Archives for posts with tag: Parenting

Like juggling water

July 15, 2014 //

There’s a vaudeville theater in my neighborhood, Kenyon Hall. It’s about two blocks from where I live, located in an old house. They have an antique Wurlitzer organ, which is occasionally played as live accompaniment to old silent films. They used to sell root beer floats for a dollar each on these movie nights.

We haven’t been there in a long time. There was a change in ownership and the types of entertainment offered there has narrowed. About ten years ago we went there with friends along with our daughter for a comedy juggling act, Brothers from Different Mothers. They were very funny and excellent jugglers. I laughed a lot.

Now, when I laugh, I do so loudly and with my whole body. Kenyon Hall is a small venue with no stage. We were sitting in the front row because we’d arrived early and wanted to make sure that we could see. I was quite noticeable and also conveniently close to the two performers.

I’d not seen them perform before so I didn’t know that they used audience members in their act. When it came time for that part of the show, I was promptly asked to go up front with them. I can’t remember everything that they had me do. But I remember being a very good sport about the whole thing.

But one part of the performance actually got a bit stressful. I was to grab one of the balls from one of the guys while he was still juggling. PERFORMANCE PRESSURE. I missed 2-3 times and I noticed that the juggler was holding the ball for increasingly longer times in order to make it easier for me to grab from him. I knew that there was only so long he could do this before having to attend to the other balls in the air. I also knew that if I didn’t get it soon, the act would drag. I mean, a woman hyena-laughing while trying to grab a juggling ball gets old after a few failures. Each time I tried to memorize the timing and rhythm of the balls in the air. On the next attempt, I got it, much to my relief. I had not spoiled the joke with ball dropping ineptitude.

I know it is cliche to compare one’s life to juggling balls. We all try to keep the balls in the air. However, when we parent, we are also trying to do a hand off balls or take balls from another, all in order to make sure no one’s load is burdensome. And we do it while each of us is juggling a full set of balls.

When my husband and I have an established and coordinated routine, this can go pretty smoothly. We know what to expect, can plan for it, and we’ve handled it before.

Then there are the times when the unexpected happens or we have to learn a new routine. At these times, it can feel like juggling water. I feel all of the responsibilities but can’t put my hands around them. What’s worse, I can’t tell which responsibilities are mine and which ones are John’s. They just splash to the ground, undone, and making a huge, undifferentiated mess. “Who’s water is this?” “And who stepped in it with muddy shoes?” “Who’s going to clean it up?” “What happened to the mop?”

I have been more irritable lately. I initially attributed it to the heat as well as my hatred of driving through downtown Seattle, something I am doing at least once per day right now in order to get my daughter to activities. All of these things do contribute to my mood.

Today, I woke up feeling sad and it took awhile to shake it. I realized that part of the reason is that each day is a different set of logistics and responsibilities. Our daughter’s schedule is different, every day. My schedule is different, every day. And not only am I taking my paperwork on the road, John and I have to figure out who is doing what, every day, almost from scratch. This means we have to remember to talk to each other about logistics and texts and phone calls from each other need to be exchanged. As a couple, this is not our strong suit. I over-communicate and my husband doesn’t communicate enough. It makes both of us a source of aggravation to the other.

Our daughter has two more years of high school. She will likely be driving in a year or two. There are some wonderful things that come out of spending time with her in the car. Yesterday, she told me what a fun time she’d had talking with me on the way to and from her activity.My husband and I have more evening time together during the summer, just the two of us.

Those are opportunities I can grab and hang onto.

Tags Logistics of family life, Marriage, parental coordination, Parenting, parenting a teen, stress

Categories Family, Marriage, Parenting

Mind me!!!!!!

July 9, 2014 //

One of the gifts of mindfulness has been perceiving sensations have gone unnoticed if I did not regularly force myself to slow down and notice. Those are its gentle gifts. The tiny intricate flowers. The refreshing morning breezes. The lovely and varied bird calls. The delicious and subtle flavors of carefully prepared meals.

It is easy to be mindful when life is slow. The hard part is slowing down.

Some situations demand that I be mindful. They are not gentle at all.

Almost every morning between 4 am and 6 am, both of our kittens jump on top of me in bed and demand my affection. They do this only to me as their designated fur-free mom.

