2.5 mile mark

For those of you who didn’t run cross country, a race is 5K (3.1 miles) and by far the hardest part was around the 2.5 mile mark. By the time you reach that point you are exhausted, but the end of the race is still too far away to pull on your reserves. This is the point in the race when your body tells you to just stop and the only thing that keeps you going is sheer mental determination. The absolute worst terrain for this part of the course was woods, where no one could see you. Because, you see, at this point all I wanted to do was walk and in the woods this was a feasible option. No, bad Sarah, must keep running.

As I’m sure you guessed, the reason I’m telling you this is that it seems an apt metaphor for my life right now. I am at the 2.5 mile mark in both the pregnancy and the semester, and with the overlap between them I am having trouble finding the energy to push through.

Last week I had a couple days when I was just done with pregnancy. It has actually by all measures been a really easy pregnancy and I know I have no reason to complain, but I was just done. I was sick of not sleeping, sick of being achy, sick of not being able to go for a walk at a normal pace, sick of wearing the same three outfits day after day, sick of people looking at me like I had an arm growing out of my head if I dared venture on campus, sick of worrying about every feeling or lack of feeling. All trivial things in themselves, but when they piled themselves up at a time when I was already tired and frustrated, I collapsed. I actually found myself resenting Peanut at one point. And if you’ve never tried being mad at a baby, let me tell you, it isn’t helpful at all because in addition to being frustrated I then felt horribly guilty. I’ve gotten a little sleep since then and haven’t been on campus in a week, so things don’t look as bleak, but I'm still wishing it was just May already.

Stopping isn’t actually an option when it comes to the pregnancy, but it sort of is when it comes to work, and that is dangerous. Normally when I reach the point in the semester where I just want to curl up in bed and ignore work, I can resist through sheer willpower. But when you add the fact that my body is just physically drained as well and I don’t feel like I can push it as much (it is one thing to shut down my immune system by working too hard and give myself shingles when it was just me, a totally different thing when it involves the baby’s health), and the fact that working from home while it has all sorts of benefits (comfy clothes, avoiding the bubonic plague undergrads pass around this time of year, not having my pretzels confiscated if I need a snack mid-day, avoiding people’s looks) is akin to the forest in the cc race, and I keep finding myself back in bed. And so the once ambitious deadline for circulating this chapter in late April is quickly becoming impossible. And part of me wants to just ditch it. After all, I’ve already written two chapters and an article this semester. Isn’t that enough? But I know that anything I can get done now will make life easier later.

But after many many races, I know it does end. If I just keep plugging along, I'll come around a bend where I can see the finish line. And making it to that bend is really the hard part because once you can see the end suddenly you discover energy reserves that you didn’t know you had and the sprint to the finish is a piece of cake by comparison. So I just have to keep plugging along for a few more weeks, knowing that bend is going to come into sight. And maybe go to the public library after lunch to get out of the forest (i.e. away from my bed) for a bit.