Do you ever wonder what it is that wakes us from a deep sleep at 2:00 a.m.? Do you know that feeling of terror, mixed with unrest, mixed with sadness, mixed with a general urgency to be elsewhere…. Cozy under the covers just moments before and suddenly that feeling is gone, replaced with a body that demands movement. Maybe I’m thinking about traveling to conferences this week, or surgery next week to replace the tissue expanders, maybe I’m thinking about work and how easy it can be to love old people and how hard it is to lose them even when I know they lived wonderful lives….I wonder about my sleeplessness, but I’ve just decided there is no explanation that’s going to come to me. At least not this morning, so I’m up and moving……though towards what I can’t tell you and for what I don’t know………
Do you know what I liked about the Cancer? I liked that for 10 continuous months I gave myself permission to take a break. It’s true. I checked out. Stress related to parenting, work, relationships, life in general… I placed all of it in a separate room and I walked away from it. It was in the same house…. I could see it from where I was, feel its presence and every now and then I would walk into that room, and look around, survey what I was missing and walk back out again. I let myself sit……. in a room in my head, by myself for months and I did nothing but concentrate on staying alive. I suppose any sort of crisis is like that… when the crap hits the fan, depending on the severity of the situation, all else falls away until we manage our way through it. It’s rather selfish I suppose, but it’s true…And now….now I am well, the cancer gone, the chemo done and I am standing in a room swirling with chaos. A messy, twisted, complicated, painful, joyful, loved filled busy, busy, busy space and I will tell you, as crazy as it sounds that there are times that I miss the selfish solitude that the cancer afforded me.
Oh my!……I am listening to some new amazing music and I wish one of my kids would wake up so I could have an excuse to dance with them, in my bath robe, hair askew. Wake up…. Wake up little people! Why is it that we think of the very best qualities of our children while they are asleep? My son told me yesterday that I was “hot.” He actually said that. We were watching T.V and some gorgeous creature came on the screen and without meaning to he blurted: “She’s so hot!” When he realized he said it out loud AND he was sitting next to his mother, he turned beet red. I laughed and told him he was right. She was “hot”, “smoking hot” for that matter. But then he said. “Mom, she’s not as hot as you are though. No one is.” Here is why I’m bothering to tell you this….not because it’s resembles truth in any form. But because I wanted to share with all of you that to someone else, I am an entire world. To my little boy I am the most stunning creature on the planet and the enormity of that fills my heart with so much joy that tears come to my eyes every time I allow myself to think about it. That feeling, my friends, is enough to make me wish him awake even when he is soundly sleeping, my beautiful, beautiful little boy.
He’s worried about global warming. Did I tell you that? My cancer has given my sons already predisposed tendency towards being anxiety ridden a healthy dose of steroids. He is having “anxiety issues” since my last hospitalization and it kills me that I caused that. Anyhoo- he won’t say: “Mom I’m really worried that you’re going to die.” Instead he falls to the ground crying about global warming. Sigh. Hmmm… What to do, what to do what to do? For now lots of hugs and squeezes and honestly, a few exasperated: “Are you serious? Are we really freaking out about the diminishing polar ice caps and fading Ozone now? When we are supposed to be getting ready for school, WHILE looking for basketball gear, WHILE finishing breakfast, WHILE locating your homework, WHILE searching for my scarf that your sister used yesterday as a blankie for one of her babies? Seriously? We are going to freak about global warming right now? Seriously?”
Have I mentioned that my parenting skills are sometimes really, really, below par?
Oh, and since we’re on the subject of my children and how my cancer has probably tarnished them for life, my daughter had a play date this weekend that is probably going to require some damage control for the other participant. She was playing doctor with her friend and when I went to check on them in the bathroom this is what I heard: “Okay, Meghan, now you are the doctor and my dolly is the nurse and this toothbrush is the shot. Oh! Hi Mom! Guess what! Meghan is my doctor and I have breast cancer and am having surgery and will have scribbles (scars) just like you.”
It seems like now is a good time to drop the F- bomb. I won’t because I just found out that hundreds of people that I don’t know are reading this which freaks me out a little… I don’t want to offend the general public and since most of you don’t know me, the F-bomb seems a little shocking…. But for those of you who do know and love me, you KNOW exactly what the little bubble above my head read as I turned and walked out of the bathroom WITHOUT addressing her comment because I am a big, fat, weeny and I honestly didn’t know what to say. What I actually said out loud was: “Davy! Joe! Where in God’s name is the cocktail that someone was supposed to be making me?”
I am sitting here next to my twinkling tree (darling pink dolly star in place) and I am thinking I should go upstairs and wake them both and tell them something profound something that will make the breast cancer in both of their worlds go away. I won’t…… they’ll be up soon enough…….though I wish I would because the stars tonight are incredible. I wish it was warmer because if it was I would wake everyone in the house and wrap them in blankets and take them out under the stars like we used to do when the kids were smaller. Sleeping under star filled skys….. I suppose as the years go by they will look at those moments less as an adventure and more as a nuisance. There goes that damn “growing up” issue I have with childhood.Do you know what inspired me today? (Besides, the twinkling lights -Dear Lord! I love this time of year! All of the sudden the glitter that I choose to toss around in my every day happenings becomes very “oh so appropriate” and I can pencil myself less on the tacky side of the page and more on the “festive” side.) I became inspired tonight by a breath taking sky and the realization that there can still be solitude even in a world that has walked past the cancer. Today, when I felt Life’s torrential waves slamming up against me and it felt as though it was hard to catch my breath, that I might literally hyperventilate. I thought about the cancer and the solitude it gave me and I decided that for today anyway, I will stop trying to hope, pray, and worry all things in that chaotic room to be okay: relationships, kids, jobs and health….I have no idea whether it’s all going to be okay and there is very little of any of that I can actually control…..So for today… I will just be grateful that I am not actively dying, that chemotherapy is not on my list of things to endure and that if I look straight ahead and let the chaos fall away, I see me, standing alone in a room, looking out a window at the most amazing sky
