I am grateful for my blessings, really, I am. And I have a multitude of blessings. I work hard to be a happy and balanced person. Most of the time my daily life makes sense to me. Most of the time my responsibilities feel bearable. Sometimes, like today, I feel worn out. I feel like I am living a life that requires 150% of me. People, each of us only has one whole self, which is 100%. 110% only exists on those stupid business motivational posters.
One of the things that I tried to change about my life after my cancer diagnosis is expecting myself to work near 100% capacity every day. I need to rest like every one else. I need balance and rejuvenating experiences.
I have been working myself hard since November. Really really hard. My family life has been hard and my work life has been hard. My health, thank goodness, has been good.
When I was younger, working more than is healthy, held certain seductive powers. I felt accomplished, strong, and self-sacrificing, the last of which giving a moral edge or some kind of “get out of jail free card”.
It’s so easy to work too hard. It’s hard to rest, to have ease. I hate that. I hate that having ease takes so much damn work. Easy shouldn’t be hard but it is.
Last year, I had two periods, each a few days long, when I felt transported into a fun, easy world outside of my work and family responsibilities. Both times, I spent time with friends and mostly without my family. It was fantastic. It was easy. Then I got back to my normal life, which although rich with blessings and meaning, landed on me like a ton of bricks.
The work on moving my psychology office occurred over two major holidays, some tough parenting issues, and financial stress. It took a lot of time and money in amounts far exceeding what I wanted. Although I am very happy with the outcome, I am worn out. I need a break. Yesterday, I was working on some summer plans. They became complicated quickly. At this time and place in my life, it hit me hard and I was sad. I was disappointed. I was sad and disappointed not with myself or anyone else, but with the lack of ease in my life. I was teary when my husband came home. I explained in a few sentences. He totally understood; after all, we share a life together.
It’s not easy to be easy. I guess I will keeping working hard on that.
As a person with “no evidence of disease”, I am grateful. I am also grateful that I continue to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and yes, cognitively. I have written of the attention, concentration, working memory, and organizational difficulties I’ve had since being diagnosed with cancer. (Some people call this “chemo brain” though I didn’t have I.V. chemo.) These difficulties have slowly but surely improved over time. A huge boost came after I completed a cognitive behavioral sleep program and then later, when I took gaba pentin for a few months to reduce my nighttime hot flashes. I have also had improvements through working to reduce my anxiety and grief through my mindfulness practice and personal psychotherapy. Last but not least, writing this blog is one of the most therapeutic endeavors I have ever undertaken. It, of course, has side effects like any therapy in that my posts sometimes worry my mother.
Although a good deal of my energy has returned, I still don’t work full time. I find that it is too hard to maintain my emotional and physical health when I do this so although I sometimes schedule a full time or slightly overtime week, my average is about 80%. Prior to my diagnosis and shortly afterwards (I had to cram my schedule in order to take off time for surgeries), my schedule varied from week to week but I worked up to 150% of what is considered full time.
Despite my reduced hours, I am quite busy. Although most of my day is meaningful and productive, a good portion of my day is being busy for the sake of being busy, doing trivial things that do not fill me up. And some of the trivial things would not be trivial if I stuck with them for more than a couple of minutes. But I spent some part of my day alighting from one activity to another in rapid succession.
I do this less than earlier in my cancer treatment. The main reason back then was fatigue, boredom, and the need for fun. Since I was having trouble with sustained attention, I flitted around lot. Although I have never written as much or as frequently in my life, I stopped reading books. There had been no time in my life since about age 10 or 11 when I was not reading on a daily basis, with some breaks for a few weeks during adulthood, when my stress was at its peak.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about accepting the things in my life about which I feel feel, grief, and anger. I know that a common fear for people impacted by cancer is fear of abandonment. My husband worries about losing me. My daughter, although she denies it, worries about it too, I think. She acts very much like other teen girls with whom I’ve worked, who have a mother with a serious disease. I worry about losing my family, through decreased participation in family life if I were to get ill again and through my own transition to death, which may not come any time soon, but will come some day.
I had a epiphany last week. Although I was aware of my own abandonment fears, I realized that I was continuing to give myself busy work to avoid feeling lonely. I have been filling up spaces in my heart and mind with filler. I have too often disengaged from my husband because I associate him with our fear of my cancer as well as the stress we have in parenting.
