So It Goes

 

There is a recurring turn in my stomach that alarms me that all is not okay right now. The past few weeks have been a wild ride emotionally. School started back up, my best friend’s health dropped back down, and my parents, for the moment, are holding steady. While it is in my best interest to compartmentalize my concerns about the people I love so as not to be consumed to the point of complete distraction each day, it is not always an attainable goal. The trifecta of helping my daughter navigate school anxiety, my best friend accepting that the rest of her time will be spent managing her pain, and my parents aging is no small feat. I have been swinging between my own anxiety and feeling numb.

A week ago, my friend called me, and I said the normal, “Hi, how are you?” To which she said, “I’m okay, how are you?” I rambled for a bit about what was happening before school and how the adjustment to the new year was not smooth sailing. It wasn’t until after my rambling that she told me she was in the hospital. She has pancreatic cancer and has been battling it for over four years. In some ways, she is a walking, breathing, living miracle because no one usually lives this long with pancreatic cancer. In other ways, she is living and reliving a drawn-out nightmare. Tumors are all over her organs, pushing into her spine, and they continue to grow. Chemo was successful at holding the growth at bay for so long, but this type of cancer is sneaky. These cells, over time, seem to know how to grow again after the most powerful poison is thrown at them.

Last year, it seemed she was in the clear for a bit. Her doctor told her to take a break from chemotherapy and live her life. She took three weeks and went with her family to Greece. They had a magical time, and she felt great, but when she returned home to visit the doctor, her tumors were growing again. She started the dreaded chemo and spent every other week sick in bed for the days following her treatment. A few months ago, when it seemed the cancer was growing despite the treatments, she decided she was done — rightfully so. To have to sit for hours being poked and prodded, IV’d and infused, only to feel horribly afterward when it barely shrank the cancer, didn’t make sense.

She was faced with either joining possible medical trials or taking no action and accepting fate. She was chosen for a great trial here in Los Angeles but, sadly, was part of the fifty-percent placebo group. She flew to Utah weekly for a couple of months for another trial, but it made her sicker than the chemo did and thrashed her stomach. So now, here we are: she is in pain but getting palliative plans to keep it at bay with daily doses of strong pain meds. She is tired, groggy, at home, and waiting. We talk every day, and sometimes we laugh, but we also talk about how much this sucks — and then sometimes we cry.

My constant people are my husband and kids, my parents, and her. Here at home, I ache for my girl who is trying to navigate anxiety, college prep stress, feeling overwhelmed, and dealing with disappointment. It is interesting to observe how much pain you can feel when someone you love so much is hurting. The pain elevates even higher when you don’t know how to help them. As a mother, you want to hold your babies close and fix whatever hurts. As my children get older, I have to learn where to help and where to just hold; either choice hurts.

My dad is tired and old but thankfully okay right now. He also has a best friend that he speaks to every day. They are like brothers and have been since they were thirteen. His best friend’s heart has been working at thirty percent for the last year, and he is so frail and so tired. The last few weeks for him have been hard, as they found a tumor in his leg and treated him with radiation. His already weak system has been put to the test. He is not doing well and spends most of the day sleeping. I don’t know how much time he has left, and it will be hard to lose him, but for my dad, it will be devastating.

I called my dad a few days ago, and he asked how I was doing. I told him I was feeling a little down, and he said he was too. It is rare for him to be candid with me emotionally. He shares happiness, laughter, and joy, but if it is fear, sadness, or disappointment, he holds it tighter to his chest. I was grateful that he was able to open up to me, given that if any one person could understand how he was feeling on this particular subject, it was me. We shared the difficulty of watching a friend deal with illness and fatigue. We shared how, despite advanced medicine being capable of so much, it is not a magic cure-all. We shared how it is likely that, sooner than we would like, we will both be saying goodbye to our best friends.

I don’t know what it will feel like, as I have never lost a close friend before, but I do know the loss will be a big one. Like my father and his best friend, my friend and I talk daily. I anticipate that realization, when I go to call her, will be alarming for quite some time. I imagine that when I want to ask her a question that I know only she can answer, I will feel the finality of loss even greater. For my dad, who is already working so hard to find the strength to get up and out for even one outing a day, these blows will likely strike extra hard. His life looks so different from what it did even a few years ago, so his connection to the people he loves is what keeps him going. His calls to his best friend daily are his lifeline.

