A Balanced Life

NEW RELEASE!

Pursuing a sport without the requisite talent can be considered foolish; pursuing it over decades can be considered borderline madness. In this lyrical memoir, Patricia Schultheis uses skating to examine the richness and constraints of her Catholic girlhood, the impact of the upheavals of the sixties on her young marriage, and how skating provided a release from the demands of marriage, motherhood, and a career. When a series of devastating losses, including the death of her husband, knocked her off her feet, she wondered if she could get up again. But skating had been a constant in her life for so long, she returned to the ice and discovered that features of the sport ~ its unpredictability, unexpected rewards, and many possibilities for grace ~ mirror those of life itself.

About the Author

Patricia Schultheis grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the second of three daughters in a Polish-American family. Struck by polio when she was six years old, she became an introspective, anxious child who found release in reading and ice skating on neighborhood ponds. After graduating from Catholic schools and Albertus Magnus College in 1965, she moved to Baltimore in order to be near her beloved older sister. A week later she had her first date with the man to whom she was married for forty-one years. While raising their two sons, she worked in a variety of public rela-tions positions, including jobs with The Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting, Kiplinger Washington Editors, and The University of Maryland. But she had always wanted to be a writer, a goal she began pursuing forty years ago, when the now-defunct The Sun Magazine published her first article, a story about a local cheesecake entrepre-neur. Since then she has had nearly one hundred articles, essays and book reviews published, as well as two books. The unexpected death of her older sister at age fifty-five, followed soon by the deaths of her father and mother, prompted her to turn to more intimate forms of expression: the personal essay and fiction. Just as reading and ice skating had afforded her release as a child, these more in-depth forms served as avenues for her to explore her values, her relationships, and her mistakes and triumphs. They also formed the basis for A Balanced Life, which she wrote following the death of her husband. She continues to write and ice skate and to live in Baltimore, where she teaches in the Odyssey Program of Johns Hopkins University.

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