Since that epiphany, I have made some changes. Trivia is okay but not as a main course. And trivia is much better when enjoyed with a loved one. I also realized that a lot of my life is serious and difficult. I have a serious job as a child/adolescent psychologist. I have personal psychotherapy, our family class on mindfulness and emotion regulation, and couples therapy with my husband. Between my job and my appointments, I spend the majority of my waking hours in a mental health facility. Last Friday in couples therapy, which we have been attending weekly I said, “I want less therapy and more fun. John, I want to spend more time with you having fun.” Our psychologist thought this was a great idea. John agreed, reluctantly, because this scared him. But we’ve been spending more time together. Yesterday, I received a note from a childhood friend. Her husband “out of the blue” told her that he is divorcing her, on the day before their 27th wedding anniversary. This has also reinforced my resolve to continue to work on my relationship with my husband. Too often people live separate, lonely lives, full of activities, suffering in silence.
I am not by nature, a lonely person. Cancer has a way of whittling away at security, even for those of us with “no evidence of disease”. Breast cancer also has a way of striking women at the prime of life in terms of professional and family responsibility. Many of us have full careers, children who are not yet independent, and elderly parents who may need support. It is easy when juggling these balls, to feel fragmented and flittery, to feel engaged with everything but intimately connected with no one, not even with ourselves.
I am kind of a beast in the kitchen. I am absorbed with cooking and getting things done. Focused on these goals I can sometimes miss dangers. This is why I often burn myself and even more often, put bruises on my hips by not taking care around the sharp corners of counters. I typically notice these injuries for only a short time and keep going. Later I might feel pain and wonder, “What happened?”
Breast cancer treatment requires a lot of corner cutting when it comes to the rest of life. There are things that fall by the wayside. I think this is a significant part of the reason that recovery takes so long. Not only does it take time for strength to return (assuming that it does at all) but even after returned we find ourselves with a lot more work to do.
There’s no such thing as cutting corners without a consequence. Work accumulates. As for myself, I have a huge amount of filing that did not get done for the last almost three years. And then there’s the relationship attention that did not occur. Spouses and children who got short shrift.
You know those people in our lives that missed out or are still missing out on us? They are also feeling ripped off. They want their due. They want restitution for the extra work that they do. And like people, they look to other people for that restitution. They want more of us. We want more of them.
Cancer, you deserve the lion’s share of the blame. But you are scary and abstract. You are deadly. You will never change on your own volition. Blaming you is so very unsatisfying. You don’t love us. Our friends and family do. So, it makes so much more sense to expect more of them, right?
A big part of my work as a child psychologist is working with parents. I help them make goals and plans. I teach them skills to help carry out those plans. And then they leave my office. This process is repeated over the course of treatment.
Sometimes parents do not put their plans into action. They might say, “I was too busy.” They might say, “I didn’t do it because it was too hard.” They might say, “I tried it once and it didn’t work so I didn’t try it again.” They may even say, “I didn’t do that because I knew that it wasn’t going to work.” Sometimes I need to re-explain the rationale, the skill, or the fact that the skills are not magic tricks that produce instant success. Sometimes we set smaller goals that are easier to implement.
Sometimes, we do not get any where, week after week. An interesting observation I have made over the years is that even when parents are aware that they have not put plans into place as recommended, they still expect positive change to result because they made the plans and are doing SOMETHING. They are coming to therapy and paying money for it. They are talking about problems. And if it is believed that the skill is too hard to implement, there is often an implicit assumption that if one has a good excuse for not carrying out a recommendation that there will be no negative consequences for having not doing so. They think their child should improve, anyway. As psychologists go, I am on the frank side. I try to be as sensitive as I can be and communicate clearly. Parents tell me, “I can’t do that. That’s too hard. I can’t be expected to do that.” I empathize with the difficulty of parenting, the severity of their children’s challenges, but also say, “Yes, it is very hard and it is harder than what most parents have to do. But just because it’s difficult, doesn’t mean that it is not necessary for your child. What can we do to make this more possible?”
In the good case scenarios, the parents either start rallying and planning during the session, or upon thinking about it later, start re-adjusting their priorities and making things possible. They are able to get past “parenting shouldn’t be that hard” to the reality of their situation. Most of the time, this is what occurs. But sometimes it doesn’t and there is a seemingly endless spinning of wheels, complaining, and expressions of distress and despair. I respect that many of the parents with whom I work are going through a grief process of having a child with chronic difficulties. But some of them can get really really stuck.
