I’ve been painting, refurnishing, and redecorating my office for my private practice. I’ll be back with photos and at least one story about Teddy bears.
In the meantime, check out my water lily. It’s blooming!
Photo by Elizabeth 2013
I’ll be back
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As a child/adolescent psychologist, I work with a lot of moms. They often express feelings of guilt for their children’s challenges. I often respond by saying, “You have the rest of your life to feel guilty as a mother. Save some for later.” This statement usually gets a laugh and often the guilt although not gone, is small enough for us to move forward in our conversation. It is often, however, not so easy. People get stuck. Even psychologically solid, reasonable parents can get stuck on guilt. Several years ago, I worked with a wonderful mom of a very young child who was showing signs of significant developmental challenges in multiple areas. She had professional experience working with children and was acutely aware that her son may have handicaps that would greatly change the future possibilities in his life.
Although there was no evidence that she had done anything to contribute to her son’s difficulties and further, it was yet unclear as to whether his difficulties would be short-lived or chronic, she felt guilty. She felt guilty and stuck. During one session I asked, “What do you think you are getting out of this guilt?” She looked at me understandably with a confused expression. I went on, “It may sound backward but sometimes people hang onto guilt because it gives them a sense of control in situations in which they feel totally out of control. We cannot have guilt without a sense of power, even if the power we feel is to harm.”
She was dubious but I had planted a seed. She came back a week or two later and basically told me that she had thought what I had said made no sense but upon careful reflection, it actually made sense. It was a turning point in her grief process.
Guilt is blame turned inward. It can also be turned outward. In Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film, The Sweet Hereafter, a town grieves for the loss of a busload of school children in an accident. Ian Holm plays an attorney who travels to the small town to file a class action law suit against the bus company. He has his own grief back story, which is his adult daughter’s drug addiction. Holm’s character tirelessly pursues blame. Someone must be responsible for the tragedy. That someone must pay. Things don’t just happen. They happen for a reason. He was going to find the reason at all costs. I won’t spoil the ending for you but let’s just say that letting go of blame and accepting the loss of control is a major theme of this film.
As for myself, I have had issues with letting go of anger. There is a release that comes with losing my temper and in the moment, it feels good. But because I am at heart a peacemaker and an empathetic person, I feel regret at having hurt other people, especially my husband. My anger is usually rooted in anxiety, anxiety that a problem can’t be controlled or solved. Anxiety that my house will never be an environment that I can control and make a sanctuary. Fears that my cancer will return. Fears for my family, especially my teenaged daughter. I have fears of not being a good enough psychologist when my patients are having particularly treatment-resistant struggles.
Most people would consider me to be a very disciplined person. One exception to this has been my life long struggle to eat healthfully and to exercise regularly. I love food. I am an excellent home cook and I love good restaurants. I love to eat a large amount of food. The act of eating is an amazing, highly enjoyable, sensory experience. It is also a wonderful social experience. And I know when I am overdoing it and often in my life, I just keep eating. And at these times, it seems too hard to put the time into preparing healthy meals. Quick and easy is convenient but not nutritious. The rest of my health suffers and I just don’t feel as good during the non meal parts of the day. It also feels good sometimes, not to exercise. “Ah, I can just sit here and rest.” This is particularly true when I let my work and family life burden me. I work too many hours at work and at home, doing things and worrying about people. I am tired and I feel that I deserve to rest even though I know that I deserve the kind of treatment that promotes good health. But like many caretakers, I put my self-care low on the priority list even though I have counseled countless moms to avoid this. But putting my health at lower priority made my daily to-do list shorter. It made it seem like I was juggling fewer balls in the air. It was a false illusion.
In my 20’s, I gained and lost the same 20 pounds over and over. By my 30’s and 40’s, I have gained and lost the same 40 pounds twice. Right now, I have given up the convenience and the joy of eating to the point of indulgence for healthier foods. Yes, it is work to plan my meals, to make entrees ahead and freeze them in reasonably-sized portions. I take the time to make sure that I always have healthy vegetables on hand. I love vegetables and you know what, eating a large volume of vegetables is actually good for me. And I’ve gotten so that I look forward to my daily 3 mile walks. The key for me was realizing that I was self-employed and could therefore set my own hours! I am better at exercising in the morning and had been trying to add it to the end of long clinic days, which didn’t work at all. So, I just started seeing my first patients at 9:30 am instead of 8:30 am. What a rut I was in to not think of that solution years ago!
