Day 1,071: Today My Son is Four

“The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four; of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.” –Jim Trelease

My son turns four today. He is a boy now, no longer a baby, creeping deeper into a childhood that will lead to an adolescence that I still fear I will miss. Every once in a while, I can envision what he will look like when he’s older, or daydream about whether his nutty personality will translate into years of entertainment or danger. I don’t have as much reverse nostalgia as I had in 2011, when the sight of boys of just about any age could send me into an unexpected tailspin of grief, but it’s there sometimes all the same.

I am not one of those mothers who laments the time that has passed. I don’t get wistful over babies or clothes my kids have outgrown or memories of their past selves. Perhaps I would have never been that way, as I am not particularly sentimental. I’ll never know now whether that is the natural state of affairs or the change in perspective that cancer brought into my life. I am the mother who gets this aching feeling when I think about my children’s future selves, the various phases and ages that I can only imagine. I would love to speed up time and see them as adults, safe and secure in their grown up sense of themselves, but of course I don’t want to miss everything as it actually happens.

Reverse nostalgia; one of the side effects of cancer treatment that I didn’t see coming. I don’t know why I feel this more intensely with my son than with my daughter. Perhaps it’s because I am a woman, and I was once a girl, and therefore I can see her in myself and imagine her in ways that aren’t available to me with him. Or maybe it’s because his personality is so extreme and I don’t know how in the hell that’s going to play out over time.

Or, maybe it’s because he was just a baby, nursing happily on my cancerous breast, when our lives turned upside down, and I had no idea back then if I would see him reach kindergarten. Of course, I still don't know that, but the possibility is seeming more and more likely as time passes.

Four is an age that is often overlooked. People have few memories of four. Children aren’t enrolled in traditional school yet. Sometimes, preschool friendships survive into adulthood, but not often. Adults are prone to underestimating the feelings or experiences of kids that age. At four, you are too young to make big decisions, but too old to be immune from the ramifications of small decisions.

What can happen at four that really matters?

When I was four, my mother died. She bled to death internally after an operation. She was resuscitated and brought back to life. She was in a coma for weeks, in bed for months. My grandmother took care of us during that time. There was a huge snowstorm that year that effectively shut the city down, and I walked to preschool through snowdrifts taller than me anyway. When I was four, I stopped sucking my fingers. I could read and write and I kept stats at my brother’s little league games. When I was four, the only decade I had ever known turned over. When I was four, things happened that were important.

When my daughter was four, I was diagnosed with cancer. She spent almost her entire fourth year dealing with a mother in aggressive cancer treatment. And yet so many other things happened as well. I just asked her what she remembers about being four, and this conversation ensued:

L: Oh, I don’t know. That was such a long time ago.
A: But then, if she doesn’t remember, how will I know what to do when I’m 4?
L: It just comes naturally. You knew how to be three, didn’t you?

Ah yes, children don’t understand anything, do they?

My son is so little, and so old. He is so aggressive, and so empathetic. There is a storybook that we read where a bunch of animals have a sleepover, and the owl is left to play checkers alone because he is nocturnal. Augie always says that he would like to be in the story, so that he could play checkers with the owl, and he wouldn't be alone. He wants us to understand that he doesn't feel SORRY for the owl. He understands that the owl might be happy; he simply would like to offer to keep him company.

Augie is the one with rhythm, the one who can’t stop singing and who remembers every lyric to every song he's ever heard, who loves to get naked and ask inappropriate questions about alcohol, the one who looks jealous in a real, grownup way every time he sees his parents kiss. I’ve written about him before, but I often don’t know what to say. His personality is, in some ways, best-suited to short-form writing; Augie is like Twitter personified. He is just something else.

The things he says are just too much. Sitting at the breakfast table when he was 2 years old and could barely speak; he turns to me and says, 19 more years, mommy. 19 years until what? Until I can have a beer. When I asked him why he couldn't just listen, he said, You know I'm three, right mom? I'll listen when I'm six. This is the kid who, at two and a half, when asked what he would ask for from Santa for Christmas, got a really mischievous look in his eye and said: A Mountain. He's always asking about girls, always shaking his booty. Always giving us reason to just shake our heads.