There’s nothing wrong with New Year’s resolutions in and of themselves. They are a starting point. The problem is when we don’t implement them. Another problem is when we use them as an opportunity to beat up on ourselves about not having carried them out. Or we think carrying them out is too hard.
I have been working on changing a habit that has a negative impact on my family and on myself. I have been working on it as part of the 6 month long class my family is taking. One of the things each of us did was to write a little pros and cons list for the behavior we wanted to eliminate as well as for the behavior we want to replace it with. Then we were told to choose three of the pros and/or cons that we most important to us and to memorize them as a little script. The habit I chose is one I’ve been trying to modify for decades. For the first time, I am making progress on it and not only that, experiencing positive benefits.
You may have heard that it rains a lot in Seattle. It does rain more than average, there’s no getting around it. But there are a lot of much rainier cities. We don’t even make the top 10 rainiest U.S. cities, by a long shot. The entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. gets more annual rainfall than Seattle. Here’s the deal, though. We get primarily light rain. And it’s spread over many many days. While a significant portion of the nation has the rainiest time of the year in the summer, we have our rainiest time in the winter. Here, up north, it’s really dark, too. Seattle knows how to pile on the dreary during winter.
But even in winter, there are beautiful days. Yesterday, Christmas Day, was one of them. My husband and I walked down to the beach. The wind was gentle and the sky was blue. I spent a good bit of the walk stripped down to a short sleeved t-shirt. Granted, I had a Lupron shot last month and the furnace usually kicks in about this time but still, I was walking on a Seattle beach during winter in a t-shirt. What a glorious day.
I happen to think that the contrast between how our city looks on a sunny day versus a cloudy or rainy day is one of the reasons that we have a reputation for being a wetter city than we actually are. It’s disappointing to visit Seattle after seeing all of the glorious photos of the mountains and the sea only to be drizzled upon. But I don’t visit here. I live here. I know that the sun will come out again and that I will see it.
People in my city, especially natives, such as myself, often remark that our part of the world would not be so beautiful without the rain. This is true. We have some of the most beautiful summer weather I have ever experienced. And there is so much sunlight with very long days. Without the rainy, dreary days, though we would not have the abundant greens, the trees, bushes, mosses, and lichens. Winter is a time when plants focus their energy below the ground. The rain is essential for root growth, the foundation of plant life. Without precipitation, there is no snow on the mountains. We are so lucky to live in a city bound by two snow-capped mountain ranges. The winter snow on our mountains is also our water supply for the dry months of the year.
We need the wet and dreary days for life. It’s not just that the bad weather makes us appreciate the sunny days more because of the contrast. We actually require it. I’ve been thinking of this a lot in terms of how it relates to life, in general. Are sadness, disappointment, grief, and other painful emotions and experiences necessary for life? More so, do they enhance our lives?
I don’t know. I am pretty sure that seeking out suffering is a bad idea. Let’s not look for trouble. And denying suffering in oneself or others is invalidating. I am working a lot on acceptance of the things in my life that weigh on me heavily on a daily basis and are sometimes terrifying. Okay, it’s not “things”, it’s a thing. The thing is parenting my 16 year-old brilliant fireball. A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany followed by some meaningful adjustments in my behavior.
I realized on a deep and visceral level that I can’t protect her from the world or from the consequences of poor judgements that she makes. I didn’t abdicate responsibility but I relinquished the fantasy of control. I am still as busy parenting as I’ve ever been but my efforts are less frenzied and whirling. This acceptance was also accompanied by deep sadness. But the sadness was grounding instead of frenetic and anxious. I’m not going to kid myself and announce that acceptance is my new permanent state of being. My state of being, especially as a parent, will continue fluctuate. But this is an important shift.
I don’t know the future so I really don’t know how to end this post. What I do know is that every sunny time is to be celebrated and that the dreariest times cannot be wished away. I am learning more and more not to manufacture suffering; why would I want more of that? I am learning more and more to accept this as how life should be simply because that’s the way life is.
One of my sister-in-law’s hosts Easter each year. She is a competent cook. She is also able to have people in her kitchen while she cooks. I could say that one reason for this is that she has a large kitchen with places for people to sit at a table, out of the way. I could also note that most of the things she makes are not hot and can be made ahead of time and taken out of the refrigerator. I could also point to the fact that she does not make something that requires the making of gravy. But the fact of the matter is that she is able to concentrate on entertaining people and making food all at the same time.
