So, about living. Turns out, it feels more
complicated to me than dying does. Turns
out, I have endless possibility in front of me that I get to manifest. I get to live, just like you. I buckled up for the worst and over and over
the universe answered, “You are going to get a miracle instead.”
I
didn’t ask for miracles. I did not want
to believe or invest in miracles. In
fact, the warrior in me knew that I, of all people, could make it through an
ugly deal. I could put on my armor, and
show up to big bad monsters. I like to
think I am not afraid of monsters. (As I
write this, I know I am just as afraid as anyone, but I like to think...) Maybe it is the adrenaline that the fear
brings that feeds a certain thrill in me, but something in me gets bold and says,
“Bring it on.” I know how to fight monsters.
When
I was pregnant, I remember offering to the universe—I can handle the hardest of
the hard when it comes to kids—Give it to me.
I had been a preschool teacher for almost a decade and I had learned to
love working with kids with challenging behavior. I also learned that I had a gift with hard
situations. I believed I would not be
abusive to a child no matter what. I
felt a call to take on the challenging so that someone else who might not have
the capacity would not end up breaking a soul.
Then
I got this precious baby. Most of my
memories of her first seven years are of watching with amazement, wonder, awe,
and love every single thing she did. It
was not hard at all. The challenges of
parenting her, turned out to be about me, not about her. Learning how to be in love with someone
new. Never adequately learning how to
give her the support she needed related to her medical diagnoses. The hardest of the hard came from inside of
me. In intimate relationships, we all
break each other in little (and sometimes big) ways. The way I broke my baby was in the places I
did not (at the time) have the capacity to feed her needs—despite wanting so
much for that to not be true.
Getting
a baby and getting cancer may seem like very opposite gifts, but cancer is
teaching me similar lessons. Instead of
a big bad monster, cancer has mostly meant living with amazement, wonder, and
awe. The challenges in living my life
mostly come from me. I have not felt
pushed to the brink of my capacity—but I suspect that I will learn that my
brink comes from inside myself. When I
was pregnant, I often thought that part of my role as a parent would surely be
to screw up—how will I hurt this precious soul that I never want to hurt?! And now, in my own living-with-cancer life, I
wonder the same thing, how might I get in my own way and be the cause of my own
brokenness?
As
much and as often as I have been saying that I am embracing life, as I write
this, I realize I am still buckled in. I
am still wearing my armor. When I wrote
that I get to live life 'just like you,' it was the first time since cancer
that I felt the expansiveness and freedom of that truth. (I know, you have all been saying it since
day one, but I had to learn it myself.)
Maybe my life will be just like yours.
Maybe I will live longer than you.
Only time will tell. But I get to
live life just like you and that gives me the courage to take off my
armor. Still, I feel less sure about how to step fully into living. Can I really take this risk? I want to let go and feel life
without the tension of death. Let’s
forget that I might be dying.
I
am listening to birds chirp and feeling the wind on my arm. I feel called by nature to get out of this
self centered brain thought and go out there and live. Just like you.
