Moms Alive!

We all go through that phase after diagnosis: that horrible period of self-questioning. What is it that we did (or didn’t) do that caused us to end up with cancer?

We like to believe we have control over our lives. We like to think that if we eat right, exercise, avoid stress and pursue otherwise positive activities then we will be essentially healthy. The flipside of this logic is, of course, that if we’re not healthy, then we’ve done something wrong.

We are responsible for our bodies and our lives, but this responsibility doesn’t mean we have absolute control. To the best of my understanding, there are so many factors that contribute to the formation of cancer, and in most cases it usually is not just one thing that leads to the disease. This doesn’t mean that we should just lounge on the couch eating grease and smoking cigarettes, but it does mean that we can show ourselves a bit of compassion. Because the belief in total control, which we will never achieve, ends up being in the end a terribly self-hating ideal. More…

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. More…

He had a different smell.

It was a strange thing to notice—nobody else did—yet it stood out to me then as the elephant in the room. I had just returned home from the hospital after having endured the X-rays, CT scans and needle biopsy that would soon lead me to my cancer diagnosis. During my unexpected absence, my son had drunk formula for the first time. And now there was this smell.

No longer was there the breast-milk scent that we both had shared in those early days, that sweetness that had saturated every bit of our beings. It was replaced now with something different, alien, foreign. The smell of manufacturers and tin cans. Of processing and cows. Of separation.

I thought of a baby bird that I had found as a child in my backyard. I had begged my mother to let me hold it. “You must never touch the baby birds,” she said. “If they take on your scent, their mothers may no longer recognize them.”

While I, of course, was not going to reject my child, I finally understood this harsh fact of nature. How primal a smell could be. How it could signify oneness or alienation. More…