Category Archives: kids

Friendship

1 Oct

Lately the cancer world has me pondering the importance of friendships. What would we do without friends? Women, especially, needs their gal pals. In fact, recently on facebook a post went around about a study that was done that determined the best thing a man can do for his health is to marry a woman, whereas the best thing a woman can for for her health is to nurture her friendships with other women.

It’s just so true.

A friend can be there to support me through the difficult moments of Elliot’s diagnosis and treatment, even if her children have never had cancer. She “gets it”. It doesn’t matter that it’s not her child, she actually feels the fear and anxiety I feel. How do women do it? We take on all the pain and suffering of those around us. When someone we care about hurts, we hurt too. Men are better at compartmentalizing their lives, at separating their emotions from their actions.

I was chatting recently with a mom, who’s son had cancer years ago and is now considered “cured” (apparently you can only say “cured” with quotation marks, because there is never a real guarantee. Darn it, and here I was hoping for some kind of official He Is Cured document from the hospital at some point!) She mentioned that someone had recently told her that she should now “shut the door” on cancer, that it’s part of the past and it’s time to move on to thinking about new things.

We stared at each other a bit after she said that. Then she said it would be pretty hard to do as she had just signed up for a two year term working with a children’s cancer group.

We laughed.

The thing is, there’s no door to shut.

Being a cancer mom isn’t a choice, and it’s (unfortunately) not a temporary role. Nobody enters the cancer wold willingly, but once you’re there, you don’t have much of a choice. You adapt. Even my friends whose kids don’t have cancer have been dragged into this world with me, sure, not as intensely as I have, but whether they like it or not, they can now chat easily about blood cell levels and remission and chemotherapy side effects and vomit stain removal and needles and port-a-caths. And they can laugh at it all, and cry at it all, and while they laugh and cry they can also make supper and do two loads of laundry and find the missing lego piece and clean the living room and feed the cat and stop one child from hitting the other and text a friend and polish their toe nails. While they are doing all this the husband usually only has time to walk into the kitchen open a cupboard, stare into it’s depths for several minutes, then ask, “Where do we keep the salt?”.

Ok I don’t mean to insult the male population there, and I may be slightly exaggerating (my husband actually knows where the salt is!). But seriously folks, let’s take a few seconds here to applaud all the women out there, cancermoms and cancerfriends, who are going through this journey or have gone through it already.

I live in an otherwise all-male household. This has some advantages. I told Jesse the other day to take out the garbage, and he replied with some kind of grumble that sounded like “ok”. A friend of mine (male) with a teenage daughter recently told me he had asked his daughter to take out the garbage and the girl broke down crying, accused her dad of trying to ruin her life, and ran to her room, slamming the door. It turns out she had just done her hair and put on her new skirt which she had wanted to show her dad (which he failed to notice) and it was raining out, which, any woman would know, means there is no way the garbage is being taken out in these conditions and how dare you not notice my hair and outfit?!?!

Jesse took the garbage out without another word. He also did not bother to put on socks and shoes or a t shirt. And it was raining out. When he came in I said “You”ll catch a cold going out like that!” and he grumbled something that sounded like “ok” and walked into the kitchen and ate an entire loaf of bread, jar of peanut butter and drank a liter of milk.

So there are advantages to the testosterone prominence in my home, and disadvantages. Sometimes, I miss having someone to talk things out with. There are occasions, during quiet moments, when I have said to my husband “So what do you want to talk about?” and he gets that slightly panicked look. Daniel comes home from school and I excitedly ask him how his day went, what did they do etc etc (It’s a new school year, I’m curious!) and he replies “it was very… school-ish.” and I don’t get much more then that…  I still recall noticing Jesse, around age 6, staring intensively out his bedroom window for a long thoughtful moment, and asking him what he was thinking about. He replied “Well, when I see a car, I think: ‘a car’. When I see a person, I think: ‘a person’.”