Teenagers and young adults love this child. He steals the spotlight away from other kids, away from our daughter. He uses his cuteness to get his way, with other people anyway, since it doesn’t work for him at home. He is charming and manipulative and devious and willful. He’s funny. He loves animals; in fact he loves them enough to give up his mamas cold turkey so that he could watch the class hamster for the week of his birthday. Last Wednesday, I told him he couldn’t have the hamster come home with him if he didn’t give up his mamas at night. He looked at me and sighed. I know, mom. But not tonight. And he put one in his mouth and held onto the other one and would not budge. Not tonight. And then the next night, Thursday, the night before we were to bring her home, he gave his two mamas to his father, and he was done with them forever, just like that.

.

This one, where do his questions come from, how does he know what he knows? What’s behind those eyes? He will deliberately disobey me, make a mess, take his pants off, start singing and dancing, punch something and start making animal noises all within the span of three minutes. And then, he will pause. And he will ask me a question:

Mom, when we die, who is left alive?

And his father and I will raise our eyebrows, and his father will begin to talk about the memories that our loved ones have of us. I am a mother, so I say this: when I die, you will still be left alive.

And he will sigh, looking at us like we have obviously failed to understand the question.

No, I mean, when we die, who's left? What’s left?

And all we can do is look at each other, knowing that he knows what we know.

Happy four, kiddo. I’m so glad I was here to see it. Here’s to more years of you teaching me a thing or two.

Day 833: Mama Said

I've been going through my son's clothes, getting ready for the changing season. Realizing that he can wear the same size in shirts that his sister, who is more than three years older, can wear in pants. Acknowledging that I will never change another diaper, at least for my own child. Ignoring the fact that when he dresses himself, if I can get him to do that, his pants are always on backwards. Accepting that he will run around the house naked, yelling things like "uh oh where is my penis?! haha!"

Admitting that my baby is no longer a baby.

He's a willful, impossible, exuberant and adorable little boy now.

A boy who still sleeps with his pacifier.

In fact, he has four of them. I thought we were down to two, but somehow two more turned up. He never uses them except at bedtime, when he puts one in his mouth and then holds the other three, like small versions of lovies. He sometimes rubs the silicone against his face.

And he still calls them "mamas."

He knows that they are not usually called mamas, and that the technical name is pacifier, and that other people call them binky or pac or nuk. But for more than two years, we have called them mamas.

Like many children, one of his first words, before his first birthday, was mama. Augie, like many boys, spoke coherently much later than his sister. Out of guilt, I had him evaluated when he was 17 months old and I was at the tail end of chemo. He showed a speech delay, albeit minor. The child never stops talking now, so I guess I was too quick to worry. But I digress. Around the time he was uttering his first tentative words, I found out I had breast cancer. He was weaned within six days. The week before my diagnosis, I couldn't nurse him on the left side for about 24 hours because of the pain from the 7 core needle biopsies and because the milk was filled with blood, evidenced by the pink substance that looked like a strawberry shake that came out when I pumped on that side. After the biopsy, he was confused, but accepting, of his relegation to the right side.

After my diagnosis, when suddenly, just like that, he never nursed again, he was hurt.

I know that now. I can tell myself what I told myself then, that he was confused, that he had only ever had a bottle when he woke up in the morning once in his life, so he didn't understand why his dad was walking into the room instead of me. I can say that it was the change in routine, the comfort he got from those five times a day that he calmed down with me, that made him angry.

I could tell myself that he was a baby, and that babies feel things differently than adults, but it would be a lie.

I saw his face on those mornings, and it was the look you get from a man who knows you are leaving him forever, the look you receive from a friend when you say goodbye knowing you will never write. He looked old, somehow worn down by the understanding. He was hurt that I left him like that without explaining.

He started calling his pacifier "mama."

He started calling me "mommy."

Just in case I didn't understand that there was a difference.