I don’t know how we will navigate the next few months. I can’t predict just how shocking losing someone is, even if you know it’s coming. No roadmap, practice, or preparation will soften the sting. Accepting loved ones dying is something our culture hasn’t done very well. Years ago, most people passed peacefully at home. Today, over sixty percent of sick people die in hospitals. We do so much to “fight” to keep people alive and so little to educate ourselves on how to let them go. As I try to quell the spinning turns in my stomach, I know this much is true: I will respect whatever my friend wants to do when she decides she is done, and I will soak her up as long as she wants to stay. I hope to be a source of comfort and understanding for my dad. He and I will only be a phone call away from each other, and I am grateful we have each other to talk to. It helps.

Metaphors

My kids started school again today. The end of summer is never a favorite time for me, and the start of school was personally anxiety-provoking. My children both have some of their own anxieties, but thankfully, nowhere near the level I would reach yearly. Each year when they start school, I quietly whisper my fears to friends, my husband, or my sister, carefully not letting my kids in on how triggering the big day is for me. 

Being a mother is something I have wanted to be since I was a little girl. Meeting the right person to start a family with wasn’t easy, and then trying to start our family wasn’t easy either. We persevered, though, and to say we got everything we hoped for is an understatement. It was as if someone pressed the restart button on our lives when we became parents. When my daughter was a newborn, I spent so much time staring at her and marveling that she was mine. My life, my role,and  my job all changed after becoming a mother. I made sacrifices, gave up some goals, made some new ones, and had zero regrets. As my daughter now begins planning for college, it is difficult for me to process that while I will never stop being her mother, she will leave this home we built and start her own adult life and experiences. This is what we all hope and wish for our children. It is healthy, but also hard.

Last night, I watched as both my daughter and son chose their first-day-of-school outfits, packed their backpacks, and made plans with friends to head into school together. Pride filled me as I witnessed how calm they were. I took the dog for a walk and took some deep breaths, trying to quell my own butterflies. Old habits die hard, it’s true, but this year feels bigger because it is my daughter’s last year of High School. It is her last first day of school, and the last day they will head off together. My mind is spinning that we're already here at this point. I know everyone says the days are long and the years are short, but how did it go by this quickly?

With the end of summer comes the end of the unstructured freedom that ten weeks off from school allows. My son skated, surfed, and biked to his heart’s content this summer. My daughter worked her first job as a day camp counselor and made money while playing with kids in the ocean. She did an internship, worked on her college essays, and saw friends. We traveled, we celebrated milestones and birthdays. We had a lot of fun in the sun. 

As a send-off to our summer, we surprised the kids and took them parasailing this past weekend. They were more hesitant than we expected, and not only did they want to know what the surprise was, but they also wanted us to be on the boat when they did it. They were scared and had many questions. “Does it really go one thousand feet up?” They asked unsurely. We went on the boat with them and watched their faces teeter between fear and excitement as the instructions were given to them. When they were all harnessed next to each other, they took their seats on the front of the boat facing us and their backs to the water. As the boat sped up, the parachute filled with air, and they lifted up and away. My son’s expression was wide-eyed and surprised. My daughter had a huge smile and bright eyes. As they lifted further and further away, I felt a tug in my gut. I hadn’t been scared for them, I too was excited, but suddenly my babies were too blurry to see anything other than their outlines. A slight panic fell over me as I watched them high in the sky. They felt too far away from me, yet the rope tethered them to the very boat I was on, just like their umbilical did years ago. Maybe the cords that connected us to each other were also quite long and just felt shorter all curled up. I looked it up, though, and an umbilical cord at its longest is not even two feet. They were 998 feet further from me. For someone who suffers from anxiety, I am thankfully not overly worried about my kids. I ask questions, make sure they are safe, but I don’t let my mind wander to the worst what-ifs. I did on the boat, though. I let myself drift into the worst-case scenarios for a few dark moments. Then I calmed myself down and looked at them with a smile on my face. They are growing up, they are doing it well, and they are soaring.