I am not like this. I can talk to people up until about the last 30 min before Thanksgiving dinner is done. Thanksgiving is the holiday that I host. I have done it for all years except one for the past 10 years. Before the last 30 minutes, I feel relaxed and confident. My apron is typically still clean. I am able to avoid burning myself on the oven’s heating element.
And then half of the food is ready and the other half of the food needs to be finished. The turkey is cooked and needs to be lifted out of the pan to rest on a carving plate. Meanwhile, I place the roasting pan on two burners, pour in alcohol to deglaze it, scraping the fond from the bottom of the pan. I add flour (now a gluten-free blend) and turkey fat and stir constantly. It always gums up immediately and the first worry is that the gravy will turn out clumpy. And it will if I don’t keep my head in the game. I add poultry stock, bit by bit, until I start to see a beautiful brown glistening sauce develop. Then I keep adding stock while I am plating vegetables, side dishes, and heating things up at the last minute. I have to work quickly so that the turkey does not rest too long and become cold. When the time comes, I call my husband to the kitchen to carve the turkey while I finish the last 500 details.
If you are a guest and you ask me what you can do to help, I will ask you to please sit down and enjoy yourself. If you ask me during the last 30 minutes, I insist that you sit down and enjoy yourself. My husband and my mom have both gotten into the habit of running interference for me and helping shoo people out of the kitchen. Even if I am not in the last push of frenzy, my kitchen is small and not a good place for people to hang out to visit with one another. My mother knows this because people congregate in her kitchen when she is cooking, standing in front of the stove or the sink, not realizing that they are setting off her rhythm. My husband shoos people out because he has empathy for me and knows how my brain works.
I love to cook but I am a person who cooks in deep thought. I have a hard time socializing and cooking at the same time. Both socializing and cooking are high interest for me and I have a hard time focusing on anything else when I am deeply engaged in one of these activities. So doing both of them is really really hard. As for those that want to come in to help, unless they know exactly what to do and how to do it, delegating is a chore for me. A chef is a boss of a kitchen and has training to do this. I don’t. I am a home cook with a small kitchen. I have a schedule and a list in my head. I am working at full capacity and the wheels are already in motion. This is also why, if you come to my house with a dish that needs tending to or oven space, I will use my powers of reasoning to tell myself that you have probably not considered that all of the burners and all of the oven space have already been accounted for. I will smile tightly and problem-solve. I may think of the time that friends had a potluck and a mutual friend showed up with a grocery bag full of unwashed vegetables and raw tofu and exclaimed, “Look, I brought stir fry!” That story always makes me smile.
I live my life at a certain pace. I try to live a lifestyle that is not only manageable, but healthy. Sometimes I even think I know what I am doing. I feel relaxed and can coordinate the different spheres of my life. And then there are the times when everything happens at once. I need to be in multiple places to do multiple things, all at once. And the consequences for failure are far worse than lumpy gravy.
I am working my best to be the kind of parent my child needs. So is my husband and so is my child. It seems that we get to the frenzy frequently and often without notice. This is the way our lives have been for the past 4 years. Cancer happened in those years, too. The normal real life bumps and reorganizations have occurred, as well. Last week, I learned that my colleagues and I need to find new professional office space. We’ve been in the same place for 10 years. I don’t like moving. It’s a lot of work. We are working to find the least disruptive and expensive solution to the problem.
During these times when I am racing in my life, I find it harder to talk about the details of my life. Not so much because it is emotionally hard but because my brain is working at capacity. I am finding myself in that mode lately. It is easier for me to organize my thoughts in writing than in conversation but even writing has been hard to organize in the past couple of weeks.
I recently wrote that I was looking forward to this week because I would be able to concentrate on cooking an spending time with my family. And I have done just that. Although I awoke this morning fairly pooped out from entertaining, I think it says something that I am finding writing to be easy again.
On this day in 1954, my parents got married. Congratulations, Mom and Dad!
My mom recently suggested that my blogging so frequently about how stressful my life is, might be adding to the stress in my life.
So, Mom and Dad, for your anniversary, I will be a font of positive communication until tomorrow, at which time, we will be back to our regularly scheduled program of life, with its ups and downs. And I will be writing about both.
I also promise to post photos of pies on Facebook. That always makes everyone happy, including me.
Seriously, I love you, Mom and Dad! Happy Anniversary!
