My own experience with endurance could probably be distilled to how I gave birth. My son stood up in the final days after being head down for nine months. The decision was made to turn the baby in the womb so, hopefully, a cesarean could be avoided. I was in a holistic, water-birth-based practice in London headed by two celebrity obstetricians. Famous people had given birth in this hospital and, coincidentally, my grandmother had done her nurse’s training there in the months before WWI when she went to France and nursed in the trenches. The turning is called an external cephalic version (ECV). This happened in a tiny room with a person monitoring via ultrasound, my doctor and me, and my baby. The father of this baby was also there but barely in the room. Basically, the doctor stood on the bed and forced my son to flip. It was one of the least pleasurable experiences I have ever had made worse by my sense that he was being forced against his will to change positions which seemed like a bad preview of the future.

The family story was amusing, a drunken Scottish doctor, me on a doorstep in London, age three, smashing milk bottles. And then kneeling in that broken glass. Getting stitched up by that doctor who squinted at the gaping wound and apparently stitched it up with something like a fishing line. I found the scar useful for remembering my right from my left. I never thought about the other details like being alone on a doorstep at age three, breaking milk bottles. And why was this doctor drunk?

I am chronically discontent. Set a goal, draw a line in the sand, set a bar, articulate a dream, an intent, an aspiration, and I will get there and immediately embrace some version of failure. Here are some of the things I’ve achieved, a master’s degree in writing, four published novels, a marriage lasting into the third decade, a healthy, happy adult child, a sulky but secretly content cat, several houses, the ability to swim over a mile, a full-distance triathlon, bicycling over seventy miles a day for six days, wonderful friends, over forty years of continuous sobriety. Guess what? It’s all slightly flawed, not quite perfect, shadowed by an overwhelming feeling that while I am fully aware, the life I inhabit is privileged and, at times, extraordinary, there is that pea under the mattress I can’t avoid, the slight flaw in the dream, the cloud in this sky where I live in such aching beauty here in Northern Michigan.