Now, when he gets in trouble, as he so often does through his outlandish but still entertaining behavior, one of the only things that works is to threaten to take his mamas away. The other day he was left with only one. Last night, though he was well behaved, I tried to reason with him that other three year olds don't use mamas, he never uses it at school for naps, why doesn't he just try to hold them instead of putting one in his mouth? I told him that he will go to his first dentist's appointment soon, and that his mamas weren't good for his teeth. I told him that babies use mamas because they get used to breastfeeding or drinking from a bottle and it soothes them but big boys don't usually need them.

He pouted and grouched, gave me his angry face, and walked away. A little while later I brought it up again. He looked at me with that old expression that I remember so well and asked me: "Why do I have to stop putting my mamas in my mouth?"

And I didn't know what to say.

So I found the fourth mama under his bed, read him two stories, sang to him, gave him a kiss and told him that I loved him.

And when it comes time to really make him give up his mamas, I'm going to make my husband do it. And I am going to keep however many are left of them, perhaps in the drawer of the nightstand by my bed, only taking them out on one final occasion: when he leaves our house for college or work or whatever he's destined to do when he's 18.

If I live long enough, I'll take them out one last time, and then I'll throw them away.

Day 389: For My Son on His Second Birthday

As a parent, it's hard to be fair. You do your best to treat your kids the same, not to compare too much, and in the end I think it's inevitable that you fail. I am sitting here full of the knowledge that I need to write a letter for Augie for his second birthday, as I did for Lenny a few months ago for her fifth. And yet I really don't know what to say.

So until I can figure it out I'll stall a bit. There are a bunch of things I've been thinking about covering in the blog, but I've been too busy doing those things and living my busy life to find the time. To start, I haven't written at all about my two experiences rowing on the river. The first water practice (we go on the water on Mondays, which is the only day I could ever practice, so that works out for me) the six novices who had never rowed before just watched from the dock. We practiced getting in and out of the boat, which really is just as wide as a pretty small person's body. None of this is intuitive and it is nothing at all like the erg, leading me to believe that the two things might as well be unrelated.

But let me back up a bit. In order to get to practice, I had to find the right spot on the river, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's in Bridgeport, that famous working class south side neighborhood home to the Daley family. You can't actually see the river from the street where you park your car. Instead, you see some chain link fences surrounding a bunch of gravel and weeds. You walk a little farther, and there are a bunch of boats--lots and lots of boats--stored in the middle of the rubble, next to some storage lockers. This area of the city is very industrial, and the river is anything but scenic. In fact, Chicago is the last major city in the country that doesn't treat the sewage out of the river. So over 70% of the water is literally toxic--a toxic waste dump we try to pass off as a tourist destination, Chicago-style. That first practice when we watched the others row, I decided it would be best not to count the condoms, tampons, beer bottles, and other random trash floating past. God help anyone who fell in that water.

The next week, we novices got our chance to row. We all successfully got our oars in, got in the boat, and walked the boat off the dock. There are a bunch of kids from a local Catholic prep school who volunteer for the team, and several of them were rowing with us in our boat. And let me tell you, it was HARD. I felt like a failure for a while, and then I realized that I could do it. If I could watch the kid in front of me and ignore my oar, I could do it. The hardest part is to try not to think about what you're doing. Maybe that's the key to the rest of life too. Just don't think about it too much. Anyway, there we were, rowing down the river while the sun was setting. The river is so narrow on the south branch, and we had run-ins with fishermen in Chinatown, yelling at us when our oars hit their lines because there was nowhere else to go. We had some groupies. I almost lost a shoe off the dock in the lethal water. I missed the following week due to house issues, and then last week I went in for the second time.

They put me in the bow seat, and I had extra responsibility for steering the boat on multiple occasions --leading us to get caught in some trees in a particularly narrow part of the river. I could have felt bad, but I figured I was a woman who had just finished breast cancer treatment six months ago, who had only rowed twice in her life, so I couldn't take too much blame. They had us novices rowing for well over two hours, for forty five minutes longer than everyone else. I had calluses on my hands and everything in my body hurt. During one drill, they had us using our inside arm only to learn how to feather the oar. Doing that just killed my breast, and my chest muscle. (My surgeon told me that radiation weakens your pecs, and that I can expect to have chronic pain in my surgery site forever--that's right, forever). Maybe I'm just that much closer to radiation and surgery than everyone else, and maybe I have too much scar tissue. But man, did it hurt. I was going to say something to the "coach" (the launch following us was led by a kid who just graduated high school, who will be going to Dartmouth in the fall), and then I realized that I couldn't. For a teenage boy, he handles the whole breast cancer thing remarkably well. I have often wondered if he has some personal connection to breast cancer. But I just couldn't say, hey, you might want to avoid that drill for women who aren't far removed from cancer, because damn, my boob really hurts. He had trouble when another coach told us to hold our oar at our bra line, so how could I go there? I know that teenage boys are essentially embarrassed just to be alive, and this kid really does pretty well, considering, so I decided to let it go for the time being.