With my friends I can talk easily about all of life’s mysteries. The anxiety of worrying about a relapse. The ups and downs of every day life. The stress of juggling the kids’ back to school schedule. The joy of shoe shopping. The confusion of relationships.

There is a special bond between cancer friends too – we who have faced “the dragon” and felt its hot breath hovering over us (oh that was very descriptive, wasn’t it? Feels right, like we’re little knights in shining armour brandishing our swords above our heads, torn between fear and fury).

You would think a group of women bonded by cancer would be a sad, weeping lot, all of us sitting together in a semi circle, sharing our sad tales over tea, a box of kleenex nearby being quickly being used up. Well, so far, in my experience, it has been quite the contrary! Swap that tea for a good bottle of red wine and there we are, laughing our heads off as one mom tells the story of sneaking a pizza in to her daughter’s hospital room and being caught by a nurse. Keep the kleenex, we’re laughing so hard we’re crying.

Don’t get me wrong. Behind that pizza story is the very real image burned into our minds of the mom who has stayed by her child’s bedside for days, the i.v.s of chemotherapy and anti-cancer medicine hanging overhead, and then the anti-nausea medicine, the anti-pain medicine, the medicine that helps you get over your addiction to the anti-pain medicine, the medicine that helps you sleep, stay awake, poop, not poop, and of course the medicine to treat the side effects of all the medicine. The mom who is exhausted, hungry, scared, sad, and has decided that dammit, she’s having pizza with her kid. The mom who is overjoyed if her child is actually willing to eat one bite of food.

We don’t need her to explain all that because we’ve all lived it. What we need, mostly, is to laugh. And be together.

Because when the dragon rears it’s head and starts charging at you, and all you’ve got is your little sword, you need everyone else to show up with their little swords. One dragon against a whole bunch of sword carrying women (and a pizza) is all we need to keep fighting. And hopefully, most of the time, win the war.

Posted in cancer, family, funny moments, hospital, kids | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Advice to Adults with Cancer from a Five Year Old

18 Sep

Here’s a light-hearted look at cancer from the point of view of my son Elliot, who was only 4 and a half when diagnosed. I know many of the adults I am in touch with who have cancer, or who are helping a person with cancer through this journey, will relate!

1. It is perfectly acceptable to have a complete tantrum and throw your shoes around just before leaving for the hospital.

2. You always deserve a present after chemo.

3. If you feel like showing more respect and politeness to the hospital clown than your oncologist, that’s ok.

4. If you manage to grab the syringe of medicine from the nurse, it’s their loss and you are then allowed to squirt its’ entire content around the room.

5. You are allowed to complain loudly about any smells like perfume, but you are also allowed to fart freely whenever and wherever you want.

6. Anyone who says “this one tastes like syrup” better be not be lying or they can expect to catch some spit.

7. You are allowed to worry about life and death, but only to the same extent that you worry about whether Santa Claus will be able enter your home if you don’t have a chimney.

8. Speaking of worry, you are not allowed to worry about anything that is not going to happen today or tomorrow.

9. Any bad thing that happened in the past should be quickly erased from your mind using ice cream.

10. It’s ok to throw up directly on your caregiver instead of into the bucket they are holding. It will create warm and funny memories for them once this is all over.

11. Good friends may stare when they first see you without any hair, but they are quickly more interested in all your new toys. So make sure you have lots of new toys around all the time.

12. It is the right thing to do to jump off the examining table if the doctor’s hands are too cold.

13. A popsicle for breakfast is a good idea and goes well with bacon.

14. If someone rubs your bald head and says you’re cute you should stare at them in complete boredom until they stop.

15. Always believe that scars are badges of courage and make you look like a pirate or a superhero.

16. Jumping on the bed is a perfectly acceptable form of exercise.

17. Someone should always be available to carry you if you don’t feel like walking anymore and they will be grateful if you look at them lovingly and say “You’re my slave.”