Letting go of these things has required patience, which does not come naturally. But I have grown and changed over the years. I have learned to manage my anxiety pretty well and with my mindfulness practice, I am learning to practice acceptance and further, that acceptance is not the same as doing nothing. It is not accepting that can spin me in circles, feeling like I am doing something but getting no where. Endless anxiety and anger can be a trap where you expend so much energy that it feels like you are doing something productive and your are not. And as a person who has been clinically depressed twice in my life, I can tell you that the helplessness and hopelessness of that passive state is one of the loneliest places in the world. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I have not been near that place for over 10 years.
It can be hard to let go of anger, of grief, of impatience, or anxiety, of sadness, of guilt, at the point when I need to move on. Emotions are vital to our lives, even the “bad” ones. They motivate, protect, and educate us. But they do not always work in a healthy way with our thoughts and behaviors. I know that I will be working and reworking this balance for the rest of my life. I try not to think about how things “should” be in respect to things over which I have little control. I got breast cancer when other people with similar lifestyle and risk factors did not. I got it when people with more risk factors did not. Disease is part of the natural world and it doesn’t make sense to me to be mad at the universe. That just doesn’t work for me and the cost is too high.
We all have to make our own paths in life. In my life, I feel pretty unstuck right now but know that the cost of each day is a different set of gains and losses. Yes, I have lost the illusion of control but I have gained so much. I write this to reflect. I write this to remember the peace I have in my life at this moment.
I let go to gain freedom. I let go to go on.
I’ve written a couple of posts lately about how much things cost ranging from Botox to Lupron to high school year books. My last post was short, a bit flip, and on the humorous side. Shortly after I wrote it, I read this amazing post on Not Down or Out. I complimented Cheryl on her post and much to my surprise, she said it had been partially prompted by my “what things cost”-themed posts!
I’m not saying that I’m never deep because I know that’s not true. But I threw off those posts about costs and didn’t really think about them that deeply. So I started thinking about costs a bit more, relating them to my own cancer experience as well as of those about which I’ve read.
Breast cancer treatment costs a lot. We lose things we would have preferred to keep such as money, time, a sense of safety, taking our health for granted, relationships, a brain that works properly, and last but not least, body parts. We gain things we’d rather not have like nausea, fatigue, weight, neuropathy, hot flashes, aches and pains, and grief. Everybody’s experience is a bit different and for each individual, the experience can change over time.
Putting aside the fact in our lives as tainted test tubes, we don’t know for sure whether each ache or pain or other side effect is really due to cancer treatment. (Okay, I know some of them are pretty obvious, but generally speaking, we don’t always know.) But we do know our current day to day experience and what we like and don’t like about it. And a good number of things that we know about are costs of having cancer and having been treated for cancer.
What we don’t know are the costs of the roads we have not taken. Those of us who had surgery for DCIS will never know if left untreated, whether it would have become invasive or not. And those of use with early stage invasive cancer, don’t know what our outcomes would be if we’d foregone all or a portion of treatment. Finally, those of us with metastatic disease will never know if we chose the right balance between strategies to extend life verses those that preserve quality of life.
Instead, we must make decisions based on our understanding of research on assessment and treatment of our particular diseases, our other risk and protective factors, our personalities, what is important to each of us, and what is not important to each of us. And we must try to make well-reasoned decisions, accounting for all of these factors, while under incredible life stress. Not to mention the fact that we all have people who love us and depend on us. There are costs to family members and friends. As my friend Nancy says, “This disease has tentacles.”
And how many assessment and treatment decisions have each of us made in our experience with cancer? Tons, right? This means there are many paths not traveled. To really understand the costs of our decisions, we would need to be able to live many lives, each based on a different set of decisions.
We’ll never really know because each of us have just one life to live. I often write about my own decisions, “I made the best decisions I could based on the information I had at the time.” It may sound kind of nerdy but it frees me from a good deal of “what if” kind of thinking. I try not to dwell on the costs of the roads I didn’t take. I will never know what they are and to do so would have me walking in circles instead of pursuing the path I chose.
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I was looking through the photos on my phone when I ran across this one:
Ollie, enjoying a sunny spring day, out on the deck.