But hey, here I am, 35 years old, clueless about boats and prep schools and team sports and all the other things related to rowing crew, and I could do it--now I can say I've done it, regardless of how long I can keep it up. The city looks just beautiful if you're a nerdy urban planner type like me and you like reading colorful graffiti and wondering how the taggers get to those places, what the were balancing on, where they came from, and you smell the bread from the factory and realize how hungry you are right after you realize how rare it is to smell something good that is actually being produced in your hometown, and you think about the Chinese immigrant children who hang out after school crouched down over the river and wave to some boats full of women who are in various degrees of cancer survivorship, and some teenagers who probably have much better things to do tell you that you look awesome, and you're so bone tired after you drive home in your one working car to the smaller of the two houses you're crazy enough to own, and your husband is putting your daughter to bed, and you collapse on the couch and think that Chicago is a pretty interesting place after all.

There might be something else I wanted to say before my letter to Augie, but that was long enough, so I'll stop there. Assuming I pass my swimming test this week (I have no memory of how to breathe correctly underwater, though you'd have to be clinically insane to put your face in the Chicago river, so sidestroke or backstroke is more logical anyway) I will keep it up for as long as it makes sense. Until then...

Dear Augie:

Three years ago, we were fairly certain that you would never be born. While we had no trouble conceiving your sister, by the time she was 20 months old and I was ready to think about going through labor again, both your dad and I had fertility issues. While a relatively simple surgery fixed his, it wasn't clear what was going on with me. Perhaps now we know, as hormones must have wrecked havoc on me in conjunction with contracting cancer, but we couldn't know that at the time. After learning that your dad was back to normal, I immediately called my doctor to ask to put me on Clomid, since I knew I hadn't ovulated since Lenny was born. I took those five pills, went in for an ultrasound, and saw the egg that would eventually become you. We were given instructions that day on how often and when to have sex that weekend, and I decided to throw in that night for good measure. Your dad didn't object, and we were later told that against all odds, on that first try, you were conceived.

I can only imagine how embarrassed you will be to read that when you are a teenager. I hope I am around to see it. The point is, though, that I saw you before you were you. I saw that picture of an egg, the doctor told me it looked like a good one, why not give it a shot? And unbeknownst to me, I was looking at you, or the beginnings of you. Two weeks later, I took the pregnancy test as soon as it made sense, and I saw that faint line. We had tried to conceive for almost a year, so I just assumed it was a mistake. I waited a few days, took another one. The line was faint, but not as faint as before, so I went in for a blood test. When the results came in,my doctor was off for Yom Kippur and I talked to the one Catholic doctor out of the twelve in the practice, since most everyone else was out as well. What am I looking at? She asked me. I said, well, I need to know if I'm pregnant. Oh, well you're definitely pregnant, but you're not very far along. What do you need to know?

I'm pregnant? Me? I asked. I sat there in a stupor in my office, wondering how it was possible. And everything about the beginning of your life was like that. I thought you had died early on when I had horrific cramping and all of my early pregnancy symptoms disappeared overnight. It turned out to be nothing but my uterus contracting and pregnancy with you was relatively easy. Then I had bleeding at 26 weeks and had to go to the ER in the middle of the night, while our sick neighbor from next door came over to sleep on our couch so Lenny would never know we had left. That was just a burst blood vessel. I thought you would be a preemie, so I stopped exercising at 36 weeks when I was told you would be born within a week. At 37 weeks, progress had halted, and I went to water aerobics after taking a long walk. My water broke in a torrential flood at 5:30 the next morning, so much fluid it was laughable and could literally have filled our bathtub, and you were born at 2:18 that afternoon. I pushed your sister for two and a half hours, and I pushed you for 13 minutes. She fought to be born healthy, you just fought to be born. You cried right away, nursed right away, and you were completely, utterly perfect. I thought I could do that again, it was so easy.

