Ten.

This beautiful girl turns ten today. Ten! A whole new existence awaits her. Ten is a magical time, when the simple things of childhood begin to be folded up and tucked away...and a limitless world of new possibilities await. Ten. Such a satisfying time. She's been waiting to claim that number for what feels, I'm sure, like forever. And now it's here.  And now it's here, and so am I. Ten. On a very dark day almost four years ago, my future collapsed in front of me as if in a conflagration. The prospect of me still being here with her on this good, hard earth and able to watch her settle the mantle of ten (ten!) atop her slender shoulders was swallowed up into the ashy blackness. I couldn't think on it. Instead, I pushed to make it to Mother's Day, to the Fourth of July, to the beginning of second grade. I breathed in, and I breathed out. And then I did it again. And ten waited in the darkness.  I caught a glimpse of it now and then, ten, as I made my way from one chemo session to another, as I climbed into another hospital bed, as I submitted to more needles. And somewhere along the line, ten began to glow. A flickery and fiery glow, gossamer and fleeting as a fairy wing. I clasped it in my hands sometimes and gazed at it with wonder. Would I see ten in my daughter's face one glorious day?  Its flickering finally gave way to a rosy hue that lit the horizon ahead, and ten became my friend, my training partner, urging me on, ever glowing and beckoning to me, irresistible in its warmth. We joined hands and ran through fall and winter, rushed through the snows of February, past the surgical procedures and question marks of March...and here we be.  My girl is ten and I am her mama.  We made it to this magnificent place, together. There are so many more miles to go...but for today, this week, this month - I'm just going to savor seeing my girl take ten and make it her very own. I love you, Sweet Girl. You have been a source of deep and utter joy to me from the moment that we met. Thank you for choosing me as your mom. Thanks for turning ten.

Comments

Post a Comment

Tell me...what are you thinking?

Popular posts from this blog

The Anxiety Olympics Arena Is Temporarily Closed for Cleaning

Image
Last week was, well, hellish. I did my best to keep busy...we even had family pictures taken on Thursday morning: See? Tranquilizer darts DO work! And then came Thursday night and that meant I wasn't going to get much sleep. Not only because of the anxiety but because of the prednisone. See, way back a long time ago (um, last spring), the first time I had a high-contrast CT scan, I developed a mild rash a few days later. And so now all of my files have big ALLERGY ALERT stickers all over them, and any time I have to get a high-contrast scan, I have to take 10 tablets of steroids within the 24 before treatment and then, just for good measure, I chase that cocktail with a couple of Benadryl an hour before the scan. It's super fun. I'm jittery as hell and then suddenly sleepy (if they give me the injectable Benadryl, then I'm REALLY the life of the party). If these scans were just once a year or whatever, I probably wouldn't mind as much. But by my reckoning, I
Read more

Yoga for Cancer Patients: No Mat Required

Image
Long ago and far away, before I was a cancer patient (or even married to my current husband, or mother to my children), I taught yoga - and of course, I practiced yoga, almost every day. My yoga of choice was power yoga - an almost aerobic form of yoga as fitness (think Baron Baptiste), practiced in a very warm (but not Bikram hot) room with high humidity. At my peak, I could do all kinds of fun  asanas (poses) and had terrific breath control and great flexibility. I even took some acroyoga workshops, and I loved those! After finishing grad school and starting my career and getting married and having two babies, yoga took a bit of a back seat and I stopped teaching. But I still practiced several times a week and kept yoga close to my heart, part of my central identity. It was the first time, really, that I had excelled at any physical endeavor - I never played on any team sports or anything like that. So it was really a shift in my own thinking about what my body could do, and how I r
Read more

2018 July 17: Crying in the MRI and My Friend Jen

Image
Honestly, I've been trying to write a post for what feels like forever about my friend Jen, who died of complications from metastatic colorectal cancer on 2 July. But every time I start, I can't seem to get it all together, so that one is going to have to wait a while, I guess. My grief and survivor guilt and sadness and anger and passion and hate for a disease I know so intimately - it all needs to percolate a little. But I'm not worried. Jen wouldn't have minded waiting to hear all of what I need to say.* As a matter of fact, I was thinking of her - and of this blog post - last night, while I was inside the MRI machine. If you've never had the pleasure of being inside such a machine, it looks like this:  Well, that's a fancy one that I found on the Interwebs. But you get the picture. They put you on the little stretcher there and zip you inside the little roundybout area. They give you earplugs and headphones (sometimes, they pump in mu
Read more