18. It’s a good idea to frequently press the little button next to the bed that makes the nurse come running, because she might be lonely and bored, and enjoys picking your crayon up from the floor.

19. The only part of hospital food you should eat is the desert. The rest is not really food anyway.

20. Make having fun your priority, all the time, no matter where you are or what’s going to happen next.

Posted in cancer, family, funny moments, kids | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Parenting Through Cancer

31 Aug

Here’s  an exact, unedited copy of a text message I received at work from my husband the other morning about how my older kids spent their evening the night before: “Apparently Daniel, Jesse and his friend stayed up really late, playing dare. So Jesse has no longer any eye brows. Daniel took a shower with his clothes on and the other dude ate a banana peel and drank tabasco right from the bottle… Daniel is up and told me…”

I laughed so hard I almost couldn’t talk for a few minutes.

The thing is, at our place, we cut the wifi internet at midnight. The theory is that reasonable people should be going to bed at that time. What really happens is that they generally find other things to do to entertain themselves. This is fine, it’s good clean fun, right? They play board games and cards, talk, sit around the kitchen table eating snacks, and generally have a great time together instead of being in their own separate bedrooms staring at a screen, sending messages to friends saying “whatcha doing?” and getting the reply “not much, you?” from everyone.  So we feel it’s a good rule. Besides, now that school has started, fatigue creeps up on them a bit earlier and they actually do go to bed at a, uh, more or less reasonable time.

But here’s the thing: it’s actually way way WAY harder to parent this way. The kids don’t realize this. They think we are chuckling to ourselves in bed as we turn off the internet, enjoying the torture we put them through by cutting them off from the joys of youtube and facebook.

The truth is that it would be roughly one million times easier to just leave the internet on and let them sit like quiet zombies in their rooms.

They would make less noise while we sleep.

They would eat less food and leave fewer crumbs on the counters.

They would quit complaining that we are the only parents in the world who inflict such cruel and unusual punishment on their innocent kids.

They would still have eyebrows.

But no, we are mean parents, and so they are left with little choice but to drink tabasco.

Parenting is hard enough under normal circumstances (sidebar here, are there actually any “normal” parenting circumstances? It seems to me, in my parenting career, which spans almost 21 years (ack!) that the normal periods have been almost non-existent. But I digress.) So what happens when the circumstances change, when an unwelcome guest named cancer arrives in your home, when life is turned upside down and you struggle to get yourself through the day, let alone try to impart some parenting wisdom on your kids? When life becomes a matter of survival, all the rules go right out the window.

Back when Elliot was going through chemo treatment (love the fact that I can say “back when”… it’s really not so long ago!), we were happy when he ate, never mind any nutrition rules.  Jesse and Daniel never said a word about it, but I am sure they would come out into the living room for lunch and see Elliot sitting in front of the TV eating a popsicle and think “And we were forced to eat broccoli???”

Not only was it difficult to maintain many of my old parenting expectations with Elliot, but also with the older two. I was just so tired.  My kids are expert debaters. Seriously, they should be on some kind of debating team, maybe turn this skill into a future in conflict resolution. I’m pretty sure they would wear down even the worst of the tyrants and bullies out there, if given the chance to have a long conversation with them. The dictator would probably just give up, pack up all his silly guns up in frustration, yell “Fine! Fine!  Have democracy! Just stop talking!” and go home. And Elliot is learning this skill too, although he is still in the phase where he just repeats the same thing over and over five million times hoping we’ll crack. So this tactic combined with parenting fatigue can put me over the edge.

So what’s the solution? I think what worked for us was, we chose a few important rules to maintain while going through the cancer treatment, and let the rest go. Elliot could eat whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. But other than popsicles, we didn’t buy junk food.  So his choices were usually more or less healthy, even if they were often at strange times.

