I was unprepared for how much this was going to hurt

“I had my first contraction!”
“Huh - you - what?” I open my eyes.
“I had-“
“Oh! Oh that’s-“ I sit up.
“- I’m in labor!”
“That’s wonderful!” I’m awake now, “Should we-“
“I think it’s going to be a while. You should go back to sleep, but I wanted to tell you.”

I’d been asleep about two hours. I went back to sleep for four or six hours. Other than a fifteen minute catnap in the delivery room I didn’t sleep again for about fifty hours and many of those were insanely intense emotionally. For her first two weeks our new daughter slept about one hour at a time. I felt constantly drunk.

I push my fingers into the space between the brick wall and the wooden cover, press my toes into the brick, push up hard with my quads, reach my left arm high overhead and back. I grab the hold, pick my right foot up to knee height, push with my right foot, reach with my right hand. My body spins off the wall, I hold tight with my left hand, my shoulder strains, both feet slip, the finger on my right hand graze the wall, my feet hit the soft padded floor, I let go with my left hand and crumple.
“You okay?” Darren asks.
“I think s- no actually.” My right ankle burns.
“Oh shit,” Lina puts a hand on my shoulder.
I unlace my climbing shoe.
“Did you hear a pop?”
“I don’t think so but I’m not sure.” I look at the wall. I only fell about 18 inches. I look at my ankle, already twice as big around as it should be, after maybe a minute. “I think I landed on the side of my foot with all my body weight.” I stand, the ankle collapses, I fall back down.
“Whoa!”
“Dude are you -“
“Well alright right then. Let me try that again.” I grit my teeth, use their hands to pull myself to standing. I try not to put any weight on my right foot as I limp to my street shoes. I put them on, leaving the right shoe unlaced. “I’m gonna go to urgent care, I think my ankle’s pretty fucked up.”
“Do you want someone to go with you?”
“Nah I think it’s just like twenty minutes from here. I’ll see you guys later.”
“Let us know how your ankle is!”
“Will do. Good climbing today, until this happened!” High fives all around.

I limp up the stairs and out the door. Twenty minutes later I am not even half way to the urgent care and my ankle feels I imagine a stabbing feels like, with every single step. I am swearing loudly much of the time, sweating heavily, and my knee in my non-injured leg is starting to protest at carrying most of my body weight on this shuffling walk. Why didn’t I ask for help? That was so fucking dumb. What is wrong with me? I realize that while I am terrified of heights I have never seriously considered that I might get injured rock climbing. Half an hour later I am at urgent care, where a doctor will tell me I have a very bad sprain. A second visit to a sports medicine doctor gets me a referral to a physical therapist who tells me to try to walk on it as long as I’m not going to fall over, and who prescribes that I dip the ankle in an ice water bath multiple times a day. Doing so will make me cry, repeatedly.

She wanted ice cream before bed. She had ice cream earlier today. She’s three and has erupted into a full blown tantrum. I haven’t been sleeping much lately and have been job hunting. “I HATE YOU DADDY! I DON’T LOVE YOU!” This is the emotional equivalent of a hail mary kick in the nuts. I didn’t see it coming and did not have my guard up. This brings tears to my eyes.

Charles Schultz drew and wrote a Peanuts comic strip every day for almost fifty years. Schultz seems to have been relatively unhappy. In one of the introductions to the Collected Peanuts the editor writes that he prefers not to see Schultz as an unhappy person who turned to making art. He prefers to see Schultz as a dedicated artist who bore serious emotional consequences due to his seriousness as an artist.

*

She’s five. It’s bedtime. She wants to finish drawing a picture before bed. She’s talking fast, agitated, and looking at the paper, focused, rather than looking at me, and her little sister is crying, so it’s hard to catch every word. The picture has something to do with soundwaves, the soundwaves have to be drawn in black and where is the black crayon NO YOU CAN’T HAVE THE GREEN ONE I’M USING IT “don’t yell at your sister” I say, STOP IT DADDY JUST LEAVE ME ALONE “honey you need to stop yelling” I’M TRYING TO STOP JUST LET ME FINISH MY PICTURE “I’m going to take the crayons away” No please just let me finish this picture I’m almost done please PLEASE DON’T TAKE THE CRAYONS.

I decide to give her five minutes. I help her find the black crayon. I think “she’s not even having fun, what is the point of this?!” and then I think about how I feel when I leave things unfinished, how much I hated putting up the fucking bookshelves after our last move but how good it felt to get it done, how much I like to finish a workout goal even when the workout makes me feel like I might throw up, how I used to play guitar until my fingertips burned, back when I did music. I guess the point isn’t fun. I picture her getting older, continuing to draw, crying because she hates her drawings, shouting because she’s angry at her work for not going according to plan and not being as awesome as she hoped. Part of me wishes she would stop drawing and watch more TV because I hate to see her in distress.
Five minutes later the drawing has not worked out and we are in another fucking bedtime tantrum. I shouldn’t have let her stay up so late.

“How was your day?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
My wife and I have had this conversation a lot, switching up the roles.