About one second after they land on me, they are already purring. It is anticipatory purring. Basie touches my nose with his nose, REPEATEDLY. Then he starts licking my eyelids. I start petting him for about a half a minute, at which time he starts biting my hands and the rings on my fingers. Then I put my arms under the covers because biting turns into playful scratching and what I call “rabbit footing”, which is when cats grab you with their front claws and start scratching you furiously with their back claws. Rabbits do this when they are picked up by the scruff of their necks, at least ours did when I was a kid, and they were not pets.

Basie continues to try to bite me through the covers and if he is being really persistent, he crawls under the covers. Meanwhile, Leeloo is feeling left out. She is the gentler of the two but she is very affectionate. If my hands are under the covers, she climbs right under my neck on my clavicle. If I don’t start petting her right away, she will try to move EVEN higher. She also likes to groom me affectionately by licking the insides of my ears.

It is hard to be mindful of the gift of affection when I am busy doing something else, in this case SLEEPING. At these times, it can actually be annoying. But the kitties charm me nonetheless. They have tiny brains and I cannot ascribe negative intentions to their behavior. They are just babies and adorable ones, at that. I kick Basie off of the bed when he won’t stop being rough. I keep their little kitty nails trimmed. Their nails are less needle like and they are learning not to bite so hard.

Right after the kitties decided to leave the bed and run around the house, John turned over, put his around me, and nuzzled into the side of my neck. He will sleep like that for a long time. I was trying to go back to sleep. I typically have a hard time falling asleep with a lot of weight on me and I get overheated easily, too. Consequently, I usually say, “Get your arm off of me, please.” (I know I am very romantic. It is a miracle that the man still makes attempts at spooning after all of these years.)

Today, I thought, “It’s really nice that John is being so sweet to me. I’m going to try to enjoy this.” So I did and had a lovely snuggle for several minutes. Then I was really hot and asked him to move, which he did.

My usual response is to anticipate that there is going to be a problem and “nip it in the bud”. I realize that I miss a lot of affection that way. Why not instead be mindful and enjoy the part that is enjoyable instead of working so hard to avoid a minor discomfort?

There are times I need to slow down my thoughts. I need to be mindful of thoughts like, “Oh, how sweet” and not race right to “Oh, John’s arm is so heavy!”

I’ve been REALLY busy lately. Summers can get that way fast because I do a lot of driving to get my daughter to daily summer activities. At her age, she typically has to be somewhere in the middle of my work day. It’s a lot of shifting gears for me and cramming my work into small bursts. It also means extending my work day so that there’s a hole in the middle for transportation. She is now able to navigate public transportation but has trouble with making connections if there is a transfer. Further, the buses run only occasionally during mid-day. She can’t always take the bus and we don’t really like the idea of her wandering around for hours so I try to drive her as much as I can manage. Today there are three places that she needs to be, all in different parts of town. It’s a paperwork day for me and I am doing it at different coffee shops around town while I wait for her.

Needless to say, we’ve been spending a lot of time in the car together. My teen daughter doesn’t talk to me as much as she did when she was younger but when she does, it’s usually while I am driving her some where, often in heavy traffic.

I love talking to her but I must say that sometimes it takes a great deal of concentration I don’t have because there are subjects about which I know little that she loves to talk about. And she loves to ask questions about them, too. For example:

The Girl: “Mom, what is your favorite episode of Dr. Who with the 10th doctor?”
Me (crossing several lanes of traffic on a Friday during rush hour): “I’m sorry, honey. I’m trying to concentrate on driving. These conversations often make me feel like my head is going to explode.”

It may be that my mind is not up to the detailed nerd girl conversations while driving in Seattle traffic. I have to concentrate a lot to drive. I have a poor sense of direction and I am easily distracted. I am intimidated by aggressive drivers.

Maybe I will try a little harder today to be engaged with my daughter while we are in the car and see what happens. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to talk to her. She knows that I would like to talk more frequently and I think it is confusing to her that when she tries, I am sometimes not receptive.

It may be too hard to do but I will try it. The fact that it could get too hard is not a good enough reason to try.

Sometimes opportunity knocks softly. At other times, it licks you on the eye.

Often the kitties just love/bother each other.

Tags Family, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting

Categories Family, Marriage, Mindfulness

Chances are

July 5, 2014 //

I was driving a rental car with my daughter in the back seat; she did not yet weigh enough to sit in the front. She was 12 years old and on spring break from middle school. We had just been hiking at Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico. It was just the two of us; one of the mother-daughter trips we used to do together.

I entered in our next destination into the GPS and started following the directions. I got an instruction to turn onto a gravel road. I thought to myself, “Hmm, this doesn’t seem right.” I re-checked the GPS and then took the turn onto a well maintained but gravel road.

