together from my despair of not finishing a race, to the joy of finishing a goal I had been chasing for two years. I had learned that I couldn’t accomplish what seems like insurmountable goals by myself. I had to take baby steps on an impossibly long journey with the help of people along the way until one day I found that I was where I wanted to be. I had to overcome self-doubt and have a little faith that things will work out.
I dismounted my bike and hobbled to the change tent. My legs felt like blocks. The volunteers helped me to change and I struggled to put on my socks. I let someone bandage my elbow and knees, even if it didn’t matter at this point. I was tired and wanted to be babied, but I knew I had to get moving.

Ironman Arizona Revisted

This is a revised version of a race report recounting my experiences racing Ironman Arizona in November, 2009. After being re-written and workshopped in a writer's group, I submitted this piece to a local writers' publication, but it was rejected. Maybe some people have no interest in Ironman races, but the experience had a profound impact on me and re-writing the piece was like re-living the event.


Part One:
I treaded the water of Tempe Town Lake waiting for the start of an epic day of racing. I had swam in the water two days before and had numb feet for hours afterwards, so I knew the water would be very cold, but it was still a shock when I jumped into the frigid water. It felt like needles on my face. People line the Mill Avenue bridge watching 2500 people bobbing below in the water. I swam to the north of the crowd in the lake so that I wouldn’t get pummeled when people start swimming. The faster swimmers will get kicked, pushed and sometimes have their goggles knocked off. The dawn was just breaking and an orange pinkish light touched the surface of the water and the glass buildings on the shore. It was pretty in a cruel way with the illusion of heat. A helicopter hovered overhead filming the start, adding to the anticipation. I tried to convince myself in my thoughts that I was not cold.
I decided to do an ironman because it seemed to me to be at least something in my life that I could control, which was myself and my reaction to tough conditions. I felt powerless, with my mother dying of Alzheimers, my husband of 32 years dumping me for someone else and the economy dropping like a crashing rocket. I think I wanted a feeling of invincibility from doing what I set out to do. I wanted to test my limits and to find out that I could meet a goal. I wanted redemption for not making the bike cut-off at Ironman Arizona in April 2008 due to windy, 98 degree conditions. I ended up the medical tent due to heat exhaustion and had felt like an utter failure.
An Ironman involves 2.4 miles of swimming, 112 miles of bike riding and 26.2 miles of running, all within 17 hours. If you think about how far it actually is, you will lose your mind. I coped with the distance by thinking only about what I was doing at the moment, rather than the fact that I had to do an incomprehensible distance.
A race of this length requires you to face your limitations. Some people are gifted athletically and can finish the race in 10-14 hours. Pros can do it in eight and a half to nine hours. I am not gifted and had to worry about finishing it in the allotted time of seventeen hours. I figured the swim will take me two hours, the bike seven and a half to eight hours and the run about six an a half hours. I was one of the sloggers just trying to get through it.

A race of this length also crushes you if your training is half-assed. In a shorter race, you could get by with inconsistent or nonexistent training. I had to do three hour runs, six hour bike rides and two hour swims. I trained hard, but the thought always existed in my mind that it wasn’t enough. I had been essentially training for this race for two years. I had a lot emotional investment in an unsure outcome.

The airhorn blasted and the melee began. Being away from the crowd, I didn’t have problems with being hit, but I had problems with myself. I don’t tolerate cold water well and I hate swimming 2.4 miles in open water. I didn’t like the feeling of not being able to stand up and rest. I worried about swimming for two hours and wondered if I was going to be too tired to finish. I have had panic attacks in open water, where I would thrash around and feel like I was suffocating. Kayakers are out in the water to direct you and to keep you from drowning, but once you resort to hanging off of one, you know your swim is tanking and that you might not finish.

As I kept swimming from buoy to buoy to the turn around, I felt the cold seeping into my bones. It got worse and worse. It sapped my energy, but if I stopped to rest, I felt even colder. I kept moving even though I was exhausted. Doubts crept into my mind that I could actually finish this swim. If I didn’t finish the swim, I couldn’t do the rest of the race. I was damned if I was going to quit voluntarily. Two years of training, financial and emotional investment would be wasted. I had to keep going, but I wondered if my body was going to fail me.

