• What adventures have pressed your limits? Tell me in the comments.

Last month I talked about our helmets and waivers vacations, and how writer’s brain has gotten me through a lot of less than meek-and-mild-mannered adventures.

I’d like to say it’s gotten me through every adventure, but alas, this week, I met my match. That’s actually really hard for me to say, because I hate to quit, even when it is for my own good. I’m stubborn, determined, and sometime just not very smart about recognizing my own limits.

Our last vacation pushed the pretty hard, (I’ll write more about it later.) We did a wild cave tour that involved a 30 foot climb up a mostly vertical cave wall, with only helmet lighting to see by. Still have no clue how I managed to get through it, but I did.

This week was different though. Son-the-second invited me along on an adventure which turned out very differently. There was ‘a thing,’ a scary, difficult, intimidating thing, he really wanted to do, so we signed up for a class to learn how to do that thing.

To be honest, I was mostly scared out of my mind about trying it out. But, since I was raised to be afraid of literally everything, I’m kind of used to the feeling, which more or less explains one of my mottos (that’s a way writers have to sum up a character in just a few words…) “Do it Afraid.”

Frankly nearly everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done afraid. When you’ve learned fear at such a deep level, I’m not sure it ever really goes away, you just learn to relegate it to the background and plunge on ahead.

So shaking in my boots, we started out. The first evening we had the ‘book learning’ portion of the class. Not a problem, but book learning has always been my comfort zone. Considering the research rabbit holes I end up in, I know you’re shocked and surprised to hear that. Things involving coordinating multiple bits of physical coordination though are another story entirely.

When I did tae kwon do with my kids, I had to work three times harder than they did to learn the same routines. They tutored me through it as I struggled to keep up. I had to find alternative learning strategies for what came easily for what seemed like everyone else in the room. Given that experience, I knew the next part of the class we were in would hit at all my weaknesses.

And I wasn’t wrong. Half a day into it, I had to come to grips with the hard truth. I was completely out of my league and no longer felt safe even trying to continue. In the meantime, son-the-second came to the conclusion that ‘the thing’ he thought he wanted to do wasn’t what he expected it would be. His profession leaves him with little time off and he didn’t want to spend it doing something he was rapidly starting to hate, so we both pulled out halfway through day two.

Had he not been so ready to throw in the towel, I fear I might have pressed on out of sheer stubborn determination. I only realized how stupid that would have been when I got home and discovered I’d sprained both wrists and sported bruises the likes of which I’ve never had before.

I don’t regret trying to do ‘a thing’ with my son though. I learned a lot-lots of good book research for certain. And maybe a new life skill, listening to my limits and respecting them.

What adventures have pressed your limits? Tell me in the comments.