I still felt nervous. Gravel roads are not main thoroughfares. I was out in the wilderness. But I also thought, “Wilderness. I am from the Great Northwest. I have lots of wilderness experience.”

I kept driving, even though I knew that it was a one lane road. That was the total number of lanes. One. There were no turn around spots. At first I was concerned that we would encounter another car traveling the opposite direction. What would we do then? And then upon driving a number of miles and not seeing a single other vehicle or person, I started having different concerns.

The road led up gradually but persistently in elevation. I was driving through high elevation pine woods. The street was so narrow, it was like walking on a path in the forest. There were rock formations in the distance. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

As we got higher, the quality of the road started to decline. It was rutted and bumpy. It all happened really gradually. Then I saw it. It was a place to turn around. Now, if I had started driving at this spot, I would have immediately turned around and driven back to where we came from. I would have seen the situation for what it was. It was a dangerous place to drive. It was a place that required a four wheel drive and even then would have been difficult.

But I am a person of momentum and I was anxious. Usually I am quite risk adverse when it comes to physical safety. But I was not only anxious about the drive. I was anxious about my relationship with my daughter. She was shifting to preferring my husband to me. Dad was cool. Mom was not.

So a reason I kept driving was because I didn’t want to be an overly uptight mom anymore. I decided to take a chance. We got stuck when I drove over a boulder in the “road”.

It was noon. I had water and a first aid kit, which I put into a bag along with my GPS (from which I had recorded the GPS coordinates for the rental car) and my cell phone, the latter of which was low on battery power.

I was externally calm. I was doing the best acting job that I could. I told my daughter that we would walk back to the gas station we had passed prior to going up the gravel road. I had located the name and address of the gas station on my GPS. It was hot. I knew it was a long walk. I was wearing hiking shoes but my daughter was wearing Converse low tops. I was on the edge mentally and emotionally. I was barely keeping it together. I kept having fears that we would be attacked or raped and no one would be able to help us. I knew that I had made a horrible error in parenting. I didn’t know how we were going to get the rental car back.

Knowing if I also had to contend with a cranky tween, I would totally lose my composure, I told my daughter, “We need to walk about 10 miles. I’m sorry I got us into this situation. If you do the walk without complaining, I’ll give you $50.”

Suffice to say it was the best money I’ve ever spent. Along the walk, I intermittently checked for cell phone reception. When I found it, I called 911. However, the reception was spotty and the calls were lost when I shifted my weight. Further, dispatchers from different jurisdictions answered each time, because we were lost in an area close to border between two counties as well as close to tribal lands. After many attempts, I gave multiple dispatchers the GPS coordinates for the car, the address for our destination, the name of the road I was on (you know it’s bad when the 911 people can’t find the road on their maps), and our current location. I also knew that texts would be sent as soon as I walked into areas with cell coverage. I texted my husband our location and instructions to call 911.

We finally found our way to the beginning of the gravel road. I recorded the GPS coordinates and took a photo of some distinguishing features at the entrance to the road since there were no street signs. Just as we were starting to walk on asphalt, a car filled with a family of sight see-ers stops to ASK US DIRECTIONS about the gravel road. I explained our situation and they kindly offered us a ride to the gas station. We got to the gas station and I asked to use their phone since I was still out of cell phone reception. I informed 911 of our location. Then I dug enough change out of my purse to get my daughter and I something cold to drink.

About 10 minutes later, I saw two police cars pull into the parking lot, one from the county sheriff’s office and the other from the city of Santa Fe. I walked out and the sheriff looked annoyed. And he was. None of the information that I’d communicated to the 911 dispatcher had been communicated to him. Stealing my mom’s catchphrase for embarrassing situations I said, “Whatever you are thinking, it is probably true.”

He said, “We’ve been looking all over for you along with the Santa Fe and the tribal police. We were just going to send out a search helicopter.”

I communicated a great self-awareness of my major judgement error along with my multiple attempts to communicate my location to the 911 dispatchers. (Meanwhile, my stomach was lurching as I was thinking about how much money a helicopter search would have cost the fine tax payers of New Mexico.)

He settled down and turned out to be super nice. He actually even pulled the rental car and got it facing the right direction. It took a lot of skillful maneuvering. Then he followed us until he was sure that we made it out of the wilderness okay.

I called my husband that night when my daughter was out of earshot. He had not received my texts. I told him what I had done. Then I started bawling. “I’m so sorry. I made a horrible and dangerous parenting decision. I am so sorry.” At times like these, my husband knows exactly what to say.