This Point In Time

This was a big year for me. I turned fifty, my book was published, I had time with my family, and there was much to celebrate. All good things are not the reality of day-to-day life, though, and like joy, disappointment, sadness, and change are all real too. Shortly after my birthday, as if my body got the memo that it was now fifty, I spotted a few grey hairs. I also started feeling tired more often, and with no change at all to my diet, I gained some extra weight in my midsection, thanks perimenopause. 

My teenager was in the weeds with the academic demands of junior year of High School, and her stress level reached record highs. My twelve-year-old, who plays hard, visited urgent care for X-rays enough times that the tech knows his name. We lost money in stocks, and had an awful loss in an election, and now have to ride out another term with someone who is taking our country backwards. All of this to say the curveballs have been thrown.

I went to London recently and saw one of my best friends. We picked up exactly where we left off years ago, and after running into each other’s arms and crying with joy at seeing each other, we talked, and laughed, and talked some more. We discussed how life can be so busy and full enough at times that you don’t even know what day it is. We spoke of our children and our parents, and how overall, even at its craziest, we live very good lives with so much to be grateful for. She mentioned a quote she had read from a rabbi that she had seen, where he says something about wishing you a life with many problems. I am not getting it exactly right, but the gist is that if you have a major problem in your life, it consumes all of you, leaving no space for anything else. If you have room for many problems, you also have room for many blessings.

A few months ago, I set my hand down on top of the cover of our grill. It isn’t ever used, but there have been times in the last few years when it is as if some phantom switch is turned, and it is incredibly hot. This was one of those times. I signed the side of my hand, and it blistered within minutes. It was painful and annoying. One week later, as I pushed down a carton into my recycling bag, a sharp object poked through the bag and cut my finger. It would not stop bleeding and was right on the joint of my finger. Much to my chagrin, my husband and I decided it was best to go to urgent care. I got a tetanus shot, soaked it in iodine before getting it closed, and bandaged it. It was quite painful and didn’t heal right, but in the grand scheme of things, small problem.

My best friend is dealing with a terminal illness and running out of options to help her. She feels lousy after each round of chemo, and at this point, it isn’t helping her enough anyway. Big Problem! We handle the details of her being sick with tears and laughter, which is as good as we can get with such dark times, I suppose. We joke about cutting out sugar, stress, and annoying people. We pretend to plan a trip to an island together where she can just stare out at the ocean. We laugh about her choosing her own urn on Amazon and keeping it in her save for later items. We crack each other up more than we cry because we still have the choice to feel it whatever way we want. For now.

The house I grew up in will always feel like home to me. I admire how some people are able to go clear out and sell their childhood homes and view it as just a thing. My parents are old, and admittedly, I live in denial that they won’t get better. I hear myself say “If “they die, rather than “ when.” My sister is the opposite. She is very practical and business-like about what we should do to prepare. My brother, the middle child, is in the middle of us on this. I still try to get my dad to exercise and continue building muscle mass, and my sister suggests that his body is giving out and that I need to accept that. We will need to figure out what we are doing with their home and all the logistics, but in the meantime, I still hope for muscle rebuilding and recovery. This is very much a normal part of life. People don’t live forever, but for me, this too is big!

Wherever I get a call with bad news about my parents, I start to think about how very little stays the same forever. My daughter will go to college, and our family of four that we have spent years building will change as we know it. I might not have a family home to go back to when my parents are gone. My best friend, whom I call all the time, might not be able to answer my calls. Sad as all of this is, this is part of life. We have celebrations and disappointments. We have accomplishments and we have losses. I keep thinking of the song “Landslide.” Change is coming my way, I know that. For now, though, I can only focus on this point in time.

One Word Answers

 When I had my first baby, we were invited to a wedding just a few weeks after she was born. No cell in my being was ready to leave her with anyone. I didn’t know it consciously, but I suppose I became one of those attachment parenting types. I had always wanted children, and when my husband and I wanted to have a baby together, it didn’t quite happen on our timeline. We had waited a long time and experienced a lot of challenges before the title of parents was bestowed upon us. When that moment finally came, we were ready. There was no difficult transition into parenting. I was in love instantly and found being a new mother a wondrous time. I was grateful to have the opportunity to stay home, and when I was itching to get back to work, I created opportunities that included her being by my side. 