I met John and Lara when I was young and confused, doing local punk stuff. They were smart kids who wrote and drew for fun. I was a little bit older than them. I’m still a little bit older but it’s almost 20 years later and we’ve aged into being the same age. They’re smart adults who write and draw for fun. They spend serious time and energy and money on it. I’d call them working artists though it’s more like they work to be able to make art. And they seem to set and stick to exercise goals. If they were friends of friends I would find an excuse to hate them because I would think it all comes easily to them instead of being such hard work like it is down here on earth. Knowing what they accomplish and how hard they work at it, I find them inspiring and intimidating and I wish I was more like they are. I tell them so recently when I see them and we stay up too late as I get drunk on nostalgia. I’m flattered that they’re flattered. I worry they wouldn’t be flatterd if they knew who I really am.

“This was my best marathon yet,” Ian says, sipping his coffee, “this past weekend. The voices didn’t come on until like the 25th mile.”
“Voices? I’ve never run a marathon.”
“For me every time there’s a point where I start to ask myself why I wanted to do this, why I bothered, where I regret starting.”
“Ah. I get that at like the second mile, I think.”
Ian laughs.
“I understand.”
“I think part of why I find running satisfying is that I run through those voices and sort of put them in their place.”
“Absolutely. That’s a lot of the point, for me.”

John draws two pages a day in his sketchbook. In one, Garfield is turning his life around. He says “Monday is just a day like any other.” He sprints, telling himself “don’t throw up, don’t throw up.” He tells another cat, “you have to choose again every day.” John and Lara encouraged me a lot when I first started running, and I only started on their suggestion. I think about them a lot when I run.

I’m trying to get back into shape. I run a lap, do five burpees, run a lap, do five burpees, go back to running. By the third set my throat has the burn and taste of stomach acid. I finish the 4th set of burpees and the last lap, walk to the bottom of the biggest hill in the park. I click my ipod to a Copyright song that’s an employee’s revenge fantasy against a boss. I turn the volume up loud and sprint up the hill. As I walk back down I have a terrible stitch in my side and I feel like I will never catch my breath. I begin doing Lamaze breathing like my wife did when she was in labor. I feel ridiculous but it gets me through.

“You should read this article,” Dan tells me. We’ve been talking about how writing is sometimes the worst thing out of all the things that are terrible. “I’ll email it to you. The gist is basically he says ‘I hate myself until the 4th draft.’”
“Holy shit that’s exactly how it is for me-“
“I KNOW-“
“-except I think I never get to a 4th draft.”
“Someday.”
“Yeah we’ll see. Listen I gotta run, I just got home.”
“Cool. I’ll email you that piece.”

I check facebook. I check twitter. I check my email. I check facebook. I check weather dot com. I check my email. I check facebook. I check the news headlines. I check the clock, it’s been two hours. What the fuck am I doing?

I pick up the printout of the piece I am writing. I set it next to me. I put a pencil on top. I open the piece on my computer. I open my stopwatch program. I get out my headphones, plug them in, put them in my ears. I highlight all the of the text in my piece, find the file that tells me how to use the software for vision impaired people. I click the command that tells my computer to begin reading my work to me. I click start on the stopwatch program and pick up the paper copy of the thing I’m revising. I make my eyes follow along at the same fast pace that the computer reads at.

Two paragraphs in I want to check facebook. Another paragraph, I want to check my email. I underline the parts I like. I draw lines through stuff to cut. I draw boxes around stuff I don’t like but want to keep, or consider further. Three paragraphs later I want to go for a walk. A page later I need a drink of water. Two pages later my eyes are streaming with tears and I am sobbing out loud. This piece is terrible. I do not know how to write I never should have tried this was a mistake this will never be anything but terrible you are I am terrible dad was right about you. I wipe my knows on my shirt sleeve and keep reading, underlining, crossing out, drawing lines.

I reach the end of the piece 40 minutes and 5 more bursts of crying later. I wonder if I am having some kind of episode. I walk to the kitchen, get a drink of water, text Kate. “I just started crying while reading through my stuff and making notes for revision.” I make myself a cup of tea. I feel soft, weak, made to cry by the act of typing. I remember my dad talking about his construction callused hands compared to my typing fingers. I try to remember a time I saw him cry. My phone buzzes, Kate, “I’ve been there. Hang in there.” I drink my tea, pace in the hallway. I text Kate again, “I reread that piece I told you about, took me 40 minutes.” She texts back “only 40! wow! you’re on a roll!” This could easily have taken me the whole week. I just took all the distraction and irritation and inadequacy I feel in reading my stuff, the things that I procrastinate to try and avoid, and concentrated it into a very short period of time. I pushed through the discomfort and kept going. I remember when my dad told me he was proud of me after I ran my first 10k, and when he said “you finish things, you’re not a quitter.”

I read back over the latest draft. My stomach sinks. I consider deleting it. I consider adding some jokes or talking about sex. I want to check facebook. I fumble for a rock climbing metaphor or something about my kid. I decide fuck it I’ll just call it done enough to be a draft. I commit to pushing through the discomfort. Comfort’s over-rated.