Was it true that I was an uptight mom?

Yes.

Was it true that I needed to take more chances in my life?

Yes.

Was trying to be a cool mom a good reason to keep driving?

No, absolutely not.

The problem was, and I was mindful of this as I reflected on the incident, was that being so careful in my life, I did not know when to heed my own anxious feelings and when to move past them. And this was a situation that sneaked up on me gradually.

Some fears are rational, some are not. When I’m afraid of everything, I don’t know the difference.

I’ve come a long way since that drive and so has my daughter. I accepted the fact that I was not cool to her about one second after we got stuck; I have never turned back. Mom’s are not supposed to be cool. I have learned to face many fears, both rational and irrational. I will face many more.

In the meantime, I am staying clear of gravel roads.

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

This is the nice part of the road.

The scenery for the long walk. The sheriff informed me that we walked through cougar habitat. Yikes! I am more afraid of cougars than any other wild animal I’ve encountered, including alligators and bear.

Tags coping with anxiety, Decision-making, irrational and rational fears, making dumb parenting decisions, New Mexico, Parenting, risk-taking

Categories Family, Flora and Fauna, Parenting

Entitlement

June 30, 2014 //

Feeling “entitled” is considered a “bad” thing typically. Sometimes, I feel entitled.

I feel entitled to expecting commitments to be kept. I’m not talking about big things, people. I’m talking about when people promise to do the dishes.

And with my teen daughter, I always PREFER to be treated with respect. But I don’t always feel entitled to respect. I am a child/adolescent psychologist, after all. I know what teens can be like.

And I don’t mean that most of the time, I just let things go. Teens are still to be held accountable for their behavior, despite the fact that the disrespect can be normative. Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean that they just get to do whatever they want to do.

Feeling “entitled” is a whole different ballgame. As a parent, I rarely feel entitled. But every once in awhile I do.

My teen daughter recently returned from a camp for which I paid. She LOVED it. I was so glad that she LOVED it.

But she has been internally rolling her eyes for the last few days. She’s been rude in the way that “good kids” can be.

Today I told her, “Please speak to me more respectfully.”

She explained that her manner of speaking was the way that she addresses her peers.

Without getting into the whole, “I am not your peer, I am your mother” debate, I responded, “That may be but when you see your friends, you hug them and look happy to see them. You don’t do that with with me so it’s not the same.”

I heard a couple of rounds of, “I love you Mom, very much” until she left for her evening activities.

I try really hard not to use guilt to motivate my child. But sometimes she needs feedback. She needs to know that I have feelings.

The vast majority of the time, she is able to get her brain out of her “peer cave” and into a more complicated world, the world in which both adults and children have feelings, that can be hurt.

Tags Family, mindfulness, Parenting, teaching empathy

Categories Family, Mindfulness, Parenting

Coasting

May 13, 2014 //

When I was a girl, my younger brother, Jim frequently rode our bikes. I remember the pumping my legs furiously so that I could coast along for awhile without having to do anything to propel myself. It was exhilarating going down hills and on the flat, it created joyful stretches of ease, moments of effortlessness.

Being a healthy person, having a healthy marriage, and being a good parent are all “works in progress”. When John and I saw a psychologist for marital therapy years ago prompted by family planning issues, I asked her sincerely, “When is the time when we get to coast in marriage?” She promptly responded, “Never.” I remember my shock at her response at the time. It’s kind of funny looking back at my thoughts at that time. I do know that I was quite overwhelmed by my life and about to enter my second episode of major depression. It was a fantasy I had that after all of the hard work I had done in my life, that I would be able to coast. I would have an easy time as a wife, parenting would get easy.

I was reminded of my wish to coast recently when I realized that after all of my hard work, I had strayed off of Weightwatchers and begun to gain weight. I didn’t gain a lot of weight and I’ve started losing again. It may not seem to be a big deal to you but I have gained and lost weight many times since I was 14 years old. And as I have mentioned, the last two periods of weight gain had put me into the clinically obese range. My breast cancer was highly responsive to estrogen and progesterone. Our adipose tissue (fat and other stuff) has glandular function and increases female hormone production. I know it is important for me to exercise and eat right. I am very lucky to not have physical issues that would interfere with my ability to exercise and to have a life situation that makes it possible for me to work part time. But even knowing these things, my weight has crept up in the past when I stopped paying attention to my habits, when I tried to coast in my life.