My favourite super hero

Finding time together was also an issue, mostly for the older boys. Jesse and Daniel spent way too much time without us, especially when we had overnights at the hospital. But we countered that by planning ahead for weeks when we would all be home, and scheduling movie marathons where we would watch a movie in a series every night after Elliot was in bed, just the four of us together. So we’ve recently had a Harry Potter marathon, a Comedy Night marathon (everyone from Michael Macintyre, Eddy Izzard, Dara O’Briain, to Louis CK and Patton Oswald) and now we’re in the middle of an Avengers series.  I’ve basically seen lots of action or crude humour movies this past year, and I can now tell you lots about superheroes (my favourite seems to be the Hulk, which probably says a lot about my choice in men). I am quite familiar with the funniest moments in each Die Hard movie, and have taken part in a debate about whether the next marathon should involve Lethal Weapon , Tron, or Batman. Strangely enough no one is jumping at my idea of historical dramas or romantic comedies. That’s what you get for living in an all-male household.

The point of the movie marathons was togetherness. A shared moment when you come together, even if it’s just to sit next to each other and laugh. And actually, that’s what good parenting comes down to, isn’t it?

By the way, Elliot’s hair has grown in now and he looks just like any other little boy with a crew cut. Jesse’s eyebrows, on the other hand…

Any advice for parenting through cancer? Opinions? What worked for you?

Posted in Uncategorized, cancer, family, kids | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Vacation

7 Aug

Ahhh… the sun on my face, the sand between my toes, the soft wind blowing and the distant noises of kids playing combined with seagulls screaming overhead…. I am sitting in a long chair on a beach in Trouville-Sur-Mer, Normandy, enjoying the sunny day. The weather in Normandy is exactly what people kept telling me it would be: completely unpredictable. This morning was grey and cloudy, and cold. I needed my warmest sweater to go out for a walk. The wind was strong, so much that my hair was always blowing around all over my face like a wild curtain, blocking my view half the time. We considered a picnic on the beach for lunch but eating sand was not appetizing, so we carried our bastognes and salami, cherry tomatoes and baguettes back to our room and ate on our more or less sheltered balcony, overlooking the sea, watching the ships just on the horizon.

We talked about how to dress later for our afternoon on the beach, which was going to happen regardless of the weather. Elliot’s main goal that day was to spend all his time digging in the sand with his cousins.

Then as we sat there, we started to notice that the dark clouds were being swept slowly away toward the east, being replaced by thin white whisps, and then those blew away like dust and the sky cleared. The bright hot sunshine fell down on us. The light seemed brighter than normal to our startled eyes, it reflected off the sea like a million stars.

We grabbed our things, sunscreen, books, beach toys, and ran out the door onto the beach.

The beaches in Normandy are amazing. The tides are so extreme that at low tide you have a huge expanse of white sand, so choosing a spot to set up is no problem. We rented one of the local beach tents that are typical of the beaches there, a brightly coloured round tent, open on one side, where you can have some shelter from the dazzling sun or wind if needed.

So now I’m sitting here on my long chair enjoying the warmth. I open my eyes and look way out to the sea. There are people jumping over the waves, small dark figures against the sun, and every wave flashes with bright sparkling light, then curls into a white foam and flattens as it slowly rolls in.

Yesterday we visited Juno beach, not far from here. It’s where all the Canadian troops landed on June 6th 1944, one of the five beaches that are side by side along this coast, where the D Day landings took place and the liberation of France began. Apparently there were so many ships and smaller boats in the sea, and men and equipment on the beaches that huge traffic jams occurred. Right here, in this sand, where my child runs now, completely oblivious to the literal blood, sweat and tears that were spilled not so many years ago.

Every town hall I have passed in this region flies all of the flags of the Allied countries which liberated Normandy after D Day, so it’s pretty cool to see the Canadian flag everywhere. The Canadian cemetery nearby has over 5000 graves, in a picturesque setting on a green hilltop overlooking the sea. There are fresh flowers recently placed in front of several gravestones.