That wedding when she was a few weeks old could have been an opportunity for a date alone with my husband, but we were both so new at parenting that we spent the whole time out concerned about her. My husband’s cousin watched her while we were out. She had five of her own children, so she was overqualified for caring for our newborn, but still, we worried. We called her too many times to check in. We asked if she was okay, and did she need us to come back. When we arrived back after the wedding and reunited with our baby, I felt such huge relief. We were together again. 

I have been one of those overly involved moms. I took her to mommy and me classes. I volunteered at my daughter’s preschool and later elementary school to come in once a week to teach yoga. We attended lots of family events and activities together. I became the PTA president of her elementary school. I advocated for language lessons, an International festival, and a new fundraising event, and added some friendly competition as well as a new sense of community. My daughter was always happy to see me at her school. She always ran up to hug me if she could and didn’t seem to mind having her mom around. She seemed to appreciate it.  

Happily, the most important role I have had in my life is being a mother. Being a mother takes the top spot for how I identify myself. I am proud of how I parent, and I feel very connected to my children. I wouldn’t say I am a helicopter parent or a controlling parent, but I would say that I am aware of what my children are doing, and how they are doing, and I am available to them. As elementary school ended and middle school began, I stepped back from volunteering at school. It was time for my daughter to have her own space. My husband and I did start going out on dates again. I started working more, and in the summer, our daughter even went to summer camp for a week on her own. 

Walking into my house, it is hard to miss family photos all over the walls, in albums, and even a pillow version of one of my favorite holiday pictures of my two kiddos bundled into hats, scarves, and sweaters. I remember where each photo was taken, the outfits that have since come and gone, and even the way their red, round cheeks felt to kiss back then, when they were a little fuller. I knew that these little kids would grow into big kids, then teens, and one day grow up into adulthood. I have heard a million times or more how time flies and to enjoy the moment, and I thought I understood. Now I see those photos of my little children, and I never imagined I would have to mourn the loss of them being small. I didn’t know how much I would miss their five fingers curled around my thumb or washing their downy hair for them, or the high-pitched voices they grew out of. 

We have been lucky that my daughter and I have gotten to spend a lot of time together. We have always been close as a family, and she and I have special things we love to do together. We love seeing theatre, and movies, visiting animals, snuggling our dog, skiing, taking new adventures, traveling, going out to brunch, and trying new lattes together. We have been close, and she has always been open with me in sharing everything from friend drama, sharing who she likes, how she is doing with school, and the goals she has for the future. She is sixteen now, and this school year has been the most challenging yet. She is more stressed than I have ever seen her. She is busier than she has ever been. She is working harder than she has ever worked. She has also experienced the reality of disappointment. As much as we want to believe that if we teach our children to go for their dreams, their dreams will come true, the truth is that it is not always the case. She has reached up and out for some big things this year, and some of them slipped from her grasp. This is important to learn in life, and I am grateful to be able to be here to hold her through her pain and let go when she is ready to try again, and yet I know we won’t always be in the same place in the future. We will likely not be in the same house, the same city, or the same state. 

A friend told me that her sister used the password of a date for some of her logins. The date was the month that her daughter would leave for college because she couldn’t wait for her to go. She told me that it is not uncommon for mothers and daughters to start pulling away from each other a year or two leading up to college. It is a subconscious protection measure in preparation for the separation that is coming. I hear things like this, and my reaction in my mind is feeling sad for these people. I think that could never be me, or that it's too bad she can’t enjoy these last few months with her child. Well, here I am, a few months late, and I understand this more than I want to. This is not a choice I have made to have friction between my sweet girl and me; it’s just there, and she isn’t feeling as sweet these days.

There is this polarizing pushing and pulling that I feel is happening to the two of us right now. She needs me less than she did, she wants to need me less than she does, and doesn’t like it when I still need to parent her. She wants to believe she knows what is best for her; she doesn’t want my opinions, but comes running to me to help her before things fall apart. She wants to be independent but doesn’t want to do her own laundry, make her own food, or get her own transportation. She is moody, and I know I am not supposed to take it personally, but I still do. She wakes up and gets ready for school, and is so full of angst that she can barely talk to me. She gets home from school with so much on her plate that she doesn’t have a minute to talk to me. She sits at dinner, and if she is preoccupied, she will barely answer our questions with one word. At times, I feel the need to increase the speed at which I am talking to her because the window of time she has the capacity to talk to me is so limited. 