As the buildings on the shore went slowly by, I got colder and colder. I could feel my legs shaking. It’s was battle between my body and my mind. I had never been this close to going over the edge of hypothermia and it was frightening. I finally hit the finish and struggled up the steps. My mind had won for now, but I was shaking violently and in a daze. I got my wetsuit stripped off and I was whisked into the med tent before I knew where I was going.
The medics warmed me up with warm saline bags and a heater. They stripped off my wet shirt. I warmed up, finally, but I had lost 10-15 minutes and I had to be out on the bike course by 9:30 or else I would be disqualified. I finally escaped the clutches of the med tent, with a thermal blanket to cover my lack of a top and ran into transition. I had just done the most difficult swim of my life and the day was just starting.

15k Race Report

I have a love-hate relationship with running. Most of the time when I run, it feels bad at first, then gets better. Sometimes it feels bad at first and stays that way. Sometimes it starts out bad and gets worse. This race, I felt bad in the beginning, felt better in the middle, then felt like crap at the end. I thought that running 9.3 miles would be easier than 13.1, which is a half marathon. I also thought I could run a shorter distance at a faster pace. I was wrong.

Non-runners would probably wonder why someone would voluntarily hurt themselves by running. Running is simple. You run from point A to B. A run has a definite distance, a definite route and a beginning and end. I wish life was more like that. My life path is meandering and I have no idea where it is going. I don’t know where it starts or where it is going to end.

Running is uncomfortable, but the purpose of the pain is to see how fast I can run. Exceeding what I think I can do in spite of the ache is empowering and even fun. It’s a sickness common to runners.

I couldn’t warm up because this race was a point to point race, which entailed taking a bus to the starting point in McDowell Mountain Park. The efficiency of this transportation depends a lot on how many people need to take the bus, how far you have to go and how organized the race is. I got to the start line twenty minutes before the start so I had to choose between standing in a line to pee or warming up. I chose to pee because running with a full bladder sucks.

Usually the start of race is fun, a kind of a celebration strenuous physical activity. On this occasion, however, a moment of silence was observed for Sally Meyerhoff, an elite athlete who was killed in a car accident. Death is unexpected sometimes. Many runners were wearing dorky pink compression knee socks in her honor.

The lack of warm up didn’t make a great start to the race for me. My body does not like running, but it especially does not like suddenly running very hard. The first mile is uphill as well. My stomach was spewing acid into my esophagus and it felt like I had daggers in my chest in addition to breathing hard. I couldn’t convince my legs to move faster. They were waiting for the stomach acid to subside and were maybe hoping I would give them a break and walk.

I finally warmed up and was thankfully going downhill. This race goes from a higher to a lower elevation. It also means that you will climb because the area around Fountain Hills is known for its rolling, mean terrain.

The more uncomfortable I am, the faster I go. It doesn’t depend on anyone but me. If I am uncomfortable in normal situations, I don’t know if it has a point or if it’s going to get me anywhere. If I say “hi” to a stranger and it may mean everything or nothing. Racing is like a contest to see what I am capable of despite my physical or mental state. This game, however, wasn’t very easy to play.

It was getting hot. No trees were on the route to provide shade. The road was asphalt that collected heat and reflected it back on me. The temperature was in the sixties, but when I run, it feels twenty degrees hotter. I was pouring water on myself at the few aid stations that were out on the course. It would have been nice to have someone out there with a hose to spray me with water, but there wasn’t a handy source of water out here in the middle of the desert.

My acid reflux had settled down, but now my intestines were complaining. Running is a natural, unwelcome laxative. No porta-potties appeared in the desert, though I was fantasizing about it. The Sonoran Desert with it’s stunted creosote and wimpy trees doesn’t have much in the way of large, dense bushes to do your business behind.

I found the rolling landscape tough to run on. Most of the running races around here are flat, because most runners wouldn’t do them if they weren’t. It takes a different level of craziness to tackle hills. A person’s pain tolerance has to be higher. You have to like the suffering. This terrain was leaching the energy out of me.

By mile six, I was running at what I thought was a decent pace and then I hit the HILL. This sucker was nasty. It was over a mile ascent and it was evil. It was waiting to devour hapless runners, including me. After running hard for six miles, I was hot and hurting. My legs hurt and they didn’t want to climb. Other people were climbing it with grime determination, with some resorting to walking. Someone passed by me and said “who put this hill here?”. I was ready for this mountain not to exist anymore.