Each grave has a soldier’s name on it, his unit, and his age. I didn’t see any over 23 years old. I think about the mothers who lost their sons on that day, and the next several days. The telegram arriving at the door. People feared the postman. A telegram was never good news.

It makes me think of receiving CT scan results. The formal piece of paper that reduces your life to a mere statement of facts.

Is it possible I can now relate anything back to cancer, or is war an actual valid comparison?

I haven’t had lots of time to just sit and think on this vacation, we’ve been busy every day. But right now as we sit on the warm beach in the sunshine, Martin and his sister are chatting, Elliot and his three cousins are digging for lost treasure and I can tune out a bit.

The first unit to come ashore lost half it’s men. Their landing had been delayed because of the weather (unpredictable Normandy, time has not changed that), so the tides had risen much more than anticipated. They couldn’t see the hidden mines and obstacles under the water.

I look out to the horizon. The tide is coming in now, the beach has narrowed a bit. I imagine watching 14,000 Canadian soldiers, barely more than teenagers, running toward me, stumbling, falling, crawling their way up the beach carrying heavy equipment, or maybe just carrying hope and fear for their their lives. I wonder if it was cold like this morning, if they shivered in their wet uniforms as they struggled up the sand past the dunes, over the rows of barbed wire and into the fields. Or was the sun out by then, mesmerizingly bright, blinding them as they tried to make out friend from foe? Did any of them have time to notice how beautiful the sea looked, or was it too red?

I get up from my chair and tell Martin I’m heading back to the hotel for a bit. We’re lucky our hotel is basically right off the beach, just across the boardwalk, so we all make lots of trips back and forth during the afternoon. The receptionist at the hotel does not seem to like this much, each time we have to ask for our key, which is one of those big brass things you could use as a paperweight. The hotel is an old historic building, and since I’m engrossed in WWII thoughts I can’t help but wonder what it was like in those times. Did secret French Résistance meetings take place behind closed doors?

I cross the boardwalk, which is littered with Beautiful People, yes, with capital letters. The Parisians are on vacation as of last weekend, and many of them are here. The women sitting at outdoor cafés along the boardwalk all look glamorous, the men all look sophisticated. This despite the constant wind, sometimes gentle, sometimes not, that blows across Normandy.

I take the ancient elevator up to our room, it’s one of those old rickety lifts with the second inner door that closes once you’re inside. There is barely enough room for three people in it, much less all the luggage we arrived with yesterday.

In our room I glance in the mirror to see how close I am to imitating the BPs, and note with regret that the wind has helped me look very similar to a broom. Oh well. I look out our window and see my family out there, enjoying the day. And yet I still also see all the uniforms running. Who stood here on this balcony on that day?

Is cancer like war? A bodily conflict, the chemo and radiotherapy soldiers being sent in to fight off the aggressor, in the hopes a strong strategy and superior numbers will win? The collateral damage is obvious. In France it’s estimated that at least 15 000 French civilians died on D Day, many from the Allied bombings that cleared the way for the troops.

Am I being too dark? Thinking of war, a conflict that is caused by people, and comparing it to cancer, an illness which none of us deliberately engages in? Yeah, maybe I am.

Martin and I both find we are a bit shell-shocked these days, like we are still reeling from the emotional impact of the last year. In some ways I think we were in “survival mode” the whole time, and just powered through because we had no other choice. Now that we have stepped away from the cancer world a bit, we often look at each other and say “Can you believe what we’ve been through?”

So maybe I am a bit melodramatic with the whole war concept, or maybe I’m suffering from a bit of post-traumatic shock… Or most likely both. I have been told I have a flair for the dramatic (not exactly these words were used, but I am going to take it as a compliment.)