But aye, there's the rub. I couldn't know then that I could never do it again, that you were my second and last child. Your father and I thought we would be done with two--he had to be convinced to have you after it was such a struggle, and then he wanted another girl. I figured I would be too old to have any more children, after having you at age 33. I just had no idea what was in store for us. With the thought that you were my last baby, I took a six month leave from work, and had a wonderful summer and fall with my adorable son. The summer was just beautiful, like a California summer, and we went walking together every day. I lost thirty pounds in a month and just kept getting smaller as your boy hormones kicked my metabolism into overdrive. I worried about you as your torticollis refused to go away. I took you to physical therapy every week starting when you were three months old, and watched as young nurses and therapists played with you and cooed at you and wondered how they were doing anything that I couldn't. I nursed you every few hours, and marveled at how easy it was. Even when you weren't good at something, like lying on your tummy, it seemed like it was because you knew you would get to it eventually, that you thought this stage was good enough for now. That is how we began to believe that you had been here before.

You laughed in your sleep when you were three weeks old, a full laugh with your whole belly. You scowled before it should have been possible. At five months old you started kicking all the time you were nursing, laughing, talking to yourself, demanding to be moved from side to side every minute. You never got to move past that phase. Other things happened, your parents went through some tough times, your sister turned four. We couldn't wait for your first birthday.

And then, just like that, your life turned upside down before it had even begun. Less than a month before your first birthday, your mother was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer. Within six days, you were weaned. If your eyes hadn't seemed like those of an old soul before, they quickly took on that tenor, as you looked at me in the mornings with confusion, as I walked past your bedroom in the mornings crying while your dad fed you a bottle.

I wish I could say that I protected you from cancer, but you were so little that I didn't know how. I made sure to never cry around your sister, but I thought you were too little to notice, so sometimes I just held you and wept. How could I know that you would get angry, refuse to start talking, never let anyone else put you to bed, start to call your pacifier your mama when you did decide to say some words? How I wish I knew what could have been different for you if things had been, well, different.

How I worried that you would never know me, that you would never remember me and I would be a story that someone else told you someday. I still think about that, and I wonder if I will be the mother you remember, or if someone else will take that role. Your father will tell me to never put voice to that idea and he will be angry with me for saying this, but I like to think that you will have a mother, and of course I want that mother to be me. If that isn't in the cards, I want to say on the record that I just don't want you to grow up without that influence.

Mothers can teach sons things, it seems to me. We can teach you to calm down, to clean up after yourselves, to not trust in this idea that boys will just be boys and therefore get away with things that girls cannot. We can teach you what women are really like, even when, or especially when, we are not like what many people expect women to be. But I cannot teach you how to be a different Augie. I cannot teach you to be still, or quiet, to be unhappy. I cannot figure out how you know how to use every piece of technology in our house, why you look through a cooler of juice boxes and pull out a beer, or why you love all animals to such distraction.

I can't even take credit for looking like you. Everyone tells you how much you look like your dad. Until last summer, I at least looked like you in the sense that we were both redheads. No matter how vain you might find this statement, it actually grieves me to not have that in common with you and your sister anymore. I know my hair is dark auburn, but I need to face the fact that I am really not a redhead anymore, not like before. Thirty five years of "redhead" being a huge part of my identity, thirty years of pretty hair getting me a lot of things that I wanted and a lot of other things that I didn't, and chemo has, apparently taken that from me. Lenny will remember being with her mother when strangers stopped us in the streets to comment on our beautiful hair. No one will ever call out my hair as pretty now, and I look just like so many other moms in their thirties--nothing special there, nothing distinctive. But not so for you. Now, when we are out as a family, people ask where you kids get your red hair, and while Lenny looks so sad as she glances sideways at me while I wince, you just laugh and say "hair!." Your dad says we picked it up at the park. I want to say that it was the mailman. The real answer is so much worse. I want to say, I'm a redhead, like my son! He got that wild crazy curly red hair from me!