I have lived a good bit of my life working at capacity and feeling fairly stressed out. At these times, I have thoughts like, “It will be SO much easier, when ____________” This blank has been completed in many different ways over the years, “when I finish school”, “after the baby starts sleeping through the night”, “after my career is established”, “after my daughter is grown”, “when my husband’s job situation improves”, “after my cancer treatment is done”, “after my energy returns”, “after I start working full time again.”

But the truth of the matter is that although stress ebbs and flows throughout out lives, we are never done with it. And there are always unknowns and unexpected challenges that loom on the horizon.

In my work, I specialize in what for most children are chronic difficulties. And although many of them have loving and very skilled parents, even the most loving and skilled of the parents gets exhausted with the extra work their child or children require. There is also a period of adjustment after diagnosis that can take anywhere from weeks to more regularly, years, and sometimes, never. It is the adjustment to the idea that there will be no coasting as a parent and that one’s children will likely need more support and over a longer number of years, than other children.

I sometimes use an analogy with parents. I tell them, “Raising a child with these challenges is like running a marathon of unknown length and unpredictable terrain, with uphill, downhill, and stretches of flat. It is important to take the cups of water whenever you can.”

If I really think about it, coasting on a bike only lasted so long before I either had to brake because I was going too fast or start pumping my legs again so I could keep going. I have been working hard to take care of myself but also to nurture my relationships and carry out my responsibilities. I will keep working on the rhythm of knowing when to pump and when I can coast so I can keep moving forward and maintain my balance. And if if that little cup of water looks too small to last a lifetime, I will take them when they are offered.

Tags Breast Cancer, mindfulness, Parenting, parenting children with special needs, self care, stress, work/life balance

Categories Breast cancer, Family, Mindfulness, Parenting

Empty

May 10, 2014 //

I was walking through the woods and I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. I snapped some photos using my phone and I memorized her location.

A humming bird sitting on her nest! I was thrilled! I ordered a real camera to take better nature photos. And the next day, I found this.

An egg! The tiniest egg you could ever imagine. A tiny little package of life.

This was the only view I got of the egg. Here’s a little video of the time she was kind of peeved with me for getting too close to her.

After a couple of days she seemed to get used to me. And she sat on that little egg, day after day. I was thrilled to have a chance to see the miracle of life in the nearby woods. Hummingbirds are small and feisty. And this mama, despite the fact that she has the brain the size of a pea, had the instinct to protect her baby. She knew how to fly around to make herself look larger and to make lots of noise. And she also knew when it was time to quell her own instinct to flee and to stay sitting on that egg.

This is a photo I took on a very rainy day. She sat there with the rain dripping on her head from the little twig above her. I thought it was a good metaphor for a mama’s love.

Every day or two, I visited the nest. I had done a little research on hummingbirds and learned that the gestation time would be 16-18 days for the egg to hatch. So, not knowing how recently she had laid her egg when I first found her, I expected to see a chick within a couple of weeks. I kept visiting and started feeling a little impatient because day after day, there was no chick.

Then I went to New Orleans for a few days. John and I walked back into the woods the day after our return.

Still no sign of the chick! It is possible that there was a chick under mama but it had been far longer than 16-18 days! Rip off! Where’s my miracle? Isn’t this a zoo?

Then it happened! A chick, a chick, a chick!!!!!!

I visited the chick a couple of times. I was planning to keep taking photos of the chick’s growth, the increase in feathers, and how little bird get loud and demanding as they await food from mamas who are scurrying around to get food for a baby who grows to her size.

Today, John and I set out for the woods. It was a breathtakingly beautiful Seattle spring day.

Nothing. Empty. That chick was still small and homely two days ago. Sometimes nests are empty because a chick has gotten strong and fledged. But other times, they are eaten by a predator or fall from the nest. This chick, whom I’d affectionately called my “grand baby” and who my Facebook friends had fussed over, is dead.

I had been saving my photos for a post on this blog. This is not the post I had in mind. But life is still a miracle and this Mama did her best, as we all do with our children to help them be strong enough to leave us.

Mothers’ Day is typically a very happy day for me. I have a close relationship with my mother, who is a healthy woman. I have a wonderful daughter. But I know that it is a day of loss for many. For those of you who have lost your mothers, who have lost your children, or who wished for children who were never to be, Mothers’ Day has a much different meaning. And then there are those of us who are mothers who understand that we can’t take our own health for granted. We pray that we will be there for our children as long as we can, especially while they are still chicks in the nest.

