My Mom Inadvertently Joined the Cancer Club

It was hard to hear my dad report back everything the doctors had told them about my mom's colon cancer as I sat in their home. Hard for many reasons, but partially, it's hard because apparently, I had expectations. My mind kept rethinking, "This is that moment where my mom tells me she has cancer." I didn't realize I had an idea of what a moment like that would entail, but I did. 

The most encouraging phrase she and my dad offered was that the oncologist had told them, "It will be a rough year." There were no final sentences or timeframes, just "a rough year."

For the most part, my mom's month of chemo and radiation treatment has been very calm. Her body handled it pretty well until the last week. With burns on her hands and feet and feeling too weak to walk, my mom heroically pushed through the last few rounds of treatments. 

The side effects of chemo are subsiding, and now, she will have her tumor removed surgically in the next little while. We think things will be fine, but we appreciate prayers sent our way nonetheless. She has shown a new courage and fortitude since this all began. She surprises me every day with her ability to take it all. 

I wonder if people realize they have such strong ideas about cancer before it taps them on the shoulder. We interact with it so frequently in forms of billboards and fundraisers, but those don't mean as much until you realize you've somehow joined the cancer club. 

Pardon my lightness. It's just comforting to think sometimes that cancer isn't something you can entirely avoid. EVERYONE should be screened, of course: colonoscopies, mammograms, whatever it takes to be on the defensive, do it. 

But outside of those things, and maybe smoking, cancer isn't exactly something you get because you were too unhealthy. Modern medicine may reveal otherwise eventually, but for now, it's simply: my mom has colon cancer and we fight it. There aren't any what-ifs.

So far, the fight is going well. When she completed her radiation treatment, the doctors gave her a certificate of completion and a bottle of sparkling cider to celebrate. 

She says that aside from her own birth and giving birth to my brother and me, it's the only certificate she's ever earned. I, for one, though, am very proud of her involvement in each one. 

Am I cut out for this motherhood thing?

My friends all seem to be having babies lately. So, in my latest post for Women's Services, I wrote a little bit about how nurturing fits into those of us who feel less like nuturers.

Read the full post here.

What I will be

The little yellow kitchen in my little yellow house, 2010.

In a few weeks, I will walk; meaning, I will cross a stage and receive a fake diploma. I won't really graduate from Brigham Young University until August, and I'll finish my last class in June, but for all intensive purposes, I am finishing my last real semester of classes.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the thoughts and feelings attached to that. Some of them, I've pushed down pretty far, which is alright for the time being, because I cannot handle them right now.

I say that because the past few months have been marked by the deepest depression I've yet endured. I will not say that my entire time at BYU has been rough, but I will confess that much of my time at college has been really hard. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the biggest ones is that I often didn't know what exactly I wanted to become. Choosing a major and actually applying myself to learning often felt like a battle I could never win.

Finally, I found the editing minor, which combines many things I love. Even with that though, I still often find myself disliking the field. I do not succumb to these feelings though because I know God has given me gifts in this area and that I enjoy it most of the time. This is good enough for me, and I trust that He will open up opportunities to make good use of me as an editor and as a writer. A few weeks ago, someone challenged me, asking "Is editing really a good thing for you?" In essence, I replied firmly, "We are not opening up that can of doubt and fear again. I have made a choice, and I will make it good."

I often think of this talk from Elder Nelson about choosing an educational path and a career. He said:

A doctor’s ultimate destination is not in the hospital. For a lawyer, it is not in the courtroom. For a jet pilot, it is not in the cockpit of a Boeing 747. Each person’s chosen occupation is only a means to an end; it is not an end in itself. The end for which each of you should strive is to be the person that you can become—the person who God wants you to be. The day will come when your professional career will end. The career that you will have labored so hard to achieve—the work that will have supported you and your family—will one day be behind you. Then you will have learned this great lesson: much more important than what you do for a living is what kind of person you become. When you leave this frail existence, what you have become will matter most. Attributes such as “faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, [and] diligence” (D&C 4:6) will all be weighed in the Lord’s balance.

I wish I could say that during my time at BYU I have developed those attributes splendidly. I haven't, but I have made some good progress.