This is a re-post from 9/20/13, which I wrote (and sang) as a gift for my mom’s birthday. Mom has been fretting about me a bit because I’ve been writing about worry and stress. She is asking me what she can do to help. I am reposting this 1) to remind her that I know that I am resilient even if my life is complicated at this time and 2) to remind her that she has already and continues to do so much for me, just by being herself.
Martha MacKenzie is my wonderful mom. And today is her birthday. In addition to being a mother of six and a wife for nearly 59 years, my mom is a singer. She has a glorious voice. Mom has almost no formal vocal training but comes from a family of musicians, especially singers. Her singing style can best be described as sacred classical. In other words, she is a church singer. Mom has been singing in church choir since she was six years old. Her oldest sister, Gloria, sang for KIRO radio’s Uncle Frank’s Kiddie’s Hour for a number of years, until she was about 12. Mom and her middle sister auditioned for and were accepted into the children’s choir for an opera production in Seattle, starring Metropolitan Opera’s Rise Stevens. Mom still remembers what she was asked to sing for the audition.
Mom was SMART and graduated from high school at age 16, after which she took a music performance class, along with her older sister, Barbara at Seattle University. We have recordings from those times of my mom’s clear soprano and my aunt’s animated mezzo-soprano singing songs from 1950’s musicals. Shortly after, Barbara moved to New York City to try to make it on Broadway. She was an amazing performer but like many talented performers did not make it in the Big Apple. During the Koren war, Mom was in a singing trio with Barbara and their cousin, Betty. They wore glamorous dresses and pulled off those unbelievably dark lip stick shades that were popular in the early 50’s, while performing for the USO.
Mom continued to sing in church choirs all of this time through marriage, rearing six children, and throughout my father’s post-retirement years. She is a member of the St. James’ Cathedral Choir in Seattle. It is a wonderful choir, which has toured Europe singing at noted cathedrals such as Notre Dame in France. They also sang at the Vatican and had an audience with Pope Benedict. My mom likes to tell us how she was trying to hike up the waistband of her support hose just as Pope Benedict walked by.
Wow, Elizabeth your mom sounds great. And you’ve talked about being a musician in your youth. You must have sung. You must have sung for your mother.
Well, it’s complicated. I was in band but did belong to the choir during 7th grade. Our claim to fame was performing, “The Sound of Music” during a middle school JAZZ competition. And no, it wasn’t a jazzy rendition of the song. I don’t know what that teacher was thinking. Then I stopped singing except for a few months during college when my mom convinced me to come to St. James to rehearse for a special community choir mass. (Regular choir members must audition. Soloists are professional opera singers.) I remember singing “A Mighty Fortress” and learning a piece based on Psalm 84 (“Yeah the sparrow hath found a house…”). I learned how to articulate words differently for singing than for speaking. It was a lot of work but was really fun.
So I did a little singing in groups. But NEVER alone in front of people. (Okay, one time five years ago I sang “Goody Goody” for my neighbors Jim and Deana. I’m not sure why I did it.) Not even for my mom except for a few bars of something and even then that was when I was much older, like 35 years old. People, singing in front of people is even more mortifying to me than wearing a swim suit in public! Zoe is the only one I have ever sung to and I sang to her a lot when she was little. I would sing with her now except that she only likes to sing alone. (Annoying teen.)
My mom used to sneak next to the bathroom door to try to hear me sing in the shower. (Watch the comments section, she will deny it!) If we were in church together and standing next to each other, she would sing really quietly so that she could listen to ME. I knew that it was really important to my mom to hear me sing but it was so hard for me to do this and I’m not sure why. She wanted to know if I had “a voice”. I performed frequently as a flutist, despite my nerves, and even performed in two master classes. (A master class is when some well-known musician comes to town and students are selected to get a lesson by that person in front of an audience of a bunch of students and music teachers. I did it twice as a college student.)
My singing anxiety does not just apply to my mom. Objectively, I have a pleasant, untrained alto voice with limited range. I think I could have been an excellent singer if I had trained to do so as I had with the flute. Perhaps the difficulties started as a combination of my perfectionism and the fact that my mom’s eagerness stressed me out a bit. And then as irrational anxieties do, it gathered its own steam from my continued avoidance, and took on a life of its own.