There are days when I confront her on some of this, and she has no idea that she has done anything to upset me. She doesn’t understand that if I get snubbed every time I reach out, it doesn’t make me want to extend my hand so much. She doesn’t understand that some days I resent her, or that some days I drop her off at school and want to cry. She doesn’t understand that I miss my little girl and am having some serious growing pains trying to get through this transition while she grows up. I do want her to understand that she cannot be rude or disrespectful. She needs to understand when to show gratitude and that she is not just entitled to all we provide. She needs to understand that she has new responsibilities that come with getting older and how to manage them in her day-to-day life. She does not need to understand that she is hurting my feelings, that I am having trouble letting her go, or that I am jealous of the hours she spends talking to her friends. Those are part of the whole package of parenting. Like it or not, I am going over this bump in the road.

 She is a budding filmmaker and last year made a short called “Still My Little Girl”. It was a beautiful, bittersweet story about the relationship between a mother and daughter when the girl was nine and then again when she was a teenager. She showed that at nine, the mother was the apple of her daughter’s eye, and as a teenager, she could barely look her in the eye. She did not play the teenager, and I did not play the mother. This story wasn’t ours, but she seemed to be foreshadowing what was coming up the pike for us a year and a half later.  

Every bit of what she is experiencing right now is normal. Junior year school stress, social navigating, deciding big future decisions, budgeting her time, managing what is on her plate now, while trying to prepare for what is ahead. It is a scary time, and I understand. I want her to know I understand. I will have a day or two where I can’t say anything right, and then a day like today where she asks me for a hug and neither of us wants to be the first to let go. I know that as far as teenage drama and angst, I have a wonderful kid, and it could be so much worse, but I also miss the amount of time she could spare for me. I need to lower my expectations and gratefully settle for the time we do have together. I do wish, though, that she could humor me when I check in and inquire how she is doing with more than one-word answers. I’d settle for two.

Sad For Her

 A few months ago my daughter participated in a theatre competition. Growing up around theatre I had never heard of doing it competitively. This was a competition for high school students, and although it sounded light and fun, it was anything but. As the mother of a boy who competes regularly in team sports, I am accustomed to intense sports parents. I agreed to volunteer for the theatre competition, unaware of what I was signing up for. 

When I signed up to help, I thought it was to drive up snacks, drop them off, and leave. I signed up to be at the competition all day. It was intense. There was a musical category, dramatic scenes, monologue, make-up, costumes, category after category of theatre kids trying to win each round to go on to the next. My daughter’s school had a competitor in almost every category. I had no idea how stiff the competition would be. My daughter was in a group performing a musical stuffed into about eight minutes. Together with her cast, they got through round one, which everyone does. They had hoped to move on to round two and only six of the ten groups would go on to the next round. Having seen them along with the competition, I was certain they would move on. I was wrong. For whatever reason they were in the bottom four and the competition ended there for them.

All ten of the kids were in tears. They were shocked at the results and hugged each other sobbing about how unfair it all seemed. After all, it is art, it is subjective. I knew they did an amazing job, but the play was controversial and dealt with some strong themes. Maybe the judges weren’t open-minded enough. It was a heavier piece than most of the others, maybe it wasn’t light enough for the judges. It wasn’t a common musical, maybe the judges preferred a show they were familiar with. Whatever it was, it was upsetting and none of us could believe that it ended so soon for them, without any plans of getting to perform it again, it was over. 

The director of the theatre program came with us that day and as she watched the students navigate their upset she posed a question to some of us moms. “Did we think our children’s hurt is harder for them or us?” At that moment watching my daughter and her friends crying, I felt awful for her, but it seemed she was taking it harder than me. I wanted to help and immediately offered her and her friends ideas of how to make them feel better. I told them that if they wanted to get a chance to perform the piece again we could figure out how to make that happen. I hurt for and with her but didn’t think more than her.

That director’s question has entered my head again in the last few days. For the whole school year, my daughter has hoped and planned for a project for her film class. She had to make the tough decision between doing film or theatre because the times conflicted and much to her chagrin she couldn’t do both. She chose film because ultimately this is what she wants to study in college, and with it being her junior year she wanted her portfolio to reflect her interests. Each year the film program offers an opportunity for six of the fifty or so kids to present a pitch to the other students. This year about twenty-three kids pitched their ideas. The class then votes that night on the ten they would like to see more of. Those ten then write a script and do a table read for the other students and they vote again on their top six.  

