Esme walked into the bullpen with five baseballs and a clear goal of pitching the ball over the plate. She watched a number of people throw before her - adult men who pushed the speed clock close to 70 mph and young boys who pitched runaway balls over the protective nets and into the crowds. She saw weak throwers pitch from the grassy midway point and the strong-armed wind up from some 60 feet back on the sandy mound. 

With few exceptions, the older women and girls threw from the grass, while the men and boys strode up to the sand to pitch.

Esme took her balls from the volunteer, walked to the grass and set them down by her feet. She turned around, eyed home plate and threw. The first ball covered the distance easily but strayed far right of the plate. The second edged a little closer and the third seemed perfect to my non-baseball-knowing eyes. She picked up the other two balls and walked back to the sand, doubling the distance required for her pitch to reach the plate. 

A noise rose up from the crowd of onlookers, a murmur of acknowledgment that this, this walking to the sand, was a gutsy move by such a small girl. 

"Whoa!" the man in charge of the event said. "Right on," I thought to myself. 

She threw the last two balls: one of them managed the distance, the other fell short. But none of that mattered. Not really. What mattered is that she's confidant in her own strength, believes in the athleticism of her body and is courageous enough to test it. She's not cowed by gender norms or limited by fear or even inexperience. 

We're not a baseball family. We don't watch it on TV, play on any teams or even throw a ball around in the yard for fun. When someone hit the ball from home plate while we were waiting for our own crack at bat, Desmond shouted "Goal!" Clearly, we were out of our league. But even that didn't stop Esme, Josephine and the others from testing themselves at bat and in the bullpen of a major league park. 

*****

The kids stood next to a North Carolina lake this past weekend and watched Kent and I swim an open-water race. A former collegiate swimmer, Kent did the 2.4-mile swim while I competed in the 1.2-mile distance. The kids know their father relishes this kind of swim; they also know I'm terrified of these races despite having completed a number of them.

"I hope you don't have any anxiety," Tobias told me as I walked back from my umpteenth trip to the bathroom before the race. The anxiety… it wreaks havoc on my belly. 

I like to think they see this. See us challenging ourselves - our minds and bodies and mortal fears - and it inspires them to swim, bike, run, stretch, jump, climb, sweat, fall down and get up again. To keep moving, moving, always moving. 

*****

The kids crowded into a dressing room at a local triathlon store while I tried on racing suits for the upcoming Half Ironman. When I pulled on the first suit and stepped back to look at myself in the mirror, Josephine nearly gasped. "Mommy, you look STRONG!"

"I AM strong," I told her. 

*****

A friend recently shared a story by a woman Cross Fitter that had some take on "Strong is the New Skinny" in the title. It's not a new concept, right? I mean, I've heard it before and it's always kind of irked me because it strikes me still as a way of fixating on how our bodies appear to other people rather than what our bodies can do for us. 

I'm all for being strong, I'm just not caught up with whether you think I look it. It's terribly complicated, really, because, I do like looking fit. I just like being fit even more. 

I care if I can swim an open-water race, brave the strong currents, laugh at the waves and thank god as I pass one buoy, then the next, for the strength of my arms and legs and lungs. Ever mindful, always grateful. 

I care if I can balance on my head, ride through the countryside powered by my own legs and beat the shit out of a would-be attacker. 

I just don't much care whether my body pleases you or not. 

I care whether it can hit a pitch in a ballpark in front of my kids - it can! - and whether that inspires them to challenge their own bodies. It does.

I've tried this several times before, tried to grow aliums like the ones in my rural Japanese village that I fell so crazy in love with. But it never worked. This year, though... Just look!

I love them! 

An opportunity presented itself recently that would have put us back in Raleigh. In a beautiful house in our old neighborhood, one door down from dear friends. I tried not to get too excited, but I basically moved our furniture into the house, unpacked our books on the hand-crafted shelves, hung the artwork and stood on the screened-in porch watching the kids climb the trees. In my mind. We were there. Back in a place I never wanted to leave. 

The job fell through. 

So, we're here. As we have been for the last six, nearly seven years. As we will be, likely, another six, seven, 17 years. 

Our neighborhood celebrated its first First Thursday of the summer season this past week. The local business owners threw a party they dubbed "Cirque du Del Ray" with a bike rodeo, hula hooping, yoga, loud music and dancing. The women from Mind the Mat, the yoga and pilates studio where I practice, outdid themselves for sheer enthusiasm and lunacy.

Raleigh is a wonderful place to raise a family, but so is Del Ray, a place filled with love, generosity, eccentricity and fun. On Twitter, I tell people I'm from Funky Mayberry. On the best days, that's what this place feels like.

