Superstorm

I was a terrible teenager.  Not terrible in the troublemaking sense because, simply speaking, I was a people pleaser.  I was an overly sensitive, emotionally erratic, sometimes dramatic, terrible decision maker.  And yet, I had no reason to be.

My home life was stable, my parents were loving, my siblings were crazy (in the best way possible) and our house was perfectly manicured.  I had good friends, boyfriends too, I wasn’t bullied and I did fairly well in school.  With the exception of our disturbingly decorated red-ceilinged living room, there was little in my life that lent itself to the overwhelming and emotionally charged teenage version of me.

So what was my problem?

I was a teenage girl.  That’s it, nothing more.

But what if? 

What if my teenage years were more than a self-imposed emotional superstorm?  What if my mom had cancer?  What if my dad needed surgery?  What if my mom lost her job?  What if my dad did too?  What if we struggled financially and what if my parents struggled to find marital bliss in all of this?  What then?  And, the worst thought of all, what if this is the emotional superstorm that I’ve created for my own teenage girls?

All of these challenges have certainly left an indelible mark on my little family.  Cancer being the first falling rock in an avalanche, creating an instability in my kids’ lives that I never dreamed I could be responsible for.  It forces me to think about what I would have needed as a teenage girl caught in a real-life emotional superstorm.

I would need to be loved for my good decisions and loved harder for those bad ones.  I would need an example of resilience and a model of strength.  I would need to be surrounded by people whose simple presence lifted me and made me feel certain that I could go on.  I would need to know that the finish line is made sweeter when the journey to get there seems outright impossible.

This is who I hope my teenage girls see when they look to me.

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This post was meant to be a thank you to all of you who supported Sparrow’s Nest through my Team Sparrow half marathon fundraiser, but my thoughts are scattered and the words tumbled out differently than I expected.  

Sparrow’s Nest fed my family during cancer treatment and it means the world to me to be able to pay it forward.  That is one of the reasons why I run.  But there is a very selfish reason why I continue to run as part of Team Sparrow – my teenage girls.  I haven’t provided them with the stability that I had growing up but, through this team, I can show them what resilience and strength looks like.  To see them and to hear them cheering wildly from the sidelines as I crossed the finish line was one of the proudest moments of my life.

The finish line really is made sweeter when the journey to get there seems impossible.