My daughter’s pitch was one of the top ten chosen and she worked tirelessly for weeks on her script, hoping to secure one of the six coveted spots. Based on what she told me about the other ideas that were being flushed out in class, I was impressed with the complexity of her idea. There were four or five others with a lot of potential too, but a handful of kids who stopped coming to screenwriting class, and a few who didn’t finish their idea. We felt good about her chances. We were confident based on the time and effort she put into her work. When the day came to do the table reads, I went in to help her read for the part of the mother in her script. I listened to some of the other scripts. I took in the room of teenagers sitting and listening to script after script looking bored or looking at their phones. I wondered how they could focus on storylines and shoot details while sitting for two hours after sitting in classes all day. They had no scripts in front of them to follow along to. The sounds of the reader’s voices blended in a monotonous tone. How will they be able to vote on which scripts were their favorite when they all blended into each other? 

When it was my daughter’s turn there were two left after her. We all read the script nicely enough, but the room was tired, myself included. When the two read after her I think everyone perked up a bit knowing it was ending soon. I felt the last three as well as one or two others stood out clearly to me as stronger stories. I drove us home feeling optimistic, but a few hours later we were shocked and disappointed. Her film wasn’t chosen. The last two read after hers were, but two of the other strong ideas weren’t chosen either. If that disappointment didn’t burn enough, she had developed her script together with a little pod of three other girls who had also been chosen and all three of the others’ films were chosen to be made, but sadly not hers.

As I reeled and tried to make sense of my thoughts, I realized how flawed this decision process felt. One of the other kids whose film idea was one of the top ten is a senior in high school, and this would be her last opportunity to participate in this program. One of the scripts chosen, that in my opinion wasn’t complete, was done by students who didn’t show up for many of the classes. Lastly, there was one student who was chosen last year as well and has already had this opportunity. It all felt unfair. The results were out though and there was not anything to do about it. As a parent, I contemplated pointing these things out in an email to the teacher, but to what end? My daughter didn’t want me to, and at a certain point, I felt it should be the students bringing these questions up, not the parents. Also, life hurts sometimes, life can be unfair, and we don’t win every time. That reality is sadly one we can’t and shouldn’t protect our children from. Yet still, it hurt so much watching her sadness and feeling it too.

As I tried to sleep that night I kept tossing and turning thinking about how much this stings. The next day in film class they all went in but were released early because of the long day they put in the day before. When my daughter stood up to leave she looked at her pod of three and asked them if they were walking out too. They stared back at her and said they had to stay for a class for the kids whose films were chosen. She left without them, waited to get into my car, and then started to cry. Today in her dance class the teacher gave a shout out to her friend on her film getting chosen and asked her to tell the class what her film was about. 

I have been trying to find positive ways to spin some of this for my daughter and myself. I keep trying to let it go but it keeps popping into my head. She is doing her best to stay strong and resilient while I am doing my best to hide from her that I am not. So back to the question from the director about who hurts more, the parent or the child when the child is sad, and in this case I would say both of us are so sad. This time she is seemingly shaking it off a bit faster than I am, but kids mimic what they see, so I am doing my best to constructively move on and away from what won’t be the last of her heartaches. I am also modeling what it looks like to persevere and find that next opportunity because this is not the last.

Another September

 In the past, I have always dreaded September. It felt like a month-long version of a Monday. I would mourn the end of summer and have to prepare myself for the monotony of school starting again. It was always daunting and the anticipation of a year of academia would kick off my anxiety with a bang. When I stopped attending school, I still suffered from the Sunday night blues and the September end-of-summer bummer. Old habits die hard.

Recently, one of my best friends shared with me that her daughter gets very anxious every Sunday night. My friend shared with her daughter that I used to call her crying Sunday night after Sunday night in our twenties upset that the weekend was over. I would tell her I was anxious about the week starting and she would remind me each time I did that it was only the anticipation itself that was upsetting me. She would assure me that when Monday morning did come, I would be fine. She was mostly right. I then tended to anticipate the worst. I love that I have become an example for her daughter now, and I hope that she sees me now as someone who has been able to keep that anticipation in check. 

