Four runs a week. Most of them easy, slow, unremarkable.
I’m protecting the mornings when I can get them. Finding other windows when I can’t. The run is where I pray, where I get quiet, where I take care of myself so I can go back into the house and be present for what’s there.
What’s there right now is a lot.
My mother-in-law fell last week. The night before she was due to go home, she broke both bones in her forearm. Surgery followed.
She has dementia, which means she doesn’t remember the fall, doesn’t fully understand why her arm is in a cast, doesn’t know why she’s waking up in a room that isn’t her own. She’s living with us now. Two to three months, best estimate. Pam’s siblings are rotating through for night shifts because someone has to help her navigate every ordinary task with one arm.
I found her on the floor in the middle of the night. Pam was there too. That image doesn’t leave quickly.
So the house is different now. Fuller and heavier at the same time.
The logistics are real — schedules, medications, the particular patience required to explain the same thing to someone who won’t remember the explanation. And underneath the logistics is the emotional weight, which Pam is carrying more of than anyone else in the room.
My job, as much as anything, is to not add to that weight.
That’s the accumulation nobody sees.
Not the dramatic version of showing up. Not the breakthrough conversation. The other kind. Staying present when it would be easier to get busy with something else. Handling the thing before Pam has to ask. Reading what she needs in a given moment without making her explain it. Doing afraid — which is what Pam is doing, and what I’m trying to do alongside her — and not making the fear into a production.
The steadiness that doesn’t announce itself.
That’s what the base-building is for. Not the race. There’s no metric for the 2am hallway.
The night after she got home from the hospital, Pam’s mom took her cast off in the middle of the night. Pam woke me up. We stood there together trying to get it back on as best two non-medical people could manage at that hour. My daughter likes to remind people I have a PhD but, as she puts it — I’m not that kind of doctor. Couldn’t do much about the cast. Could do something about being there, calm, at 2am, so Pam didn’t have to handle it alone.
Nobody sees that. It doesn’t count anywhere except where it actually counts.
Pam is stepping up. Doing things afraid. She’s not waiting until the fear passes to show up for her mother. She’s showing up with the fear still present, doing the next thing anyway. I’m trying to do the same thing — just from a different position in the room.
The runs are still happening. I’m protecting them because they’re not optional. An hour of slow miles in the quiet morning is how I come back into the house with something to give instead of something to take.
That’s not selfish. That’s the aerobic base. You build it so you can run the race when the race shows up.
This is the race showing up.
Not with a bib number and a finish line. With a mother-in-law in a guest room who doesn’t know why her arm hurts, and a wife who is carrying more than her share, and a house full of people doing their best under real pressure.
The accumulation happening this week won’t be visible. Most of it won’t be acknowledged. Some of it won’t be noticed by Pam, because she’s managing her own load and doesn’t have bandwidth to track mine.
That’s fine.
The base is building. The work is working.
One ordinary moment at a time.
If you’re in a season where the work is real but nobody’s tracking it — send me an email and tell me what the accumulation looks like for you right now.