This photo was taken just a couple of weeks before he became very obviously ill. He was greatly enjoying the new deck. He his tail does look narrower toward the base. Ollie had been pulling out his own fur, something he’d never done before. I don’t know if this was related to the metastatic cancer or whether it was coincidental.
Ollie was an indoor cat up until last April. We live near a major street and I was afraid that he would be run over by a car. The rest of my family felt differently. We loved him but he had a lot of anxiety problems, which resulted in his spraying all over our house for years. And no, our house does not smell like cat pee but it has taken a lot of work to keep it from getting that way. He was also aggressive to visitors though the sweetest cat to us. Ollie had a lot of personality but I know that other families may have taken him on a long drive to the country or euthanized him. I am not a person who always wants to have a pet. I had held off for years before meeting Ollie in Eastern Washington. He was a stray, adorable, and I didn’t want him to be coyote food. My stance is that once we committed to having a pet, we committed all of the way. When someone rather pointedly asked why we didn’t get rid of him, I said, “We don’t kick members of our family out for mental illness.” Little did the person who made the comment know that this policy was also working in his/her favor.
While I was home from TRAM surgery, I must admit that the first time Ollie pooped on our bed, it was less than charming. He did it again only a few days later. I remember letting go of the fear of trying to protect him from everything at all costs. I relented, “Okay, we can let Ollie go outside,” I told my husband. Being an old cat, Ollie stayed pretty close to home. He mostly stayed on the deck or sat on the stair railing on the front of the house.
Miraculously, as my husband had predicted all of these years, Ollie stopped spraying. He acted much less anxious. My husband was right. I was wrong. (I figured that once he got a whiff of all of those other cat smells out there, he would get even more paranoid.)
However, as I described in a recent post, Ollie was killed by a car. And this was only two months after I’d agreed that he could start going outside of the house. So I was right, too.
But when I look at this picture of our beloved pet sunning himself, I can help but think we did the right thing. We didn’t know it at the time, but his body was full of cancer and he would soon stop eating and fall over every time he tried to jump up onto a table, because he no longer had the strength that he had had only a couple of weeks before.
We were both right. Yes, that can actually happen in a marriage.
Poppies get a bad rap in the Wizard of Oz. I mean, come on, the Wicked Witch of the West used them for nefarious purposes, to thwart Dorothy and her friends from their quest to see The Wizard. Plus there are those horrible, nightmare inducing flying monkeys!
Poppies are in bloom in my neighborhood and they are oh so beautiful! Enjoy!
Today is the summer solstice. Hooray! This summer is met with particular eager anticipation because last summer with the Summer of Surgeries. This summer, I will have no surgeries, knock on wood. Now fall of 2013, will likely be a different story but whatever “work” is done will be minor. No more major surgeries on the known horizon.
So, in honor of this occasion as well as it’s personal meaning to me in 2013, I would like to post a few photos that show resilience. Let’s call them my Timex photos. All of you resilient readers and bloggers out there, we take a licking but we keep on ticking.
This is a photo taken after the weeding party, during which the evil plant-engulfing wireweed was removed. See the small shrub that was uncovered? Yeah, well I can barely see it. It looks like a bouquet of brown twigs.
Here’s what the bundle of sticks looks like today. It’s alive, it’s alive! Like a phoenix that has arisen from the ashes!
Speaking of a phoenix, here is the phoenix I bought John for Fathers’ Day made by Cedar Moon Studio (available from Etsy.) This Phoenix rose from the ashes of an old plastic pink flamingo yard bird, that was re-purposed into this magnificent creature.
Click here to see more transformed pink flamingos.
As any gardener or first grader knows, green beans are easy to grow. Further, they are delicious and much better than the beans purchased in the grocery store. Consequently, I grow green beans and tomatoes every year because both of them are so much better when they are home grown.
Last year, during the summer of surgeries, I harvested a total of zero green beans. Not a single one. You might think that I just didn’t harvest any and let them rot on the vine.
But you would be wrong. There were no vines! I planted beans last year but not a single one sprouted!
I’m not sure what happened. It was a wet spring and early summer so the fact that I forgot to water should not have mattered. I did, however, neglect to pull out the strawberry plants that were encroaching on the spots where the green bean vines were supposed to grow.
This year, I made space. And this week, lo’ and behold!
Look, look, look! I’m going to have beans this summer!
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My Eyes Are Up Here 