I don’t get anxious on Sunday nights anymore. Sometimes I am sad that the weekend is over and feel the weight of responsibilities upon me. The routine lunch making, waking up early, and having to get out the door doesn’t always give me that warm welcoming feeling, but it doesn’t fill me with dread either. My children have had some of my anxiety passed down to them, but even with that, they manage it much better than I did as a child. Despite being sad, overwhelmed, or nervous for the first day of school they were able to keep their eyes on the parts they looked forward to as well. It hasn’t been all roses and butterflies but school provides them opportunities socially (even though that part can suck sometimes) academically (also sucky sometimes) artistically, creatively, and athletically in ways that we are all grateful for. 

It isn’t often but once in a while, I will get that uninvited familiar pang of dread at the end of the weekend. I will try to determine if it is just that my body remembers the routine so well or if indeed there is something that I am upset about. It has been two years since my life was turned inside out and backward by debilitating anxiety, so at times I get anxious about being anxious. Mostly, these days I am counting my blessings for being on the other side of the journey. I am so grateful and relieved to be healthy. Each day is a gift and now that I have learned how the other shoe can drop at any point, I don’t take my days for granted.

I have learned to accept that there is only so much in my control. While it might look like other people around you might have it easier, no one gets through life without a struggle here and there. I allow myself the grace to take one beat at a time since I can overwhelm myself when I try to plan too far into the future anticipating (there it is again) what is next. I remind my children to do the same when they fear for the whole school year ahead of them instead of one moment at a time. I have taught myself and the kids about talking to themselves and building your confidence. I have explained what parts of life we can step into and change and where we need to step back and let things be.

Even in the overwhelming month of September, I am present, wide-eyed, and happy to be here. I am also compartmentalizing. I have a lot to celebrate this month and my cup is full. Twenty years with my husband, a published book, and a big birthday coming. I have to give room for the sad stuff too and while life can be wonderful it is not always fair. Positive thinking is amazing, but you can’t mantra away cancer and disease. My best friend has terminal pancreatic cancer and she has been nothing short of a walking miracle since getting diagnosed three years ago. She has been told it’s gone, it’s back, you are defying odds to things aren’t looking so good again. She compartmentalizes her time by accepting what she can’t change, trying her best to beat bad odds, and being focused on being a mother to her three children.  

Last week on September 11th I thought about lives lost in 2001 and mourned those I knew as well as those I didn’t. The next day I celebrated my anniversary and was basking in the memories from twenty years ago. On the same day, my friend got the news that her cancer was growing once again. She wasn’t ready to share the news with anyone so just the two of us talked about it together until her doctor weighed in the next day. After that, her husband posted the news on Facebook and as I read his words I grew upset with him. She is so private and it’s not her style to announce things to the world. I also came to understand that it was easier for me to get angry with him for his words than it was for me to allow myself to feel the devastation from the reality of his words. 

With half of the month behind us already I am holding on tightly since it can be quite a ride. There isn’t much to be gained from looking too far ahead so I am stopping whenever possible to breathe in the moment. Time has a way of moving too quickly and I want to stretch it out to last a bit longer. Even in September.

Unimaginable

 Everybody has friends that they used to be so close to and then time and distance comes between them. Most of the time you can see pictures of that person on social media and get the posted version of their life. You can tell if they are single or got married if they still live in the same city they used to, or if they have children. It doesn’t equal a real friendship with that person but it is better than having them slip out of your life forever.

I have one of those friends. There was never a conflict between us that tore us apart. We never had a falling out. I never intended that we wouldn’t always be friends. We lived across the hall from each other in New York. The building was on 71st Street on the Upper West Side. It was an old brownstone that was seemingly divided into a bunch of tiny apartments. It was a walk up and she and I lived on the fourth floor. My place, you could not even call it an apartment, was on one end of the hall, and hers was on the other. In between us, there were two other tiny apartments. She and I both had a window, but that seemed like the biggest feature. We each had a loft bed, a stove, and a tiny toilet with a shower only big enough to squeeze into. When you opened the front door it hit the loft bed because there wasn’t enough room for it to swing all the way open. The only sink was a tiny bathroom sink with a medicine cabinet over it where you could keep toiletries and dish soap.