Regardless, I do think I could look fabulous in a trench coat and a fedora, tipped slightly at an angle to shield my eyes, secretly running down the quiet cobblestone streets at night, slipping quietly around corners, whispering through a crack in the door to my résistance friends some secret code word to tell them of the imminent invasion so we can all join in. Martin would of course have been part of the Danish Resistance Movement, had we lived in those times, and would have been one of the many Danish heroes who smuggled all the Jewish Danes out of the country by boat into Sweden, making Denmark the only occupied country to have saved almost it’s entire Jewish population. Our heroic saga would end romantically when we part ways at a fog-shrouded airport, both destined for different missions…

Oh who am I kidding? In truth I would probably be hiding in a basement, waiting it out.

Oh well. We’ll always have Paris.

Posted in Uncategorized, Vacation, cancer, funny moments, kids | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Living in the “Now”

25 Jul

The First Batch!

So one of the things that you learn when you are in the middle of a cancer diagnosis (or other major crisis, actually), is the importance of living in the present moment. You learn to value each happy day, each healthy day, and to not dwell on the “what ifs” of the future.

Now how many of you, reading that last paragraph, felt just mildly annoyed? Like, you KNOW you’re supposed to “live in the now” and embrace the present, and cherish each minute, but how many of us are actually able to do this?

I would very dearly like to live in the now. But I’m afraid that my kids will destroy my house if I do. I’m fairly sure we will all get quite hungry pretty soon if I choose to embrace only the present moment all the time. And although some people in this home (I’m not naming names) would be perfectly happy just throwing out the dirty dishes instead of washing them for the next use, I have a feeling eating breakfast cereal with milk directly off the kitchen counter would eventually ruin the experience. And frankly, I think if I don’t at some point wash that pile of laundry waiting for me, it will come alive, get up and walk out of our home in disgust.

The problem with “living in the now” is that the future is just waiting there, lurking around the corner, hoping you won’t bother taking out the garbage so that suddenly, when the future becomes the “now” you have to live in the unpleasant now because the old fun now is now the past and the new now stinks.

Did any of that make sense?

My kids are pretty good at it though. They seem fairly confident that everything will always work out and there is no need to really plan anything because somehow, magically, food will appear on the table, clothes will become clean, new shoes that fit will be bought in time, and anything broken will be fixed before it is desperately needed again. This is truly the magic belief of youth… Another name for this magic is “mom”.

In some ways, since I had my first batch of kids at a fairly young age (I just like how that sounds, “batch” of kids, like I’m an oven making cupcakes), I feel like I have been cleaning up people’s nows for a long time. And sometimes the nows seem to repeat themselves. Am I caught in some kind of cosmic time loop? Is that what living in the now truly means, that I get to repeat things over and over (and over)?

The other day, Elliot (sidebar, just want to mention, he already has some hair! Ok it’s just some peach fuzz, but still), decided that since he was going to be sitting on the toilet for a while (5 minutes total, which is a long now for him), he would bring a little toy car to play with. Don’t ask me how you are supposed to play with a car while sitting on the toilet, these are debates I prefer to avoid. In any case, the inevitable happened. And in the hopes of salvaging the situation, he flushed. So the now was now a flood.

And suddenly I was brought back in time 15 years to the same (almost) situation. (That is, different bathroom, different kids, same result).

Rewind to the “now” of one day in 1997. I walk in to the bathroom to find two boys, ages 3 and 6, standing next to the toilet staring in to its depths. The water in the toilet has already risen to past the halfway point and is continuing to rise rapidly. The two guilty looking kids (my sons, I admit) are staring in unblinking fascination at the spectacle as the rising water quickly reaches the brim.

“Hey” I yell, running in just as the water starts to pour on to the floor. “Hey” was the best thing I could come up with on the spur of the moment, though I admit it was not very original. My kids obviously thought so too, as they ignore me but quickly jump away from the waterfall surrounding the toilet bowl and up onto the edge of the bathtub, holding on to each other for balance and wobbling slightly. They stare at me with the same fascination they had bestowed on the toilet bowl, eagerly awaiting my next move as they teeter on their perch.