I had a moment on the Farmer's Market parking lot, where the conga line marched and the limbo-ers danced - when I thought how lucky we are to be here. With these people. Maybe one day we'll get back to Raleigh. If we have to wait somewhere, though, we couldn't have found a better place to spend our time. 

Over the years, numerous doctors have noted that one of my legs is longer than the other but only one of them thought it was a big deal. The physical therapist I started working with a few months ago agrees and said the fact that my right leg is a full inch shorter than my left is the reason my back has been so bungled up. 

I need to correct the discrepancy by using a lift in my shoe. As you can imagine, though, you can't put an inch-thick lift in your shoe without your foot overflowing the shoe itself. So, I had a three-quarter inch lift constructed, and I have to send any shoe I plan to wear to an online company that builds the shoe up the remaining height. 

I'm still waiting on that shoe to be delivered. It's an athletic shoe similar to the one I've been wearing day in, day out for the past three months. 

Because it's so important to keep my hips level and my spine in line, the therapist wants me to wear my shoes even in the house. 

If you know me well, you know that I HATE this. First, I don't like shoes in the house. Second, I'd go barefoot everywhere if I could. I'm just not a fan of shoes. I'm also not a fan of debilitating pain that keeps me from the activities I love though, so…. shoes. 

I can't bear the idea of wearing athletic shoes and socks all summer. I want to find some kind of sandal that I can build up without it looking ridiculous. With a sandal, I obviously can't wear the insert, so the entire base will have to built up an inch. Get out a ruler or tape measure and imagine a shoe with an inch heel. That's pretty big, right? And if you built that inch onto something that already has some height, well, it would look terrible. 

I've gone to multiple shoe stores and left all of them frustrated and on the verge of tears. I can't find anything. Here's your challenge: have you seen a flat, comfortable looking sandal? I don't give a shit, really, about fashion. I mean, I don't want it to be ugly, but I don't care that it's hip. I'm looking for simple, durable and comfortable. And, flat. Thoughts?

The past several days I flooded my social media streams with photos of the cherry blossoms in bloom round the Tidal Basin. I did the same thing last year. Probably the year before that too, though my footprint on the Internet was smaller. No Twitter or Instagram then. 

If you happen to be my friend on Facebook or follow me on the other sites, I'm sorry. 

I'm not sorry, really. I love cherry blossoms, but I especially adore the trees that ring the Tidal Basin. I'm a Japanese haiku cliche when it comes to them. They're exquisite and so tragically fleeting they practically scream: "Embrace this moment now. After this breath, it's over."

With this wind, they're blown.

With this rainstorm, they're drowned.

Every year, I feel compelled to visit them daily because that's how quickly they change. On Monday, some had started to unfurl and there was an expectant blush on the water. By Tuesday morning, the blush was a blaze and the canopy of pink made magical forts of dirt and sidewalk. On Wednesday, virgin blooms already started to fall like snowflakes. 

It's not that I want to see the blossoms, I do, it's that I'm drawn to bear witness to their splendor before it's spent. For another full year. Or always. What if I'm not here next year? What if they aren't? There are no dreams or plans that bad luck or misfortune can't upend. 

So, I walk beneath the blooms and celebrate their magic, and show you because I can't help it. Look! Look! It's beautiful. This life. These trees. This moment.

No need to fill in the details of the conversation. Suffice to say, we talk often.

So, the book.

I started somewhere in the middle, after flipping it open in the library. Once we got home, I got distracted by dinner and bath times and the nightly ritual and set it on the desk by my bed. Upside down. 

The kids had off from school today, so after a trip to the coffee shop to eat treats and play chess, I retreated to my bedroom for some quiet computer time. Desmond wandered in after a spell, stood next to my bed and picked up the book. He gave me a wry smile and said, "I thought you got this about me." 

I smiled. 

"What did you think about the waffle episode?" he asked, laughing.

I didn't know what he was talking about. Turns out, it's the title of the first chapter and describes the story of an 11-year-old girl who flips out when her simple plan to eat three waffles one day and save three for the next is upended by her little brother. 

"I started in the middle," I told him. "I didn't read that part yet."

So, Desmond started to read aloud, from the beginning. He read of oppositional behavior, vapor lock, meltdowns and I cannot tell you how surreal it was to hear him put voice to scenarios that play out weekly in this house. 

"Of course, life isn't always so simple as 'I'm mad' anyway," he read. "If a child says, 'I'm mad,' the world- his parents, teachers, siblings, peers, soccer coaches - is bound to respond in some way. Then the child has some more thinking, feeling, and expressing to do. The trouble is, 'I'm mad' is all about some children can muster in the 'expressing your feelings' department. So if the world asks for clarification or a more sophisticated articulation of 'I'm mad' or demands additional thinking through, these children may become confused, disorganized, overwhelmed, and - you guessed it - frustrated."

