savagemama

Saturday, Seth and I started hiking up a drainage in the Mission mountains at 7:30 a.m. It was our sixth wedding anniversary. The trail was steep and familiar and we moved slowly as Eliza and Lucille lay sleeping at the house of dear friends who’d agreed to watch them so we could have a kid-free night and day. Around 9 a.m. we came out of the trees and onto a rocky alpine ridge. As I stood looking at the curved mountain meadows to either side, the jagged outline of Graywolf Peak, the tiny lakes that had just barely begun to thaw, I thought about how in our modern lives there are so few opportunities to touch something ancient.

Birth. Mountains. Death. Ocean.

To experience these things we place our hands, even if for a moment, on that place inside us that needs to connect with something primal.

It got me thinking about the choices we make: where we live, how we treat ourselves, those in our lives and how they treat us. I thought about how it is okay to choose to make something a part of your life just because it’s beautiful, just because it fulfills in you some unexplainable need.

It’s important to be surrounded by beauty.
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As a mother I know I’m supposed to kiss the owies, put the four hundredth bandaid of the day on dirty, sticky fingers and serve the oatmeal with strawberries in the purple bowl along with the Elmo fork. I know I’m supposed to read the cat book at least three times before bed, help Eliza write her name, Lucille’s name, our dog Imogene’s name and not protest when bath time turns into a bathroom soaking, all out water fight. These are things every mother does: the ass kicking, the kung fu, the back flips. But in summer in Montana we mamas do all this while hiking mountain trails, swimming in creeks and sleeping outside.

It’s a part of the negotiation, I’m finding, to raise children here. Even those of us who come from somewhere else spend our summers gently removing hooks from the mouths of rainbow trout, floating rivers, starting fires and reading our children to sleep by the light of head lamp looking at the stars through the roof of our tent.

It’s one thing to live in Montana it’s another wholly to be raising little Montanans.
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When I cracked an inside joke around mile 23 I think my friend Sarah knew I was not only going to be fine but that was going to finish this marathon smiling.

I had picked her up a mile or so before. She was jumping up and down, smiling and cheering for me.

“Woohoo Savage!” she said.

I took my headphones off long enough to hug her and say, “Let’s get her done, Richey!”

“Let’s do it!” she said. We were both pretty excited. I was feeling strong, we’d connected at the spot we’d planned the on the day before when she said she’d be happy to hop in the last leg of the race and run with me. There aren’t many people I’d want to see at mile 22 of a marathon but Sarah Richey, she’s one of them. She’s top notch.

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The hay is in the barn.

Or at least that’s what our coach says.

We’ve trained since March, we’re four days away from running a marathon and we’re ready. The hay is in the barn, he says.

Our neighbor in Arlee, a life-long ranch woman, told me once when I offered to help her with the lunch she was preparing for 30 or so people, “Oh, honey, I ‘bout got it licked!”

This is one of those things I love about Montana. The sayings.
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I saw a cartoon in the New Yorker this week that made me laugh. It was a of a woman driver, clearly frazzled, with three kids in car seats behind her. The bumper sticker on her minivan said, “I’d rather be working.”

I have been that mother in the car with two kids in car seats gripping the steering wheel, doing deep breathing exercises just trying to get to somewhere. I get it, I thought. Yes, there are days I’d rather be answering emails, coming up with tag lines for ads, writing a communication plan — the “work” I’ve done for years. But as I stood there reading the cartoon again, I thought, hey, wait a second. If that woman is taking care of three kids who are young enough to still be in car seats, no one is working harder than she is.

It is the New Yorker, after all, who knows, that irony may be the whole point of the cartoon because that magazine is nothing if not ironic. But that cartoon got me thinking.
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