Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

putting on the new

Run your race

It was only 20 minutes after the race had started that the first runner crossed the finish line. My son and I stood there at the end of the route wrapped in winter coats on a Sunday afternoon in April. Two of our foursome–Dad/Husband and Sister/Daughter–were out on the course somewhere and we weren’t expecting them for at least another 15 minutes or more. But my son insisted on seeing the first person to cross the finish line and wanted to keep watching as the timer ticked away while more and more runners crossed the line.

Over the next several minutes, young and old, women and men finished the race. Right around the 38-minute mark, our people came into view. My daughter was struggling through some discomfort as my husband jogged next to her, watching her carefully and closely.

Weeks ago, when my husband decided he wanted to run this particular 5K, he asked my daughter if she wanted to run with him. She’s part of a running program at school and is training for another 5K in May. (I’m her running buddy for that race and I’ve been training, too. More on that later.) I was proud of her for saying yes and taking on the challenge.

Read the rest of this post over at Putting on the New.

The question the kids were really asking

One by one, the kids trickled into the small room, shoes off, yellow sheets in hand. It was Health Screening Day at the school, and a crowd of volunteers gathered and recorded heights and weights, and administered vision tests.

I stood off to the side, writing the numbers on the yellow sheets, then entering them in the computer. It was my first time at this gig and I watched the kids from the corner of my eye. Some of them had zero inhibitions about having their height measured and stepping on the scale. Others approached with a let’s-get-this-over-with attitude. We were told from the beginning not to announce any weights, especially with the older kids, and I could 100 percent identify with the reason for that. I was mortified anytime anyone had an inkling of my weight as a tween/young adult.

We saw kids of all shapes and sizes, no two of them alike. But they did have one thing in common. I’ll get to that.

Heights were measured in inches only, so we had to calculate a bit, which meant the heights were often spoken out loud.

“Am I tall?” some of the kids asked. “How many feet is that?” “How tall am I?”

We answered as best we could with encouragement and truth. But it was the questions and comments after the scale that had my heart breaking.

“Is that good?” “Is it okay?” “This scale weighs me five pound heavier.” (That last comment has to be something they’ve heard at home, right?)

Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash

Weight. It’s such a tricky thing. And it wasn’t just the girls asking. Some of the boys hopped off the scale and announced their numbers, even though they had been told not to. One boy was relieved that he could still play football.

A lot of the girls were silent. If I could read the silence, though, I know what some of the thoughts were. Because I was a girl whose number was always too big compared to her friends, too embarrassing to repeat. Even now, at my heaviest apart from pregnancy, I can hardly stand to admit the number out loud.

With a prepubescent daughter, though, it’s long past time for me to tackle these issues head on. Because she is strong and beautiful and her body is so different than mine was at that age, but the words and attitudes and pressure are just as damaging. Maybe more so.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. Not really. There is another question behind all those questions that had nothing to do with height and weight. It takes many forms, but at the heart of it all, this is the question I think they were really asking:

Am I enough?

Read the rest of this post at Putting on the New, where I blog on the 12th of each month.

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