40

I turn 40 tomorrow. One of those milestone ages that seem about as close as the moon when you are younger. I turn 40...I GET to turn 40.

I turn around and have no idea and every knowledge of how I got here. 40 years of memories, some so clear I can see them as if a movie reel in my head. My life is nowhere near what I imagined it would be at 40, but then, is almost anyone's?

I shed tears tonight...not because I'm turning 40 (I want to shake...throttle the people who bemoan birthdays, who hole up in their rooms and rage against the extra candle) but because I want to turn 41, and 42 and 45 and 55 and 65 and 75. You start to feel greedy asking for years, asking for time that so many give not a second thought to, that most expect.

I still don't know many things. But I do know that even on days when I lose my shit, sometimes on the very days I least deserve it, my smart beautiful son tells me I'm the best mama in the world. I know that every day I watch this little sweet stunning girl who fought inside of me, grow and talk beyond her short years. I know that I am lucky in the spouse department...that I have a husband who never waivered for me, who was as blindsided as I by the past two years yet has never once winced or blinked at the baldness, the scars, the uncertainty. I know that I try...to be a better mama and wife, to really appreciate the fact that my days with them are a gift to me.

I know that this year my word is Brave...I need to be brave, to take chances, to not be afraid of what could or could not happen.

I know that I have lost way too many people - people who didn't get to turn 40. I know that they will never ever be forgotten to me.

I know that I need to give myself grace, to know that I can't humanly ingest every day and moment like I should - that even after all of this crap I'm still human and nowhere near a saint or a poet.

I know that this body with its trail of scars and Frankenstein-assembly that I never could have anticipated or imagined is mine. It still, for the most part, works. I am lucky.

I know that I still do not love this curly hair that I've been left with, with the grey that's been growing since I was 20...but I appreciate it every day.

I know that while I have been unlucky in certain aspects, I have been very lucky with many more.

I know that I will take any candle I am blessed to get. And I want more.

A Roiling Boil...

Do you ever have so incredibly much going on - good or bad - that you just feel like you are in a bubbling whirlpool? I'm in the whirlpool. Between my very long and scary surgery tomorrow, Jack turning four, my baby girl just changing immensely every day, my grandparents house, a house that I pretty much grew up in, being almost emptied and up for sale....I'm just overwhelmed. They aren't all bad changes, but they are big life changes all at once and my goodness, for someone who does not like change at all, well...I was driving home from my grandparent's house this weekend, singing loudly with my Mumford and Sons and streaming tears - some happy, some sad, some grateful, some freaked out.

 

So now I will try to go to sleep until 5 am tomorrow morning when I get ready to go to the hospital, and kiss my sleeping babies heads, and get ready to put one of the big life changes behind me.

Purgatory...

I went through 12 years of Catholic school. I'm sure teachings on this have changed significantly over the years, but in first and second grades, we learned a lot about purgatory, the place between heaven and hell where you went if you weren't quite good enough to get straight into heaven, but certainly were not bad enough to go straight to H-E-L-L. Purgatory housed people who didn't have enough graces (I used to think of it like collecting enough skee ball tickets to get the big prize at Castle Park) or didn't say a perfect Act of Contrition before they died, or maybe you were a baby who had not been baptised and therefore had not committed any sin but had not been cleansed of Original Sin. Whatever the story, you were stuck in no-man's-land until enough people left behind prayed for your soul and you collected enough grace tickets to gain entry into heaven...or you just languished there forever.

 

The aftermath of cancer, after the treatment, at least in the beginning...that's like purgatory.

 

Heaven would be the rest of your life cancer-free, but of course no one knows if that will happen until, well, until they die without having a recurrance. So basically you still live your life in purgatory. I'm sure as the years go on without any problems purgatory transforms into a much more comfortable place. Don't get me wrong - after this crap, even in purgatory most of us are trying to dance more, laugh more, be a little more wild and at times reckless - and get all of the tickets that we can from the damn skee ball machine. Purgatory doesn't have to be boring, but it is at times...I don't know...heavy.

 

Because you know that at any moment the cancer bitch could come up and sucker punch you and steal all of your tickets because SHE wanted the 5000 point prize and the floor drops and down you go...and you find yourself in a doctor's office, being told that the scan doesn't look good.

 

When you join this craptastic club, unless you shut yourself off from everyone, which some days you really want to do, you will see loss. You will have a front seat to shitty outcomes for people you may never have even met in person but care about and cry for and hurt for. You will hear of a bad diagnosis, of mets, and the twisted black tiny portion of your mind that you are ashamed of but that is purely human and natural will sigh and think thank god that's not me. And you will cry silent tears while you are rocking your baby before bed. You will go and sob alone and undetected in the shower and you will dry your eyes and go read to your son before bedtime. And then you will spend the next week rehashing over and over again the thought that this could be you, at any time. But then you will get up and brush yourself off, and put on loud music and dance and sing and keep on swimming and live in purgatory.  

 

In the past six months, in my small 120 or so person facebook group, we have lost one person, one person's mets have spread and the chemo is no longer working so well, one other person has had brain surgery and radiation due to mets and one was just diagnosed with mets today. I'm just angry. Angry that it's still a zero-sum game, angry that all too often someone gets sucker punched and robbed. I'm just angry.

My 39th year...