Between us, those two other tiny apartments didn’t even have a window. They each only had a glass skylight overhead. One was occupied by an old woman and the other by an old man. They weren’t friendly but they seemed to be friends with each other. They tolerated us youngins. My friend and I would sometimes open both of our front doors to make the hallway appear to be part of our “apartments.” More often than not though we would go out down the street to grab food, take a walk, or sit and talk somewhere. When Krispy Creme came to NY there was a location dangerously close to us around the block. The first time we tried them we couldn’t get enough and ordered seconds together.

That was a moment in time in our twenties. We were both recent college graduates just taking our first steps out into adult living. We hadn’t quite landed and didn’t know where we would put our feet down. She was living on her own in a new country having grown up in Prague, and I was living on my own in the same city I had lived in my whole life. When another friend of mine asked me if I wanted to drive cross country with her to try living in Los Angeles, I had to make a really hard decision — one that would impact the rest of my life. I remember weighing the pros and cons while sitting in my tiny apartment. I didn’t want to move so far away from my family. I didn’t know if I wanted to say goodbye to NYC. I wasn’t sure of how I would get started once I made it to California. I didn’t want to leave my friend across the hall, but as I sat in that tiny apartment I looked at my belongings I had a feeling if I stayed I would just end up like the two people in the hall who probably lived in these apartments their whole adult life. 

That was twenty-five years ago, and I never moved back. I go home to visit often, but I am a California Girl now and I love it. My husband is from here, and we have started our own family here. When I go back to NYC, I try to see as many friends as I can but once I had kids that became harder and harder. I had to settle for updates online as a poor replacement for seeing people face-to-face. My friend across the hall married the boyfriend that she had met right before I left. They stayed in the city for a while building their careers before eventually having a little girl. A few years later they had a little boy. I was excited for her as well as in awe because I too eventually wanted to start a family and she seemed to get the whole package. 

A few years later I too got married, then had a little girl followed by a little boy. We all had our hands full and before we realized years had gone by since we were in touch. A few years ago I saw a photo of them all out and we said a quick hello to one another. Then yesterday I saw she posted a photo of her son saying she is missing him, especially on his birthday. I scrolled back to see if it had ever said anywhere else anything about what happened to him. There wasn’t much but it didn’t take a lot of investigating to see a photo of him a year ago without any hair, and then another with him ringing the bell at the hospital when he completed treatment. I went back and reread the message from yesterday over and over. It didn’t seem possible that he could be gone. Maybe she said she missed him because he was away somewhere. He couldn’t have passed away because he was not even sixteen, and it all would have been too unfair. I could not process what I was reading. It was too unimaginable 

When I became a mother a friend of mine gave me a book called “Operating Instructions” by Anne Lamott. In between nursing, changing diapers, and trying to catch up on sleep I read the book. She spoke of wanting her son to become all these great things when he got older and then stopped herself and said “ I don’t care what he becomes just Oh dear G-d please let me outlive him.” That quote has stayed with me every day since I read it with my tiny infant in my arms. When I send them off to school or camp or even to a friend’s house I say a little silent prayer that they will be safe and live longer than me. It is my biggest fear that some tragedy harms my children and stands in the way of them living a full life. 

I could not accept that this nightmare had been lived by my friend. Her son’s bright personality always came through from what little I saw of him. Stunned, I wrote her straight away and said that I had seen her post. I said I didn’t know what had happened but I was thinking of her. She wrote back with such a direct statement about how and when she lost her boy. She said he had Leukemia and was treated and came out of treatment okay, when he went back a few years later he once again completed treatment and was healthy. They had planned on doing a bone marrow transplant and that is when things went wrong. He got an infection and sepsis. He did not make it and passed away. She wrote these words to me followed by how losing him has been so hard on the three of them and that they are learning to go on. My heart sank as I read her words and I began to cry. My stomach tightened and my head hurt because I couldn’t swallow how unfair this news was. How final! 

I let myself sit for a while before writing her back. I wasn’t even sure how to respond to her devastation. She had asked me when I would be back in NYC next and there will be no excuses to put off seeing her when I go. If I could beam myself to her right now to hug her I would. I went to sit on the couch where my son was sitting. I sat behind him and hugged him so I could breathe him in. He couldn’t see my face, or my tears, but all I could think of was that my friend couldn’t hold her boy anymore. I held on as long as he would let me. I will never let go first. Time is precious.