Finally, the torturous ascent ended and it was time to speed up again. My legs disagreed and told me to go to hell. Theoretically, a race is supposed to be run faster in the final miles. This theory would be fine if I hadn’t trashed my legs on the previous seven miles. All I could do was to press on.

The final miles were through Fountain Hills, which I am sure that drivers held up in traffic did not appreciate. I always secretly have a feeling of satisfaction making a car wait instead of me having to wait for them. Down the road I could finally see the finish line. I did an imitation of running faster. I finished in an hour, twenty nine minutes.

Every one of the 9.3 miles I had earned. This race was so hard I might be masochistic enough to do it again. I liked the feeling of accomplishment of running on the difficult terrain. I can’t explain the insanity. I just know it is there.

The Pool vs Me

      I detest my pool. I want it not to exist anymore. It is the bane of my existence, but it wasn’t always that way. It sucks electricity, chemicals and water. It sometimes becomes a death trap for baby quail who inadvertently fall in. It’s a symbol of what I am unhappy with in my life now, it’s old deteriorating outdated existence that I have no use for anymore. It sits there, a reminder of a life I used to have.

     When I first moved into the house I am in now, seventeen years ago, the pool was clean and blue. The tile trim was pretty and no algae fouled the walls. It had been recently re-plastered. It was an oasis on a hot day. It was something that I actually wanted to swim in. The pool fence was in good shape, a must for having a small child around.

     Having a pool with a young child was great. She wasn’t like some children who have a death wish and try to get into the pool by themselves and then drown. She loved the pool. She had friends over who also loved to swim, especially the neighbors who didn’t have one in their back yard.

     My ex-husband also loved the pool. He would sunbath naked when I wasn’t around to give him a hard time about it. He would go skinny dipping at night on hot summer nights. Sometimes he would keep his swim clothes on and my daughter would join him. I wouldn’t go in as often, but it was nice at night when it was still a 100 degrees at night.
     This love affair faded, however. My daughter stopped wanting to go into the pool when she was a teenager. My ex also stopped swimming and sunbathing. I swam elsewhere because the pool wasn’t big enough for serious swimming and it was more fun for me to swim with a group.
     Normally, my ex-husband would take care of the pool. It required regular chemicals, messy filter cleaning and other mysterious rituals. My husband lost interest in doing this after a while. Then he lost interest in me. The old relationship died slowly, little by little every year. I sensed that he was growing distant, but I was in denial that the marriage was dead. He spent most of the summer in California with business as an excuse, but I always assumed that he would come back.
     The pool had gotten older by this time. The tile cracked and algae would grow on the walls. The water tasted bad from the salt and the skimmer got sluggish. The filters needed cleaning and the motor was failing.
My ex-husband left me and I had no idea how to take care of the pool. To add to my stress of having my life fall apart, the water decided to turn green no matter how much chlorine I threw in it. I had to hire someone to drain it and to acid wash the plaster. I think my water bill that month to refill it was about $200. It looked good for a time. I hated having to repair something that I had no use for and I resented having the responsibility dumped on me.
     I was paralyzed with depression and I didn’t want to deal with my life, let alone the pool. It took me a long time to recover enough from being dumped to have the energy to do something about maintaining the pool’s annoying existence.
     To top it off, the metal fence is rotting with bubbling rust. I don’t know how it still stands up. It will wobble if you push it. Since I decided not to maintain a lawn by myself and didn’t water it, and I can’t get the lawn mower to work, the bushes by the pool decided to shed a lot of leaves. They would blow in the pool and I would fish them out and throw them by the fence. Then they would blow in the pool again. I was too lazy to rake them.
     With all these leaves blowing in the pool, the skimmer decided to stop working. It would move against the wall, lazily flicking it’s tail and not go anywhere. I recently had someone clean out the pool filter and it worked for about two weeks. The pool almost looked clean again. Then the motor developed a whining sound and it the skimmer stopped working. Now leaves and dirt are on the bottom again. The pool mocks me, letting me think I am the boss, when I am not.

     The pool is unloved. The only creatures who seem to enjoy the pool now are the boat-tailed grackles who perch on the floating chlorine tablet dispensers and drink water. It’s just a lot of work for me and I am looking forward to the day that it no longer is my responsibility.

