* * *
It is not always easy to put yourself in the same spaces as the mentors you look up to. Sometimes I will go through Herculean efforts to put myself near a particularly tantalizing mentor. Take Rachel Dratch, who played my mother in my first movie, Tracktown. Rachel and I both went to Dartmouth and were even in the same college improv group, years apart. I also studied comedy at Second City just like she did. Despite these connections, Rachel was not immediately accessible to me. I had met her once, when she came to do a book signing at the Dartmouth bookstore, but I was among a crowd of other students who were also eager to meet her.
When my now-husband, Jeremy Teicher, and I wrote Tracktown, we wrote a role for Rachel with the hope that we might be able to ask her to consider being in our movie. We were able to get a copy of the script to Rachel through a connection in the Dartmouth running community. Several weeks passed, and then Rachel reached out to me one night asking if we could meet for coffee the next day in New York City if I was in town. I immediately responded with the white lie that yes, I was around, and I’d love to meet. In reality I was at a race in Boston—but as soon as I finished competing, I skipped my flight back to Oregon and hitched a ride with a runner I met that night at the race to get me to the city the next morning. We drove through the night together and got to NYC just in time. I stayed up all night and it was so worth it. I think if Rachel had known what I went through to make it to our meeting, she wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking me to meet—but I didn’t want any logistical obstacles in the way of actually getting to spend time with this woman I so admired. Rachel was my dream movie-mom.
Knowing I may never be in the same room as people has never stopped me from making them into mentors. I’ve learned how to look up to women I admire from afar, which takes the same kind of imagination my little-girl self used when I pretended someone else’s mom was mine. For instance, even though I’ve never met Melissa Clark, I feel like I’ve drawn as much comfort from watching her New York Times food videos as I did from watching Kati’s mom cook. When I watch Melissa’s videos I pretend she is my mom telling me how to make a crumble—joking that it doesn’t really matter if the strawberries are chopped perfectly because people don’t like perfect! If you’re feeling brave, add mint! She taught me that it is better to be brave, not perfect. With Melissa, I always try to listen to what she’s actually saying beneath the recipe itself. What she means when she says she is going to save the crisp edges of the casserole for herself is that she values herself enough to give herself the best part of her creation. She is kind to herself first.
Britney Spears is another example: she taught me to unapologetically commit to my goals after I read in a magazine that as a child she used to take over the family bathroom to sing into her hairbrush because she knew she was destined to be a singer when she grew up. She took her dreams seriously and I latched on to that idea like a barnacle.
And there were others. I listened to the audio edition of Tina Fey’s book Bossypants twice in one week because when I found out that she is Greek like me, I decided that she could be my mentor, too. When she talks about the way she looks, I thought, that’s the way that I look, and that made me feel more capable of becoming someone like her.
When I was little other people believed that I lacked something because of my mother’s death. I can never know for sure exactly what I missed out on. But what I do know is that her death forced me to seek out female mentorship on my own terms, and the mother-shaped hole in my heart has now been filled by wonderful women of my choosing. My greatest loss has become my greatest gift: I’ve learned that the whole world and all its inhabitants are there for me to observe, absorb, and imitate. I will never outgrow or be too proud for mentors.
Even though my mother’s experiences are forever closed to me, the rest of the world is wide open. Like a buffet, I want all the shrimp, all the pasta, and all the chocolate fondue. I don’t have the one person; I have every person. I can pick and choose bites of anything. My selections might not all make sense on the plate together, but I crafted this meal; it is mine, and I love it.
the cake pretends
to be a cake
before it is baked.
desiring the joining of
a world of butter and sugar
milk friends flour
it begs the heat please
without lumps or complaint
alter and whole
the thick into shape
recognizably cake.
by making itself
believe
it is saying
“i could be a cake.”
PUBERTY POWER
My family and I stood together in the small waiting room just outside the Oval Office, nervously smiling like a group of kids waiting their turn at the top of a waterslide. My brother, Louis, stood at the front of our pack, ready to walk in first—he had spent the past few years working on President Obama’s staff and this was his last day on the job. As such, he was invited to bring his family for a meet-and-greet with Obama himself. The Oval Office door cracked open and laughter spilled out into the waiting room. The family ahead of us walked out, and there he was: the president of the United States, standing just a few feet away.
One by one, we shook President Obama’s hand. Louis introduced me as a professional runner. This was in 2015, before I was an Olympian. President Obama’s attention turned to me. “You have a gift,” he said. “You were born with a body that was meant to run long distances, more than the average human.”
Right away I knew what I wanted to say in response…but dare I risk embarrassing my brother by disagreeing with President Obama, his former boss and the most powerful person in the country, a man we both admire and revere? I started by thanking the president, and then I couldn’t help myself—I added that my performance in the sport was just a result of hard work, motivation, and support from my community. But the president disagreed.
“No, no,” he said. “Your body is able to flush out lactic acid better than the average person—running is what you were born to do.” Obama’s energy and tone was so confident and convincing that he could have told me the moon is really made out of cheese and I would have agreed with him. I nodded and thanked him. Besides, our five-minute meeting time was up. I left the Oval Office feeling very honored, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about what the president had said. The idea that I was meant to run, that I was born with a special ability, felt like it subtracted from my own willpower and motivation.
My brother later told me that President Obama was a serious basketball player as a teenager and competed on one of the best high-school teams in the country. He grew up training tirelessly, presumably with big basketball dreams, and it wasn’t until later that he hung up his jersey and focused his attention elsewhere—though basketball was still near and dear to his heart. The thing was, as Obama grew up, he discovered that there were physical barriers that prevented him from advancing to compete at the highest level of basketball. No matter how hard he worked, he wasn’t as tall or fast or coordinated as his competitors. That must have been deeply frustrating and heartbreaking to someone as driven and disciplined as President Obama. Could that explain his comments about my body’s natural ability to run long distances?