Life is full of mixed feelings. I hope that at least one of the feelings you experience tomorrow is serenity. If you are a mom who has lost a child, I know you worked to love and protect your children. If you are a daughter who has lost a mother, I know you brought moments of great joy into your mother’s life just by being her child. If you wanted children but it was not meant to be, think of all of the children to whom you have mattered by being a nurturing presence.

Tags loss, Mothers' Day, Nature, Parenting, rufous hummingbird

Categories Family, Flora and Fauna, Mindfulness, Parenting

It’s hard to stop crying

December 30, 2013 //

I often read my old posts as a way to process my life experience. Today I was reflecting on the past year and I re-read my post, “No Words”. I can’t stop crying. I had a good day. But I read this post about the death my friend, Gina, and the tears just keep rolling. And I’m doing the “boo hoo hoo” loud kind of crying. John kept asking me what he could do for me and he finally just came into my office and gave me a big and welcome hug. I am not despondent. I am just sad that such a wonderful woman died suddenly and was not able to be there for the rest of her life or for the life of her son who was still an infant when she died.

I am not totally unselfish. I want to be there for my daughter. When I wrote this post, I was afraid that I would not be able to be there for her. This will always be a worry. At most times it will be so much more manageable. It will not elicit “boo hoo hoo” crying. But it will always be a worry. I am a strong woman with lots of support. How do people who are less strong and who have less support deal with this? How? Cancer sucks! People out there who have not dealt with this, you can tell me that I am a drama queen all you want. But I can tell you, as a strong and healthy person, having had a life threatening illness, one that can come back, and thinking about taking care of your child, WOW, CANCER SUCKS!.

You’d think that Gina had died of cancer. She didn’t. She had a brain aneurism and died in her 30s. I could go on about how unfair this was. But we are part of the natural world. It is not governed by justice or fairness. It is nature and some chaos is to be expected. But it still hurts and it hurts A LOT.

Every August, for the past several years, I get an unexpected wave of sadness. Then I remember that my friend, Gina died in the month of August. I can’t even remember how long ago; it must have been at least 15 years. Gina was just a beautiful person and friend. I met her in graduate school. I was in the clinical psychology program and she was in the counseling psychology program, which was housed in Education rather than in Arts & Sciences. We met through our mutual friends, Annette and Ellen, who are also now counseling psychologists. Gina had just returned from her clinical internship to finish her dissertation, her remaining Ph.D. requirement. She was also recently divorced.

Gina was so fun and such a kind-hearted person. After she graduated, she ended up taking a job at Duke University in onco-psychology. Yes, she worked with cancer patients. Gina used to talk about how happy John and I were together. “Elizabeth laughs when John tells stories you know that she’s heard a hundred times.” She and Annette were quite taken with John and referred to him as being the “most marriageable man” that they knew. Not that they thought he was available; they just thought he was well suited to marriage and were looking for someone like him. (And believe me, this is not the first time my girlfriends have talked about my husband this way to the point when my friend, Cheryl would even say, “I’ve got to get myself a computer nerd.” It was just fine.)

I suspect even more than being re-married, Gina wanted to be a mother. She eventually did marry her husband, Bob. We flew back to North Carolina for the wedding reception and John was the official photographer at the small family-only service at Coker Arboretum on the UNC campus. He took some really beautiful shots.

Gina did have a baby, a beautiful boy. We were so happy for her. A few months later, Annette called and I answered. “Gina died.” She’d had an brain aneurism and died while her husband was driving her to the hospital. There’s a boy in North Carolina who only knows the mother who waited for and wanted him so much through a video that Annette made. When she found out that Bob and Gina didn’t have a camcorder, she borrowed one and took footage.

I was wondering today why I was feeling her death again like the day Annette called. I looked down at my calendar. In fact I feel sadder than I have felt in many years. Today is August 8th. Today is the anniversary of my mastectomy. Today is a reminder of what I have lost and the greatest losses were not of my breast or my femininity, or my sense of self.

The loss I feel today is the loss of the ability to take for granted that I will be able to be alive for as long as my daughter needs me.

I have learned to be happy, to be appreciative, to have abundant and overwhelming joy in my life. But some days are just sad and that’s as it should be. In our sympathy card, I wrote to Bob, “So many words describe what Gina meant to us. No words describe our grief in losing her.”

Tomorrow is a new day. But today is the one I have right now.

There are no words.

Tags Breast Cancer, grief, Parenting

Categories Facts, Family, Feelings, Parenting