But who would believe that? While it saddens me, it makes me glad for you. You get to look like yourself, like your sister. You don't have to be so conspicuously associated with your mother. You can look like your dad and be handsome in that unassuming way. And you can remind me that there is something in me that you will always recognize, perhaps even if I am not here. You have given me that gift, among many others. You see pictures of me bald, and you say mommy. Pictures of me with long red hair, short dark hair, and it's still mommy. You see pictures of me as a teenager, as a child even, and you recognize me, when I can't even recognize myself when I look in the mirror every day. You see me, when I find it hard to see myself.

You are so much yourself that you remind me that being yourself is not a choice. It is the only option. If you are devious, and fearless, and empathetic and stubborn and happy and a little bit crazy, you probably always will be that way. The same is true for me, and perhaps I am a little bit of some of those things. Regardless of who we are, you will have spent almost all of your life with a mother who had cancer, you will on some level remember being torn away from me, and I hope that you will forgive me. I tried like hell to have you, and then you were here, and if you hadn't been here before, it at least seemed like you were here as long as I could remember. I will always regret that many of the biggest things of your life, like learning to walk, are but vague memories for me in my surgery and chemo-clouded brain. But they are memories all the same, and that is what I hope to have with you--memories upon memories. You are, after all, my last baby, my only son.

Two years have come and gone, and you will remember next to nothing that happened in this formative time in your life. You are reliant on witnesses, on stories. Let this letter, and this blog, be a part of that story for you. If you cannot remember, or if I am not around to tell you, you will know that you were wanted and loved, that you made us tired and you made us laugh. On some days you even made us remember ourselves in spite of ourselves.

Happy birthday, Augie. I love you.

Love, Mom

Day 19

So, for those who have been wondering, I haven't updated in a while because there's really not much to say. I was very busy at work for the last week, as my big conference took place and I stayed downtown on Wednesday and Thursday, since I didn't need to come home and nurse the baby. It was hard to be by myself on Wednesday, except that I enjoyed having the king sized bed to myself. It just really hit me that every show on network tv is some really violent cop show crap that you don't want to watch when you're thinking about your mortality all the time. Gabe came to stay with me on Thursday, and we went to dinner at the Lockwood and wandered around the loop, which was nice, while my mom babysat the kids. I think I only cried once that night.

So in the midst of my internal drama I managed to do all this stuff at work and take care of the kids and still feel kind of like I was living someone else's life. The conference happened, it was a success, and I managed to do a little bit of small talk, but not too much. They usually rely on me to do the non-economics talking, but I just couldn't get too deep into conversations about sports or other people's kids with my mind wandering back to the BRCA test or whatever all the time. And when little snafus happened, I had to admit that I wasn't worried in the least. Conference on the one hand, breast cancer on the other. Trump card, anyone? Cancer does give you that--I was able to ditch my own conference reception, using the logic that "due to an overwhelming case of CANCER I will be unable to attend."

Plus, I managed to catch Augie's cold, so I kind of sound like a dragon lady with this laryngitis, and talking would have been difficult regardless. The hardest thing about the conference was that last year, it happened two weeks before Augie was born, so I was as big as a house and waddling around. A bunch of people who saw me this year were telling me how great I looked (mostly men) or how pretty my hair looked (women). I really wanted to slug everyone who said something like that to me, but of course they have no clue, and that's my problem, not theirs.

Can you tell I haven't gotten over this part about not wanting to be bald? I just hate waiting and pretending to live a normal life while I know that soon I will be getting some prognosis handed to me, and then I will go through some horrible treatments that will make me look like a boy, an old lady, whatever. It's the public nature of cancer that's tough. You can't hide it like you could something else. If I suddenly show up at work with no hair, or with a scarf on or a wig, people are still going to know. And that's fine, but then you deal with the pity and the fear and everything. People cry around you and you wonder, am I the walking dead? Because right now I don't feel like it. I have a cold, but otherwise things are working pretty damn well.