 

"Oh, Earth, you are too wonderful for anyone to realize you... Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute? No, saints and poets maybe, they do some." - Wilder

 

I can guarantee to you that my husband...and Jack...and A-R if she could talk...and the rest of my family and friends would tell you that I am no saint. My high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Roth, would tell you that I'm no poet. But with all respect to Mr. Wilder, although not a poetic addition (see, I know what's not poetic), I would add "and people who have or have faced life threatening illnesses or situations".

 

 

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This crazy beautiful precious life is just funny. Life truly ain't nothing but a funny funny riddle. You spend your youth voraciously coveting additional candles, longing to be older, waiting for the day that your life will "begin!!" "When I'm older I will..." starts innumerable sentences. Somewhere in your 20's, you start feeling time accelerate - not only chronologically, but also across your face, parts of your body, your hair (in my case for sure, I've been going grey since my early 20s). What only years ago was a source of pride - "I'll be 16 six months before you!!" - becomes "Ha Ha, you'll always be six months older than me!" Your 30s come and eventually parts of you start creaking and cracking and you realize holy crap, somehow I've ended up precipitously close to middle age. The music you grew up with starts to be played on "retro" weekends and classic rock stations and the band members are receiving their AARP membership applications. You find yourself going to your 20 year high school reunion, which you can't really understand because you are certain that, even though you have been married for 11 years and have two children, you KNOW you only left college about 5 years ago. But if you are healthy, all of these thoughts are accompanied by the tiny voice in the back of your mind going "but I still have soooo many years ahead, no big deal." And then something comes and smacks you in the face so hard that a punch would feel like a cotton ball, turns your world so upside down that vertigo seems like a gentle ride on a small carousel, that everything you previously knew for certain, everything you knew to be true about this world, is intrinsically forever changed.

 



People who hide their ages, are ashamed of them...I just want to shake them and say "Why can't you see? Why can't you see how very very lucky you are? Those years are family you got to love and sunsets you experienced and places you traveled and children who were able to know you." But I understand. It's truly not something that you can ever comprehend until you live it and I get that. And I mean that - I have been on both sides now - even if you have taken care of someone who has passed, even if you have lost people around you, even if you have lost a piece of your heart when they left. I have lost many people in my life. I have lost people at a young age (both them and me), I have taken care of people that I have lost, I have taken care of someone who at one time held my heart, I have lost chunks of my heart, a rather large chunk of my heart- but I didn't fully understand - I didn't fully ingest, absorb, taste, consume the complete and utter fragility of this life until I got sick. I can see the theoretical thestrals. I wish to God I couldn't, I wish I thought the carriage was still invisibly guided, but I can see them.

 

So this is what a birthday means now.

 



 It means that I had another year to practice at this crazy dance called marriage. It means that maybe to these two beings I will actually be a tangible mother, not a vague memory or scent conjured only by pictures or stories. It means I had another year to try and realize any, some, bits and pieces of my dreams and goals. It means that I have had another chance to continue in this powerful play, to contribute another verse.

 

It means that if someone says, "Oh, you'll always be older than me" I will smile and say, "Yep, isn't that great!?" It means if someone says, "Don't worry, you'll be there one day", that I will gleefully say "Yes, I will, and I can't wait!".
 

Never again will I lament the opportunities, the blessings that the passing of this time has given me. Never again will I fail to celebrate another candle, another 365 days, another 525,600 minutes.

Never again will I spend and waste time as if I had a million years.

I am 39 years old today.

A small peek into what cancer does to your mind...

As I have mentioned, I am going to a cancer retreat this weekend and am completely looking forward to it. Until a couple days ago when I was in tears at random times. And I finally connected why. One of the activities included in the retreat, in most cancer retreats, is a message. Totally awesome, right? Something most people completely look forward to and pay good money for. Except to me it's an impending panic attack. Because I finally realized that on some deep level I equate getting a massage with getting cancer.

By the time I was diagnosed, the tumors under my arm were pressing on a nerve that ran down my arm and also causing a bad pain in my shoulder. The night before my ultrasound/biopsy, the night before my world started to fling itself off of its axis, the night before I, for all intents and purposes, lost my innocence to be ridiculously yet appropriately cliche about it, I had my husband rub my neck and my shoulders because it hurt so much, still completely and contentedly oblivious as to what lay underneath and ahead. Since then, even if I have had a pain anywhere, whereas most people would say, "Honey, please rub my shoulders" I completely ignore it, because to validate the pain might mean validating that "something" is there again. Because rational or not, somewhere I have always thought Oh my God, what if him rubbing my shoulders that night caused something to break open and spread further? So there you have it....

On top of that, I have a pain in my shoulder. Not a bad pain, not even shooting pain, just sort of a sporadic irritant; something I would never in a million years have gone to the doctor for before. Could it be from repeatedly lifting a 17 lb baby's butt to my face to smell her diaper? Could it be from the bunch of lifting and reaching I did last weekend? Could it be from holding the baby with my non-dominant arm because my left arm is just tired? Not in my world! Because after cancer, every pain, every ache, every upset stomach, every muscle spasm is cause for your mind to start racing at what it could be. So I'm fitting in a quick trip to the doctor tomorrow morning, hopefully for a "you know you have a cancer patient, please set my mind at ease" appointment before our trip. Which I desperately need. I am so exhausted, mentally, emotionally and physically.