Stretched

September 6, 2022

I woke up this morning to a very sick puppy dog. She made a colossal mess in my beautiful townhouse with various doggie bodily fluids and I drove her to the emergency vet with eyes blurry from tears and said various doggie bodily fluids all over my new dress. I knew she was fine, or that she would be, but I felt a little stretched during that drive. “Stretched” is a word we often use at work when we are trying to tell someone NO in a very polite way. “Todd, I’d love to teach that class on proposal writing this month but I’m a bit stretched with client work right now. How does October sound?” This morning I was really feeling it – stretched. I woke up with a long to-do list in my head and got up extra early to make my way into the office before the noisy masses arrived to start the work week. 1) Kick ass. 2) Take names. 3) Take Brian to lunch to celebrate the ass-kicking and name-taking. Those were my plans. Of course, my plans changed in a hurry.

Yesterday I wrote an extremely charming listicle about how being single is awesome. Today, however, was a great example of how having a life partner would come in extremely handy from time to time. A partner might have been able to take the dog to the vet for me, or pick her up in the evening so I could get some work done, or simply be an emergency contact I could put down on the damn form to answer the phone for updates while I’m trapped in my phone-free vault at work. He might have helped me clean up the crime scene Maudie left behind in the house, or picked up some dinner to save me one more chore. He could have helped me hold Maudie’s mouth open while I shoved her antibiotic pill down her throat, or just sent me a text around mid-day that said “Hey girl, you’re doing great.”

Alas. Ryan Gosling is not my boyfriend and Maudie and I have to make things work. I think about my friends who are single moms or single dads to little human babies and want to ask them “HOW?” How are you doing this? My guess is that you are also feeling pretty stretched. And my friends who are not single moms or dads – they’re stretched too. All the moms, all the dads, my friends who are librarians, nurses, welders, accountants, bus drivers and teachers who are simultaneously operating as coaches, friends, dog parents, Bible study leaders, swimmers, dancers, Instagram sales-people, bakers, dress-makers, knitters, car guys, brunch-goers, and so on. You name it, we do it. We all have all this stuff going on that stretches us this way and that way. We have various levels of support and help, but we just use that as an excuse to keep stretching further and further.

I know it’s weird that I keep thinking about the Donner Party so much. It’s probably even weirder that I keep telling you about it. I listened to a podcast about that story the other day and haven’t been able to stop researching it. I’m scared to death of all the cannibalism, but those people were survivors (and most of said survivors were YOUNG WOMEN). The thing that’s so interesting about these pioneers and explorers from back in the day is that most of them came from pretty privileged backgrounds just based on the selection-bias. If you didn’t have enough money for a wagon, some oxen and supplies, then you just didn’t get to go on these journeys. So it’s not like the surviving members of the Donner Party catastrophe were a bunch of hardy soldiers who set out to rough it in nature for an adventure. They were little kids and young women who were being led to a new life in California by the patriarchs of their families, who almost certainly never did a day of hard labor in their lives before they were stranded in the mountains. Yet they ended up climbing mountains, building shelters, enduring long days in miserably cold conditions, and just figured out how to make it all work. They were stretched but they didn’t break.

Statisticians have looked at the survivors of the Donner Party and other similar predicaments and determined that the more people you have in your social network, the more likely you are to survive in these difficult circumstances. For example, all but one of the single men (without family on the trail) who were part of the Donner Party died in the Sierra Nevada. First hand accounts of some of these deaths mention things like “he gave up” rather than “he starved to death.” But the people who were traveling with their families were more likely to survive, especially mothers and children. There are tons of confounding variables at play here, but the idea that the people who survived were the ones who had other people to survive for (and vice versa) is kind of a nice one. Even for a spinster lady like me.

My point is that my morning of mild inconvenience with my sick dog is comparable to the plight of the Donner Party. The end. Be sure tip your waitresses on the way out.

JUST KIDDING. That’s ridiculous. I guess my point is that we are these incredible creatures that can do unthinkable things, especially when our survival instincts kick in – designed to stretch and bend and twist and change direction based on what life gives us. And when we aren’t feeling “stretched” enough by our own lives, we tend to take more things on. We risk being stretched a little further so that we can offer support to the people around us. And that beautiful little factoid about most humans is what helps us survive and thrive and do incredible things together.

I started this blog entry complaining about how I wanted Ryan Gosling to support me or be my boyfriend or something like that. That was the old Rebecca. The Rebecca from 20-minutes ago. Now I can look back on my day and realize that even though I felt pretty “stretched”, I definitely had some non-Ryan-Gosling people stretching themselves a little further in their day to relieve me. My boss took my client meeting for me today, and offered to Google Search carpet cleaners when I sent him a text that said “Steve. OMG, my house.” My mom called me to check on me and Maudie. My co-worker sent me a Teams message to tell me he hoped my pup would be okay and to thank me for being a “slide-making beast” this weekend. The vet tech was sweet to my Maudie girl and gave me a bottle of water. None of these things are extreme or grand gestures, but I’m surrounded by the kind of people who support me during my tiniest, most insignificant set-backs. I am confident that they would help me stay alive in the mountains. Or, you know, they would let me die of natural causes before snacking on my corpse. Which really means a lot.