My mom wants me to believe she’s an “outdoor woman.”
She’s led a campaign over the past few months to convince me that she could go on a trip to the Boundary Waters if she wanted, or go skiing if she felt like it.
A few weeks ago I was eating breakfast at the kitchen table in my parents’ new suburban-development style house in Duluth. My mom walked up to me in her workout clothes, her hair in a ponytail.
“I’m an outdoor woman, Emily,” she said. “Here, feel my muscles. " She rested her flexed arm next to my cereal bowl, smiling. I stared at her, skeptical, with my spoon hanging out of my mouth. I wished I knew how to raise one eyebrow like Betsy did.
She turned around, and backed towards me.
“OK, fine, poke me in the butt. You’ll see!”
My mother grew up as the third child in a Finnish family of four. She was the oldest girl, though, so she had to be pretty tough to fight off her older brothers. They tied her to chairs and tickled her until she peed.
She’s also nothing like me. She’s tall, blonde and emotional. When Betsy died, she took it harder than the rest of us because they were so much alike. “This world was just too tough for her,” she would say.
And when Betsy died, she gained a lot of weight. As my mom joked with me a few months ago, “I was so confused that I thought I was going to find her in the refrigerator.”
Almost two years after Betsy’s death, my Mom went with her best friend to Florida for a vacation this winter. Her friend owns a house there, so they spent a few weeks walking around the beaches, shopping, reading books and eating at good restaurants.
But she also had some sort of epiphany. She said that one afternoon she and her friend were on the porch of a restaurant near the water. They were having a good time, telling stories, drinking wine. And she just started sobbing.
She explained to me later: “I just started crying for everything. For Betsy, for my lost youth, for everything that has happened to us over the few years. And it’s like I knew then, finally, that I would be OK, or that we would be OK.”
After that cathartic trip, my mom decided she was tired of gaining weight and moping. Now, she’s on a diet, she walks five miles a day, and she’s lost more than 40 pounds since March. She's going to a yoga retreat in Chicago next month, and she lifts weights with a personal trainer. I better start watching my back, or my mom’s going to wear a smaller dress size than me.
None of this, of course, explains why my mom thinks being in shape means you’re an “outdoor woman.” In my entire life, she’s only gone skiing about a dozen times. Common excuse include “I don’t have any ski clothes,” “It’s too cold,” or “why would I want to do that?”
For the fifth year in a row, I ran the half marathon for Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth in June. Every year my Mom comes to watch me at the finish line (my Dad is usually working in the medical tent). But she constantly reminds me that he hates running. She ran a 10K in college, and that’s about as far as she needs to go.
This year was different, though. She saw the varied types of people that hobbled across the finish line. This time, instead of thinking it looked miserable, she thought she could do it too.
After the race she dragged me to the mall with her to help her buy running shoes. She said she was going to train for the half-marathon for next year, and she was going to start that afternoon.
Two months later, she’s still training. But I still refuse to poke her in the butt.