“Hey, what happened in here?” I ask, quickly grabbing the plunger and throwing an old towel on the floor. The extra “hey” is for effect. Obviously, it has none. The boys continue to stare, mouths wide open in surprise, heads moving back and forth from me to the toilet like fans watching a tennis match.

I fight with the toilet for a few minutes and the tidal wave subsides. Exhausted, I turn around to face the guilty parties and unleash my wrath. They are perched on the edge of the tub, the youngest one, Daniel, clutching on to his older brother’s pyjamas with both hands while the oldest, Jesse, holds onto the shower curtain. Both of them rock back and forth like tightrope walkers about to lose their balance.

Jesse speaks first: “Why did the toilet do that?” he asks, tentatively. Daniel, sensing his cue, adds “yeah Mommy, why dat happen?”

Two sets of eyes stare at me in complete innocence, awaiting my response.

Well, I think to myself, everyone in this country is innocent until proven guilty, right? I usher them out of the bathroom and sit them on the couch. “Did anyone put something in the toilet?” I ask, voice a calm reassuring blanket covering my extreme frustration. It is possible, I am reasoning crazily to myself, that the boys were standing innocently gazing into the depths of the toilet when suddenly for no apparent reason (perhaps a very localized earthquake with my toilet at the epicentre) the water suddenly started to rise out of control.

The boys look at each other, then back at me. Twice. Then Jesse, the responsible one, the mature one, the type of person who is willing to accept the consequences of his actions, fesses up. “Maybe Daniel did?”.

“No!” Daniel counters. “Just a wittle toily paper!”.

“How much toilet paper?” I sigh.

“Well,” offers Jesse “It wasn’t too much at all! But it WAS still attached to the toilet paper roll and when I flushed the toilet it just kept rolling and rolling and rolling and rolling (his eyes get very wide at this point in the story) and all the paper on the roll got pulled into the toilet… And then the water thing started to happen.”

I take a deep breath, trying to summon up as much energy as I can. “Look”, I explain patiently, “if we put too much paper in the toilet, or anything else in the toilet, it plugs and then the water can’t get down into the pipes when we flush. So this is what happens, ok?”

“What happen?” asked Daniel.

“The toilet plugged and the water spilled out” I answer, still patient.

“Oh.” Daniel is thoughtful. “But why?”

“Because you put too much toilet paper”

“No! Just a wittle piece!”

“But the little piece was still attached to more pieces and that’s just too much”.

“Oh. Why?”

“Because the toilet will plug.” Said with finality.

“Why?” Innocent eyes staring.

“Because that’s the way it’s made.” Trying to end the conversation.

“Why it’s made dat way?”

“Because all toilets are made that way” Starting to feel cornered.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“But why?”

“Just because”.

“But…”

AAAArrRRRggghhh, loss of control, desperation sinking in, will now do anything to stop the madness.

“Daniel how about a cookie?”

“Otay”.

And fifteen years later I am having the exact same conversation about not flushing objects down toilets, with roughly the same results (it was a muffin this time, not a cookie).

So is this what living in the now means? Being stuck repeating the same situations because there is actually no lesson to be learned?

I know I’m supposed to embrace the moment, seize the day and all that jazz. And it’s definitely true that cancer has made me realize that our time is limited. But despite all that, I do find that planning for the future is great. We’re heading off to Paris today. I’ve researched hotels and sites we want to see, what time of day is best to visit the Eiffel Tower without waiting in line too long. Elliot is insisting we have to take the stairs up, not the elevator. Not looking forward to that “now”, while it’s happening. But the memory of it will be worth the pain, just like the memory of Jesse and Daniel’s little faces as they perch precariously on the edge of the bathtub is all that now remains of the infamous Toilet Paper Incident.

Anyone else have advice for seizing the day, living in the Now?

Posted in cancer, funny moments, kids | Tagged , , | 3 Comments