Moms Alive!

I have a memory of being very young and at Girl Scout camp for the first time. I’m standing at the start of a trailhead surrounded by the wild oaks of the Osage Hills. I hear the roar of bugs dinning thickly in the humid Oklahoma heat. I am flooded with an overwhelming sense of possibility. What could lie beyond that first bend? I am an adventurer. I feel as though nobody has traversed this path before me.

Of course, this is not true. This trail has been traveled by many. It will not take me to exotic locales. But this is no matter. It is only that sense of wonder that matters, that feeling of being exquisitely suspended in the present moment.

We are often suspended in the present moment on our journeys as both mothers and cancer survivors. The feeling is not always as deliciously intoxicating as it was when we were young; we are often terrified of hypothetical situations, of where our paths might ultimately lead. But our tasks at hand, those trailheads we now find ourselves poised at, ask that we focus on what’s in front of us: Facing surgery. Getting through the next chemo treatment. They keep us grounded in the moment.

At the same time, we learn to appreciate life more fully because we no longer take anything for granted. We realize each day is truly a gift. I remember once waking in the middle of the night for the zillionth time to tend to my teething son and thinking in that dark stillness that even that quite difficult moment was a gift, as exhausted as I was. I knew, maybe better than some healthy mothers, that it was a privilege just to be there.

We are, indeed, gifted to be mothers. To be alive and nurturing life. We know this acutely. We feel the ache of its loveliness in our bones. Each day we celebrate our children’s milestones and help open up the world to their senses. And as they unfold into the universe, we grow with them. They allow us to remember what it is to exist in a state of perpetual beingness.

This is my current meditation, the seed thought I am watering on the eve of my “first birthday”: my one-year anniversary of finishing chemotherapy. In some ways, I feel as though I am finally catching back up to the present moment.

After treatment, I felt a surge forward, a rush. It was as though I finally could think about my future—because I felt like I actually had one. I began making all the plans I had not been able to think about for so long. While this felt good, I realize that I also lost that centeredness in the present that had become so necessary when survival was my preoccupation. And being so far ahead in my planning restricted me from truly processing and integrating the tremendous losses that I felt—and still feel.

But now I am sitting still with those feelings and allowing them the space and the right to exist. It takes courage to BE HERE NOW, and I honor myself for this. I am “moving on,” as we are so encouraged to do, but I am doing so moment by moment—and I am taking all of my emotions and experiences with me. The most elated highs and the deepest, darkest lows are all part of who I am. The clarity of this realization is sobering and sacred.

From this privileged perspective—of being healthy after having come so close to death—I see that cancer can degrade a certain innocence we may have once had about the world and our physical bodies, but it—as well as our children—can help us understand and experience life more vividly and completely. Perhaps because of the fortune of our misfortune we will make new, and better, choices. Maybe as we yearn to see our children grasp their dreams, we will realize the value of our own. Maybe both motherhood and cancer can help us find the way back to that love affair with life we may have lost along our paths—that ineffable sense of wonder.