Last July, I wrote about the co-existence of grief and joy as being part of resilience in the post, How Can I Keep from Singing? The post title is the name of one of my favorite Christian hymns. I included the lyrics in the post followed by a little message to my mom asking her to record the hymn so I could post it on this blog. She offered me the deal that she would record it if I sang WITH her. I replied to her comments with a “definite maybe” type reply. I don’t think she ever saw that reply because she hasn’t mentioned the topic even once in the last almost two months. Or perhaps she has been playing it REALLY COOL.
I subsequently decided that I wanted to record the song both for my mom and for myself, to face my fear of public singing. Unlike going on loop de loop roller coasters, I actually enjoy singing quite a bit. It’s the only kind of music I still make. My original vision was for my mom, Zoe, and I to sing one verse apiece and the last verse together. However, Zoe was not at all interested in participating at the time I asked. My mom kept going camping with my dad all summer. I ended up not talking to her about it.
I decided to go solo and a cappella. Actually, a cappella is my favorite for this hymn. Plus, I don’t play piano and ukulele accompaniment by Zoe would probably not sound right.To me, the hymn sounds a little Irish. However, it is American and although there is a somewhat complicated history behind it, the authorship for the music is attributed to a Baptist minister, Robert Wadsworth Lowry. There are a number of different versions of the lyrics. I chose the one that was closest to the one I’ve sung in church many times as a member of the congregation.
I started practicing the song on and off about three weeks ago. Then I had to figure out how to audio record myself. (No way would I have a videotape made. This audio recording is a big enough step as it is.) I finally decided, as time was passing quickly, that I just needed to get it done. So I downloaded a free recording app onto my smartphone and started recording myself. I spent enough time on it to give myself a few tries but not so many as to activate my perfectionism.
Happy Birthday, Mom! Here is a song for you. I am posting it on my blog as my kind of “performance” so you can have a cyber stage mother experience.
I remember the beginning of my face to face relationship with my daughter. The nurse put her in my arms. “Welcome to the world,” I said as I placed a tender kiss on her forehead. She was an utterly perfect clean slate full of infinite possibility.
As she grew, she changed and so did our relationship. By the time she was a four year old, she was lively, happy, brilliant, confident, independent but connected, and as sweet as could be. “This little girl is going to change the world someday,” I found myself thinking. She was a slate full of infinite happy and healthy positives.
Many parents of challenging teens rhapsodize about their children when they were younger and perhaps even exaggerate. But I can tell you, I was not alone in being in awe of this child and no, I’m not just talking about her loving father, my husband, John.
A major parenting challenge is when the slate of possibilities changes, for some children earlier than others but for most it certainly changes in adolescence. Teens create consequences, short and long-term than they can’t really fully appreciate as they are putting actions in motion. In other words, a common part of growing up is making foolish decisions that could make adulthood much different.
The slate gets dirty. There are still good possibilities but some scary painful possibilities join them. When we love our children and hold their happiness and dreams in our hearts, it can be all too easy to focus on the dirty parts of the slate. Plus, since adolescence is even harder for the teen than the parent, we get the punched in the gut feeling as we watch them struggle through tumultuous times.
I love my girl. She is still brilliant and lively. She is not always happy. She has highs and lows of confidence. She is still super sweet deep down and it is not rare for it to bubble back up to the surface. But to be honest, it is sometimes anxiety-provoking to introduce her to my friends. There is that worry that she will be obnoxious, provocative, anxious, or lacking in manners. She doesn’t really adjust her behavior much based on whether she is with adults or peers. You could be the Queen of England and there would be a chance that she would greet you with a brain rattling belch.
But the truth is that as unpredictable as she can be, adults actually tend to like her. I know that part of the embarrassment on my part, is the common sense that one’s child is the product of parenting. But that’s not all of it. I think that another piece is that she is different than she used to be and as she moves forward, her fate is less and less subject to my influence and protection.
The slate I see when I view my daughter is no longer clean. It is full of known positives, known negatives, and much gray that has not yet been elucidated by time. I look at her and I just don’t know. She is not like the joyful curious 4 year-old for whom my husband and I were the center of the universe. Time can take her away from her wishes and dreams. It can take her away from her own compass of right and wrong. It can take her away from us. It is very scary.
As a breast cancer patient, I have often felt like an adolescent. I have oft written about how the integration of cancer into my identity calls back to the original phase of my identity development during adolescence and early adulthood.