     The pool is like my life. Certain things don’t work anymore and I need to get rid of them. Old habits, old possessions, old ways of thinking, old relationships that were great once have lost their usefulness. They are old and crumbling like the rotting pool fence. They made me happy once and now they just cause me pain and anxiety.

     I have to make my own tough life decisions and figure out how to implement them. Avoiding discomfort and anxiety won’t solve my problems. Thinking that I am just not good enough won’t give me strength to face the world, let alone have some semblance of happiness and peace. Falling down the rabbit hole of depression won’t let me move forward.

     So one day I will be in a better place in my life and the pool will be someone else’s problem. No more algae, no more leaves and dirt in the water, no more lazy skimmer.  Good riddance.



Desert Duathlon Race Report

I stand by the start line watching the pros getting ready to start. I like to look at the pros. The men are kind of pretty in their skin tight clothes with their perfect muscled bodies. The airhorn goes off and they dash away.

This race is fun in a hellish sort of way. It’s set in McDowell Mountain Park, which is lush Sonoran desert with a LOT of hills. The race site this year was at the competitive tracks, which are popular with trail runners and mountain bikers. The trails were specially designed to test your skills in these activities and they do. While not technically difficult, they are challenging and some spots scare the bejesus out of me if I am mountain biking. There are loop de loops, hairpin turns, steep drops off, rocks and LOTS of climbing. Running them isn’t a piece of cake, either.

The age groupers are next. In addition to pros, this race attracts athletically gifted age groupers. I am not in this category. The men go first so they supposedly won’t run down the women. Finally, I am off.

The first run goes up a hill on the road and then to a relentless series of hills. The day is cloudy and cool with a layer of white fog hugging the distant mountains. You are surrounded by desert populated with Palo Verde tree, teddy bear cholla cactus and various bushes. I struggle to run hard. The terrain demands a lot of my legs. The ground is sandy and rocky and the trail goes gradually uphill for the first half with constant ups and downs. Supposedly, the theory is that you don’t go all out on the first run of a duathlon, but it wasn’t working out that way. My heart rate was higher than I planned, but I wasn’t about to slow down.

As I was running, I was thinking about transition. I had to get through it without getting a lot of mud on my bike shoes. If I got too much mud on the cleat, I couldn’t clip into the pedal. This might be tricky. I had noticed the amount of mud surrounding my bike prior to starting the race. The mud has a sticky, greasy composition. Once it attaches itself to something, it clings like cement.

I finished the run and ran into transition. Most of the bikes were already gone, of course, so at least I had a little dry ground to work with. I usually end up riding mostly by myself towards the second half of the bike ride and also running by myself the second run. Everyone else finished early. I had a good half an hour after they are done to contemplate my athletic inadequacies while I was racing. I got on my bike shoes and negotiated the bumpy carpet to the road. I couldn’t clip in to my pedals at first, but I knocked mud off of my shoes until I could.

The road bike loop is a lot of hills, like the runs. The bike route descends to the park entrance, turns left onto a highway, then turns around and heads back to the park. It then ascends to the north end of the park and turns around again. The park road has a rough surface and sucks the energy out of you. The road entices you with false flats and climbs that seem like they should be easier, but they aren’t.

The first part of the bike course is not too bad. The rain was holding off and I was still warm. I got passed on a hill by someone who was 64. She must have been really fast, at least that’s what I told myself. All of the pros and the fast age groupers were gone. I turned around and headed back to the park.

The climb to the park entrance is where all the fun begins. It’s a long, slow slog up a hill. I didn’t mind it today as much as I had in the past. I went by mile marker twelve. Really? Is that all? This ride was not going very fast. By now the bike course was really deserted, with only a few stragglers. I was hoping that I wouldn’t be doing the last run by myself.

I finally got to the top of the hill and then went thankfully downhill. I hit the final turn around. Then the ride started to get ugly. I had to climb yet another hill. I wasn’t making much progress and this was turning into one of my slowest bikes I had ever done in this race. The wind started to pick up and it was raining. My thighs felt like someone was whacking them with an iron rod. It was definitely a low point in this race. Last year this point was at the beginning of the race and uncomfortable, but not as difficult as it felt now.