Even now, when faced with decisions about jobs and internships, I think I still don't know exactly what I want to be. The question I've been wrestling with all this time is still there, still bothering me.

But out of the depression I've been in lately, I've found a better question to ask: what kind of person do I want to be for my children? In many ways, I ask this in the same spirit that I ask God who He wants me to become. That's probably the more important question to ask, but I've found that phrasing it in terms of my children helps make it a bit more tangible.

My answer to this question is primarily that I want to be a woman of faith. I want to be a mother who knows. Those are my primary goals.

I also enjoy reflecting on the fun parts too. My mom likes to remind me that I will be a good mother someday because I am creative. I believe this is something I can use to make the world my children live in good and bright.

Dorothy Lee, a wonderful anthropologist who writes many good things about motherhood, says, "Motherhood is not a thing in itself, it is I who am a mother and I have to be myself first." She doesn't mean this comment in the sense that we have to go out and find ourselves in some grand external sphere to be mothers. Rather, her point is that what our children want is us. They want to know us as whole people with quirks and flaws and preferences.

I find that lovely. It also makes me want to be my best self—the one who writes good things, does not fear, and is fun. I can imagine that the day-to-day stresses of motherhood might threaten to dampen that spirit within us, but it certainly does not need to. In fact, those daily activities of eating, cleaning, sleeping, working, worshiping, and playing are exactly where our true selves lie. Knowing this makes me worry a lot less about what my degree says I am.

A mother's heart

Today, I went walking in search of the playground near my house. I took the long way, wandering down 7th East towards the school there instead of the smaller park. To my delight, I found a playground beyond my wildest dreams. They just installed it: a pirate ship—each turn of wood work gloriously crafted to make some child sure this is the real deal.

Yes. There is pirate candy.

Mostly though, it just looked cool. I walked around it and thought about how I could climb in it, but then what would I do? If I had a friend, I'd throw back a Jones soda and tell stories about the wind and how spring is coming. But I worried that there wasn't really much to do with the pirate ship besides just being in the pirate ship.

How very demanding that all sounds of me. As a child, I would have been far more capable of coming up with entertainment. I realized that I still am. I just need a child who will appreciate my efforts.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a mother. The idea of it thrills me. I get so excited when I think I want to be a mother. I want to have a family. These thoughts are beautiful and good, but sometimes, when I think more about what that entails, I get worried. I start thinking about what I will do all day with a house of children. I worry about filling the time everyday. I worry about always drowning in a mess. I worry about my kitchen looking like this play one I found today.

I'm afraid of not being able to handle the day-to-day living part of it, so much so that when I think about actually being a mom, my focus shifts to these areas and the excitement I feel at the simpler thoughts evaporates from me.

When this happens, I think of this quote from a woman who has nine children now. This comes from her essay titled "To the Mother with Only One Child." 

"When I had only one child, I told myself over and over that motherhood was fulfilling and sanctifying and was filling my heart to the brim with peace and satisfaction.  And so I felt horribly guilty for being so bored, so resentful, so exhausted.  This is a joyful time, dammit!  I should enjoy being suddenly transformed into the Doyenne of Anything that Smells Bad.

"I loved my baby, I loved pushing her on the swing, watching squirrels at the park together, introducing her to apple sauce, and watching her lips move in joyful dreams of milk.  But it was hard, hard, hard.  All this work:  is this who I am now?"

This quote is comforting, because even for this woman, who is what we could call a good mother now, it was a struggle to make this change to all day care. Her days were long and hard, but she still felt moments of joy. Over time as she had more children, those long, hard days changed into more times of enjoyment, though the initial move may be very hard.

It's a shift to fill your entire day with the needs of one other person. But how glorious it becomes as you grow. It's a difficult balance to strike: realizing it's demanding, but stepping up with faith and cheer anyways.

I told a friend yesterday that I didn't feel like I was wanting the right things, meaning that my desire to be a wife and mother is sometimes shallow and overwhelmed by my worries about the less glamorous parts of it. She said, "Well of course! No one wants to be wiping butts all day." This bothered me. I suppose she was trying to make me realize that my worries are normal. But that wasn't what I needed to hear.