I have been reflecting a lot about my long time relationships and how breast cancer, and how I have changed in response to it, has impacted them. I am not the same person as I was before. And the slate of possibilities for my life has been dirtied by breast cancer. I realize that some have responded to me like a changeable teen. It is not a constant, but there is strain on some of my relationships and it is palpable. With some people I can feel it in my gut, even over two years past diagnosis. I am engendering fear through my association with cancer.
I have made a number of new friends through my breast cancer blogging. Sometimes these friendships seem like a vacation away. There is ease to them at times that is rare in most of my close relationships. I have been very grateful for this but at the same time, it’s seemed a little odd. And I think given how much writing there is in the breast cancer community about the perceived realness of cyber friendships, I believe I am not alone.
One of the reasons that it feels odd is that I feel small but perceptible twinges of disloyalty to my long time friends. Whee! Cyber-friends all the way!! Mostly, I have tried to appreciate and nurture friendships regardless of their origin and focus my efforts on those that are mutually supportive.
It occurred to me today that one of the reasons that new friendships have been so important to me is that none of them knew me before cancer. None of them have had to incorporate this into a pre-existing concept of me. So even though cancer is on my slate, I started with a dirty slate.
During most of my adult life, I have introduced myself to others with a smile and a handshake. I may talk about the weather or about casual pleasantries. As a blogger, I introduce myself to others with my illness. “Hi, I am a cancer patient. I write about personal and painful things. To relieve my anxiety about this, I sometimes make boob jokes.” Despite the the fact that I lead with my disease in this way, I have become part of an amazing community of people, which has led to other connections outside of the community. What a wonderful gift indeed.
Summer is the driest season in Seattle. With the long days and rarity of extreme heat, it is absolutely glorious. I love the summers here. It is also the time of year when I take vacation and when my daughter does not have the stress of school.
This year, the summer seemed longer because I took two short vacations in October. One in Seattle where I acted as tour guide for a friend and the second, a trip to North Carolina from which I returned just a few days ago.
While I was gone, the rains returned in a very big way. It was raining before but we had a major wind and rain storm while I was gone. Our power went out and after trying to fix our land line phone, which I assumed was not working because it was off the hook, I have discovered that it has been out of order for the past week and no one noticed! (Note to friends: It is always better to call my cell, anyway. Note to telemarketers: Bwahahahaha!)
The weather in North Carolina was delightful. The company and sights were rejuvenating. I visited many more different people and places than I typically do on a trip. Part of this was because I had a lot of people to see and I needed to work around their availability. (I actually used a scheduling application to get everyone’s availability so that I could more easily determine the best times to see different people.) I was worried that I would tire myself out traveling, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. I had a wonderful time. And then I came back to Seattle to inclement weather, inside of my house.
I am consistently aware that my family life is stressful. I often forget how very stressful it can get, how much energy daily living can take. And after being welcomed with a drizzle in my house, by the next day there was a storm with ebbs and flows. And although I am still mopping up the extra water and wringing out my clothes, we may have narrowly missed a tsunami last night.
One f the lessons I have learned from walking outside year around is that most bad weather is scarier from the inside of the house. It looks threatening. The rain looks grim and relentless. And just like the summer seems likes it will never end, the shortening fall days can be so disheartening.
Yesterday, I relearned the lesson of the weather. It rained constantly for a good portion of the day. I did not want to walk in it. I looked outside and thought, “How depressing. Bleh.” But I have been off of my exercise routine with plane travel and getting caught up at work so I suited up and ventured outside with an umbrella in my rain coat pocket.
I walked outside. Yes, it was raining but I immediately felt better. There was fresh air. I was moving. There were trees, grass, and flowers. The rain actually made some things look better. The leaves were glossy. There were beautiful water droplets creating light effects and textures on the plants.
I typically feel so much less vulnerable when I put myself into the situation that I am trying to avoid because I fear it. By putting myself in the situation, I can be mindful of it because I can experience it fully. I can see, hear, feel, and taste things that I can’t from within my own home, standing still, looking at the window and feeling stuck, like I belong no where.
I have to be honest. It was hard to come back home after a trip of fun and little responsibility. It is tempting to avoid bad weather, real or threatened. Life brings change, some good, some bad. Walking in the rain is not an appealing notion to most, especially when the seasons are bringing us to cold and dark times.
But when I walk into the rain, my family is there. With them is where my life is and where I want to be.
George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His newest book "The Neural Mind" is now available.
My Eyes Are Up Here 