I finally got to the end and went into transition. There wasn’t enough room to re-rack my bike and I had to push one over to get mine racked. I almost fell over and banged my shin on the teeth of the bike gear. I changed shoes and hit the second run.

My legs felt like lead and it was hard to run. This trail was harder than the first, with steeper ups and downs. I passed someone I knew, then another. There weren’t many people on the course and everyone seemed to be struggling. I didn’t have much speed left in my legs. Then it started to rain again. Super. At least my multiple layers of clothing were keeping me warm.

I finally saw the finish line and tried to speed up, but couldn’t. My final time was 2:43. It was one of those races I thought I survived, but did not conquer. Trying my best and finishing it should have been enough, but it wasn’t. I liked the challenge of pitting myself against the terrain, but it was the king and not me. It was so pretty and so mean.

IT’S WAR OUT THERE: BIKE RIDING RANT

I feel like every time I ride my bike on the streets, it’s a war between me and the cars. People either don’t want to yield to bikes or aren’t paying enough attention to bother to look if I am there. I have to always assume that a driver is going to act like an idiot, because if I don’t, I could get hurt.

WHAT DRIVES ME CRAZY:

1. The rolling stop. Are you going to run me over or not? Sometimes it’s a game of chicken to see who stops first. It pisses me off. I have learned to veer away from the car if I am not sure they are going to stop.

2. Failing to yield to me in a crosswalk when I have the "walk" sign. I have the right a way. Stop already. I know you have more important things to do than slow down for a mere bike rider, but I can sue your ass if you run over me.

3. Cutting me off. Drivers assume they can turn right in front of me without my body doing too much damage when it bounces off of their car, but it’s a dangerous gamble. I might get blood on your pretty clean car.

4. Honking and swearing at me for no apparent reason. If you are having a bad day, why don’t you go to a therapist or something. Don’t take it out on me.

5. Not giving me the legally required three feet of space. You don’t have to run me off the road. Really.

　
If I am not contending with idiot drivers, then I have to deal with bad street design. It’s obvious some intersections weren’t designed for anyone not in a car.

1. Intersections where I have to push the walk button in order to get across and the walk button is located in a weedy patch of gravel that I have to drag my bike over to get to. Some cities have the walk button right by the curb. Why can’t every city do that?

2. Intersections where you have to guess whether you have enough time to get through the intersection on a green light. Kudos to Phoenix for putting in countdown numbers for the light change. I wish this was everywhere.

3. Intersections that don’t have a right turn lane, but the drivers make an illegal one in the dirt on the side of the road. In one instance, I couldn’t even cross the road on the green light because cars wouldn’t yield to let me through.

4. Intersections where there is no crosswalk on the right side, so you either have to wait in the lane going straight and hope a car triggers the light or you have to cross the intersection in three places to get back to the right hand side of the road.

I don’t know if drivers are worse in big cities, but it seems like drivers in Phoenix have a need to go ten miles over the speed limit and have to be somewhere ten minutes ago. If I get a polite driver that lets me go through an four-way stop intersection, I get confused. I know some drivers hate cyclists. Some cyclists run through red lights, don’t stop at stop signs and generally act like traffic laws don’t apply to them. I think they are the exception and besides, they don’t kill anyone other than themselves if they make a mistake.

Sometimes I have a fantasy that all the cars are off the road and I can ride my bike without fearing for my life. Riding a quiet street is a relief because it restores my inner peace and I can relax. The war is over, at least for a little while. I try to ride on streets with low traffic, but you can’t totally avoid busy intersections. It helps to ride with people so that drivers are more likely to see you, but that isn’t always possible.

So, unless I want to ride on a trainer indoors all the time, which I don’t, I have to gird my loins and do battle with the metal enemies. Victory is getting home safely.

Turning Eighteen

Eighteen is a crossroads. It’s a time to grow up, to fly or fail on your own and to become your own person. This age seems like a beginning because at eighteen your whole life is ahead of you. You have yet to experience a lot of the amazing highs and lows of life. You get discover who you are and learn new things about the world in a new environment. You get to discover first love, if you haven’t already. You might go to college and study new subjects, meet new people and learn exciting new ideas that expand your mind.