What I really want is to change my desires so that my focus is on the why and the beautiful rather than the how. The how is so important: you cannot give love to your family without being willing to give them the deepest acts of service, the "feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and administering to their relief, both spiritually and temporally, according to their wants" (Mosiah 4:26). For me, I need to focus on why those things are so important and what they say: the why, which is love—deeper and purer than anything else—for both God and His children.

After my frustrating encounter, I came across this quote from Kristen Oaks, an LDS woman who did not marry until her 50s.  

"I got a doctorate and became so involved in my profession that I forgot about being a good person. I would say to everyone in this room, always remember that your first calling is as a mother or as a father. Develop those domestic talents, talents of love and talents of service."

Her words validated the thoughts of my heart.

My dearest friend Kent once told me about a new mother who blogged. Her mom commented that all her daughter wrote about was pee and poop. The younger mother exclaimed, "You understand it now! That is my life." I love that this story was important to him. I believe it stuck with him because he understood the struggles of parenting, yet he has a much deeper conviction of the joys behind the struggles. He was willing to take it all.

For him it was so obvious that these things all fit together. Finding matching shoes, cleaning counter tops, and preparing food—all means to joyful moments of standing in holy places, creating praiseworthy projects, and partaking of the Bread of Life together. Those all sound pretty great to me. I can live with the means to get there if those are the ends.

See/Skip/Savor: My Neighbor Totoro

I'll spare the categories and just cut to the chase: see My Neighbor Totoro and savor it. I was afraid it would scare me. I was afraid I wouldn't like it. I was afraid I would miss something by not watching it with subtitles. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get it back to the library. I was afraid I'd never get it to play on a computer past the first five minutes.

I am obviously afraid of many things. I watched it in spite of those. It's a children's movie after all, right? Yes. And no. It's a movie for everyone. For me though, it was a movie for the mom I am not yet: both literally and spiritually.

I'm afraid of more things than just not liking movies. Unlike Satsuki and Mei, I'm afraid of the dark. I'm afraid of things hiding in corners. I'm afraid of monsters. I'm afraid of ghosts. These are things we normally stop fearing once we're no longer little kids. I think Satsuki and Mei have beaten me to overcoming these though. They step into the darkness with a loud growl and a laugh to scare away anything scary. This is a lovely method, but can a grown woman scream every time the sun goes down?

I'm afraid of my own children some day coming to me with fears that I also have: things under the bed, making new friends, and dark spaces. I need to respond with comfort, proper assurance, and real answers—things I need to give myself now.

I'm afraid of worse things: like losing children. I recognize that I'll become an over-bearing mother who can't let her kids out of her sight. Though I recognize that, I'm determined not to become that. As Satsuki and Mei ran around free in their world, I was nervous. I wanted them to be safe. I wanted someone to know where they were at all times. But as the movie went forward, my worries left. The example of trusting, loving, and hopeful parents stood in place of what I feared. Their children were taken up by a cat bus, for crying out loud, and I was totally okay with that. It's a safe world. My children won't have a Totoro exactly, but are we not constantly encircled in the care of angels? I believe that. I can trust that. I can let my children run. I can escape my own fears.         

A Letter to the Mother with One Child

My first thought as I glanced at this article was jealousy that there are 601 comments on it. Then I read it. If all of those 601 comments are good and positive, Simcha Fisher deserves every one of them.

These are beautiful thoughts, which I agree with completely. (I wouldn't disagree as I don't have the credentials for that.) I wanted to share it with my readers, because I want to hear your thoughts as women, girls, inbetween those two, mothers, grandmothers, and even as men, boys, and fathers.

You can read the article here, http://www.ncregister.com/blog/to-the-mother-with-only-one-child. Then come back here and share some comments. What part of this resonates with you the most?

Here's what resonates with me: we have so many expectations of what we are capable of and of how things should feel. We are usually wrong: we are capable of everything, and there is always deep joy to be had somewhere.

I include this picture of my brother and me from about five years ago because this was a moment when we were deeply grateful for my mom, who tried to get us to win her a cake at the elementary school cake walk for twelve years, between the two of us. At the last time possible, we did it.