I'm still mad about that--about taking a healthy body (except the cancer part) and putting it through hell, some of it temporary, some of it not, just to keep living. If you get hit by a car, that's immediate--the effects are right now, and I think that's easier to deal with somehow. This just creeps up on you. That's apparently especially true with breast cancer if you're nursing. Now that I'm no longer engorged, this tumor (I guess I do have two, plus a cyst) seems huge and feels like a jagged marble. It hurts all the time. It's like I was walking around and then WHAM. Cancer--big and obvious, and I and my husband must have been morons not to see it. There's no way anyone would have told me it was a clogged duct or anything but cancer if it felt like this. So of course I'm convinced it's much bigger, spreading, etc., but I'm being told it just feels different because the milk is gone. I wonder if I've had this the whole year I was nursing, or even when I was pregnant, but I couldn't feel it. Then it doesn't seem like I caught it so early. They still tell me I'm "lucky" I found it, but I think what they're really trying to say is what my ob told me straight out: "I think you saved your own life."

It's hard to be proud of that one. I shouldn't be doing that at age 34. I shouldn't have to be angry every time someone tells me a story about a 5 or 10 year cancer survivor. In 5 years, I'll be 39. My kids will be 9 and 6. In 10 years, I'll be 44, and my kids will be 14 and 11. Sorry, but that isn't good enough or long enough.

I'm going in to see my surgeon on Tuesday just so she can hopefully tell me I'm nuts and the tumors are the same size. They might be sick of me calling all the time, but I don't care. It's as if they diagnosed me, did a few tests, and said, yes, it's cancer, see you in a month. Now, that's not really how it's been, but this past 3 weeks has been infinitely longer than even the last month of pregnancy, or the first month in a wheelchair, or anything else I've experienced. I'm having very literal dreams about getting my BRCA test back and having a double mastectomy, and because I know how sad that will make me if I have to do it, I just need to KNOW. Damn this company with their patent and their $4,000 test and 2 week wait time. Women shouldn't have to go through that.

On that note, this whole experience makes me think a lot about the things in women's health that doctors don't know or even pretend to know. It seems like a huge number of women 45 and under who get breast cancer recently had babies, miscarriages, were nursing, just went off the pill, etc. And yet it's not related, they say. Then why did you ask me 7 questions about the pill in that questionnaire? And it's the way they talk about "choice" that kills me. If you have testicular cancer, they don't just say, ok, let's take them both, even if it's only in the one. With other cancers you don't seem to make as many decisions--they tell you what to do. It's as if people think you want to keep your breasts because they're breasts, and you're vain. Or that you could get rid of them because you don't need them. Well, you don't need your testicles, or your feet or arms to live either. I want to hang on to them because they're a part of my body and if they're not broken, I don't want to fix them. I'll do the stupid double mastectomy if I'm BRCA positive but I will not be happy about it. I just wish there wasn't this idea of "well, you could still do it even if it's not necessary" to make you second guess yourself all the time.

I mean, I don't think I would have done anything differently in my life if I had known I would get breast cancer. But I'm suddenly learning that there are risk factors that most women don't know about. You can't control many of them--like getting your period before you're 12, as I did. Or having your first baby after 30. I was 30 when Lenny was born, and almost 12 when I got my period, so does that put me on the breast cancer fence? But, if having my kids had anything to do with it, I would have done it anyway, and I am glad I got the chance before I found out. Also, I don't feel bad about being on the pill for 11 years. But I do wish they had a clue what was going on, because so many young women have this disease, and youth is not in your favor with cancer. Your body is not lazy, and neither is the cancer.

And neither am I, even though I've been a little bit more of a hermit. I've seen a lot of people this week, and have even been kind of social. If you see me, I will probably be talking about cancer quite a lot, but I'm finally capable of talking about other things. I still have my moments. I started crying at Lenny's second dance recital, wondering how many I'll get to see. I've done weird things, like let people who aren't my husband take topless pictures of me. I start staring off into space and get quiet, and I can't remember what we were talking about. But I'm out there. I might want to crawl into a hole when I'm bald and have a chemo port and I'm weak and in the middle of the nightmare, but maybe you all can come get me and bring me out so this summer and fall will seem a little brighter. Sound good?