My daughter Melissa turned eighteen in January. I don’t think a teenager magically turns into an adult at eighteen because everyone is different, with different life experiences and some teenagers are more mature than others. Technically, my daughter is an adult and is able to vote, sign legal documents and make loans. I think Melissa is fairly mature and smart, but she doesn’t have a lot of life experiences because she hasn’t been out in the world on her own. Most teenagers don’t at that age. I was fairly immature at that age myself and it took me years to learn what I probably should have known at a lot earlier age.

So eighteen is also an end because even though I will always be a parent, I feel like however good or bad parent I was, most of my job is done. I will still provide guidance, but I can’t make decisions for her anymore. She has to make her own mistakes. I feel a sense of relief and also fear. I won’t be around to protect her. I will have no control over what might happen to her.

I was never one of those gung ho mothers. It took me a long time to decide to have a child and by then it was almost too late. I haven’t been exposed to babies when I was a child, since I was the youngest and I felt kind of lost as a new parent. I found out that babies are pretty amazing and that they soak up knowledge at an astounding rate. But it is a relief when they are potty trained. Taking care of a child can be pretty boring, but then it’s delightful when they first learn to walk or have other milestones. Even at an early age, they seem like extraordinarily complex creatures. Their moods change instantly and sometimes figuring out what they want is impossible.

But I am ready to have less responsibility in my life for other people. For a while I was a wife, a mother and my mother’s caretaker when she had Alzheimers. I am no longer a wife and my mother has passed away. Living without a husband, I have gotten used to doing whatever I felt like, except I still had to take care of my daughter. She is fairly low maintenance and keeps out of trouble, but I still feel a little constricted. My ex-husband got to move away and re-marry and do whatever he wanted and I want some of that freedom. I want to come and go as I please, cook whenever and whatever I want, and not have to clean up after anyone but myself. I am ready to let her go.

My daughter has always surprised me. Because of her I have had experiences I would not have had otherwise. For a while she was into pets and begged for a dog. I had no desire to have another child who wasn’t potty trained, so I didn’t give in. She tried fish, which all died. She managed to starve a goldfish to death, which is still shocking to me. Then she tried parakeets, which are hardy pets that like people. They have never been to a vet and are thriving after ten years. Of course they shed feathers like crazy and poop prodigiously. I would have never thought to have birds if she wasn’t around.

She also is a member of her speech and debate team in high school. This is an activity I wouldn’t have pursued in my wildest dreams. It would have terrified me and I would have avoided it like the plague. Most people don’t like the idea of getting up in front of people and performing a memorized speech, but she does it, is good at it and likes it. I have judged in some speech tournaments and I am amazed at what some of these kids can do in their creativity and acting skills. Participating in speech seems to give her self confidence and improves research and writing skills. I admire that she acquired such self confidence, since it is not an easy attribute to have.

Another world she inhabits is anime. I think it’s part of her creative side. The people that follow it are in their own world and are obsessed with it. I don’t understand it and I can’t explain it. In pursuing this interest, she sews costumes. I know nothing of using a sewing machine, so she learned it on her own. My mother hated sewing and so do I, so I don’t know where she picked up the interest and the aptitude for it. It must be a recessive gene. She goes to conventions with her friends and they dress up like characters in anime stories. I find it baffling. It’s another thing I wouldn’t have had contact with if she hadn’t been around. Still it is part of her life and she has a whole circle of weird people who enjoy it with her.

Being a teenager, my daughter had her "moods". She gets crabby for no apparent reason and sometimes tells me when I say something that "I DON"T CARE". Sometimes, she isn’t fun to be around and she takes me for granted, assuming I will always be around to help or do things for her. She thinks I am hopelessly out of date with technology. She wants desperately to get out of high school and go somewhere far away from Arizona. Teenagers like to distance themselves from their parents and she is no exception.

I am hoping her transition into adulthood isn’t too difficult, because it’s hard and I can’t do it for her. She seems fairly independent, and I have faith that she can do it. I think the whole college thing will be a piece of cake for her and maybe she will get a job someday, hopefully soon.

I am looking forward to being an empty nester with excitement and trepidation. Excitement because of what might be in store with me and her; and trepidation because I might worry about her and because I might not like living totally alone. I am sure I will miss her. Although I will never again experience a first love, like her, it’s also my chance to discover who I am and learn new things about the world in a new environment. I could even go to college and study new subjects, meet new people and learn exciting new ideas. You don’t have to be eighteen to do that.