The entire time he read, I was emailing Kent things like "Holy crap. This is a mind bend." I helped him sound out words like anxiety and benign, and I asked at intervals what he thought about what he just read.

"I think that children have different minds," he told me. "And they act differently when they get mad." He looked up from the book and smiled. "I don't get as frustrated as easily as the people in this book do."

To wit, he went on to read from a conversation the author has with a father and mother about their son, George. 

"Me: Thinking back, has George ever responded to frustration in the adaptive way?

Father: Now that you mention it, no.

Mother: But it was never this bad.

Me: How do you mean?

Mother: When he was smaller, he didn't swear at us like he does now.

Me: What did he do instead?

Mother: Well, instead of screaming things like 'Fuck you!'"

[AND THAT'S WHEN THE RECORD SCREECHED TO A HALT!]

I closed the book and started laughing.

"What?" Desmond asked.

I laughed uncomfortably because I honestly couldn't think of any better way to respond.

"What does fuck you mean?"

"It's not nice at all. You don't want to say it."

"I didn't say it!" he said. 

Well, right. I scooched him ahead several chapters and restarted him there. He lost interest after a while then went to play in his room where he remains, no doubt busy processing what he's read. I'm still trying to process it all too.

We hash out workout plans, laugh about something funny we've read or whatever. 

Today, I asked him if he got the point of my yoga post. And, in asking, I realized he probably didn't because I didn't even make the point clear to myself. Here's the thing: the newfound freedom I feel on the yoga mat mirrors the freedom I feel having moved into a new chapter of life that doesn't involve a bevy of children hanging from my every limb. It's the physical suffocation I'm so happy to have moved beyond, the occupation of my body by others, the round-the-clock demands and needs. 

I loved pregnancy, birth and nursing and the pride of being the vessel that carried FOUR beautiful beasts into this world. But I'm done with that part of parenting. It feels glorious and indulgent and delicious to stand on the mat by myself and stretch within my own body. Mine. 

Attending so many classes - day after day after day - may be the single biggest indulgence I've ever given myself. I'm not ashamed. 

I practiced yoga for years: Ashtanga first in a sweatshop of an attic in a neighbor's house in Raleigh, then Iyengar after we moved to Virginia. I dropped the class when we went through our family's third or fourth round of belt-tightenings. The studio was 20 minutes from the house, parking was always tricky, the kids were exhausting and there were other excuses I used to ignore what my body craved.

When the hot yoga studio opened two blocks from home in January, it offered a hard-to-ignore deal of 10 classes for $99. At the time, my back still ached from morning to night and my feet tingled and I could barely touch my toes without bending my knees heavily, but I desperately wanted to do something. To move, to find comfort. So, I bought the package. Then another and another. And, here we are a full two months later and I woke in a toxic mood because the threat of snow forced the cancellation of my morning class. I don't just look forward to my time in the studio, I've come to rely on it. The heat, the solitude, the fun!

We're asked at the start of each class to set an intention. Throughout January, my intentions generally focused on one theme: healing. I asked to remain humble in my practice, not push my body where it didn't want to - or couldn't - go. I asked for calm or peace, anything to settle the spasms that made me weak-kneed throughout the day.

Somewhere along the way, though, I started to find ease in the practice. My back began to heal and my intentions changed. Now, I'm more likely to close my eyes, smile to myself and ask for freedom. I seek the "wild" in my practice. I ask to "fly."

Lately, I can't stop thinking about how grateful I am to have moved into a different phase with the kids. They clear their dishes from the table and fill the dishwasher; they wash and condition their own hair; they help me pick up. Tobias will go to preschool five days a week, four hours at a time next year. I'm on the cusp of something altogether different, sloughing an old story and writing an unfamiliar one. 

A friend recently tweeted the older she gets, "the more I understand the lure of the drunken, slutty mid-life crisis." It struck me immediately that I want the opposite. I'm done mistreating my body, punishing it with stupid decisions that leave me exhausted. I don't know if it's so much a crisis as a crystallization, but I'm ready to celebrate my strength. Tax and test my body, push it physically and find the wild.  

It's all about battles with this one, apparently. Given his loverboy personality, his passion for war seems disjointed. Nonetheless, I present "Battleship." 

"I was thinking of something in 'Star Wars,'" he said. 

"The good guys are American and the bad guys are British," Tobias told me. "The good guys win!" Because he's still fighting the Revolutionary War, apparently.

Except, he later explained that the battle took place in the 1990s.

"No, I mean the '41s."

Long pause.

"It happened when the dinosaurs were around," he said, then skipped out of the room. 

And there you have it.