Moms Alive!

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s already 2008. It’s been about a year since I launched Moms Alive! and a little more than two years since my cancer diagnosis. I’m so grateful to be here.

The holidays have become a reflective time for me and my husband. All the seasonal celebrations take on a double meaning for us. On one hand, there is the usual excitement of this time of year: the joys of eating good food, sipping hot apple cider, and reveling in the company of good friends and family. On the other hand, because I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s right before Christmas, all these little rituals also remind us of when we first stepped into this crazy cancer journey.

Two years ago on New Year’s Eve, we were celebrating a very different ritual. My husband, infant son, and good friends Elizabeth and Heidi had gathered for my head-shaving, which I felt fortunate to have been able to conduct on such an momentous day. We created a ceremony that reflected our understanding of my loss (of my beautiful long hair, of early motherhood as I had expected it to be, and of my preconceptions of myself as a healthy young woman) as well as my empowerment. You might think empowerment would be a strange thing to find during such a chaotic time, but even when our backs are up against the wall we have choices to make. For me, preemptively shaving my hair while I still had quite a bit left was liberating. I felt like I was taking action and making a choice to assume a warrior position—and look. Bald heads are fierce, after all, and they leave nothing to hide behind.

In a way, that head-shaving ceremony was an illustration of that relationship between loss and empowerment, or, as I later came to understand it, between strength and surrender. We must recognize our losses and not be afraid to sometimes let our perceptions of ourselves be leveled so that we can then choose to grow.

My losses made me question what I had assumed about myself and my experience of motherhood and reexamine the person I wanted to be right then and there. I realized that I had completely equated the tools of good parenting with being a good parent. I had given my tools, wonderful as they were, too much power and forgotten that there was someone wielding them, just as there still was someone beneath that head of rapidly disappearing hair. I had been hiding behind my tools, and I didn’t realize it until I had lost some of them and felt stripped bare. I could no longer breastfeed. I was too tired to always serve as the primary caregiver in my son’s life. I felt devastated that cancer had taken these facets of my parenting experience away. But I realized that I could still be a loving, attached mother and that maybe I would be an even better mother because I no longer confused my chosen tools with my being.

So I shaved off my hair, just another lost tool at the end of the day, a trapping of the carefree “pretty girl” I once was. It was time to get down to the essence of me—and motherhood—without the drag.

I wish everyone a bountiful, transformative New Year.