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 853: Childhood, Defined

One of the unique markers of parenthood is that it gives you the opportunity to actually observe childhood. When you are a child yourself, you are just living your life, aware that you are small, but lacking the experience that informs what is special about childhood. Then, once you are grown, if you choose to have children, you see these once helpless people begin to do things for themselves. You observe a series of firsts, and you take an insufferable number of pictures, and you record the cute things that your children say, and you think back to how it was when you were their age. You juxtapose your own experiences onto theirs. The fleeting nature of time makes you wince, or cry, or hug them tighter. You think about how short childhood is, compared to the rest of life. You use words like innocent and precious.

You spend most of your time being hopelessly wrong about everything.

I took my daughter to school today. I recorded my feelings about leaving her at her first day of first grade. I lamented how sad her brother seemed to be that she wouldn’t attend Montessori school with him anymore. I shed a tear or two. I wished she would have looked up to say goodbye as I waved to her at the same time that I was glad that she was so greedily reading the new workbook at her desk.

I did what parents do. I thought about milestones, new phases in life. I acknowledged that in a blink of an eye that child will be in high school. I considered how absurdly fast six and a half years have gone, and part of me would have liked to hold that image of her tiny six year old body at her desk for a long time.

But only a part. The rest of me is happy for her and glad that she is big enough to do some things she couldn’t do for years, because I know that’s what she wants—to get older, all the time. I know that being little has its disadvantages. I’ve learned some things, perhaps due to the things that happened to me as a child. When traumatic things happen, you either choose to forget how you felt at the time, or your feelings are imprinted so strongly in your brain that it would be impossible to forget them, no matter how long you live. I am in the latter camp, and I can honestly say that I remember at least some of what it felt like to be a child.

It was hard. Now, don't get me wrong. I had a mostly happy childhood, in spite of everything. I was loved and had friends. My home life was troubled and we didn’t have much money but I was never hungry. I was girly, I was a tomboy, I was a lot of things. I worked. I shielded other people from difficult truths and from my own emotions. I kept a lot to myself. I learned how to say goodbye with grace—to people, experiences, old ways of being. But I had no control over what happened to me, and I remember that. I didn’t make big decisions. There was a world and I lived in it, in a small way. I was important, but not in charge. There were so many things that I didn’t understand, that adults didn’t want me to understand.

I don’t remember my first day of first grade, or of any grade. And that is not because the years have taken their toll with my memory. It’s because those days were just not that important to me. There are many, many other things that I do remember. Lenny might remember this day. She might not. Her brother might quickly get over her absence in his daily life. He might not. Their parents chose their reality, but could not choose how they felt about it.

Yesterday, the kids played so beautifully together for hours that I felt that something important had shifted. I figured that those 10 days together in the north woods, with no other kids to play with, must have caused it. And then I heard crying. Mommy, Lenny won’t play with me anymore. I want someone to play with me. And I walked into my daughter’s room, to see her reading on the floor while she ignored her wailing brother. She looked at me half-defiantly. I just want to be by myself.

And I know that—I have always wanted that, birth order be damned, I’m the younger one and I’ve been trying to be alone for 37 years. I’ve wanted to be alone as a child, a teenager, a young woman trying to figure out how to be in “adult” relationships where people actually want to be around you all the time, as a mom. I manage my family’s schedule such that I am by myself (usually exercising—walking, spinning, strength training—such good excuses) for at least two hours every single day. I got it, I understood her.

And I took the book out of her hand. Lenny, this is the last day that you have to play with your brother without worrying about homework or your school schedule. You will play with him all day.

I was being a tyrant, making decisions for her that I knew went in opposition to what she wanted. I expected a fight. She just smiled, summoned up that coddling tone of voice that makes her sound like a grandmother and said, OK Augie do you want to play marbles? I’ll let you have the shooter.

Because she understands. She and her brother have been figuring out how to balance their different temperaments all their lives. They are only successful at it because they love each other so much, and because they both understand, she more than he, how little time they have to be together.

He knows, to some extent. He talks about not seeing Lenny every day, and we assume he means because she is no longer at his school, but really, he means, someday I know we will live in different places. So he grabs what he can. He wants her next to him when he’s eating a snack. I see him look at her lovingly and then check himself, right before he puts her in a headlock. He says Lenny I am trying to wrestle with you.

I am trying to love you.

So she elbows him in the ribs, just like we taught her to do, and loves him back.

They know about the arc of life, and its complexities, just like we do. It’s just so hard for us to admit that they know. So they shield us from their understanding.

Gabe had offered Lenny a test run of our new routine, telling her on Sunday night that we could wake up early (7, maybe) on Monday morning and see how long it took to walk to the bus stop. I have been having trouble sleeping for the past week, perhaps worried about dropping my small child off with drivers I don't know, entrusting three different sets of parents with her after school care. I woke up around 3:30 yesterday morning and was restless. Around 4:00 I woke Gabe up, which is easy enough to do. Around 5, he emerged from our bed naked and went to the bathroom. He came back right away, looking petrified. Lenny’s awake. Both of us thought, oh no, did she hear us? And I asked what she was doing.

She was sitting quietly in bed reading The Secret Garden, one of those classic children’s books where the protagonist is an orphan with a total bullshit situation, waiting for us to wake up so we could walk her to the pretend bus. She didn’t mention hearing anything. She didn’t mention her dad walking naked in the hall.

She spared us, like so many other times. Like the time when she asked me where babies came from, when I was in the middle of writing a piece for work at home. I decided to take her literally. She didn’t ask about sex, after all. She wanted to know how a baby could be inside a woman’s stomach and then emerge into the world. I told her about the uterus, and that babies are born through women’s vaginas. She thought I was insane but ultimately decided I couldn’t make that shit up. She reasoned that because she had a uterus and vagina, she could one day have babies but her brother could not. I said he could have them in the sense of being a daddy to them, but he could not give birth to them like she could. So she asked, so what does the daddy do? He just has to marry the mother?

And I fed her a snack, not yet ready to get into the whole thing. Because what will I say? I’m no good at telling lies. I can’t be one of those parents who talks about fallopian tubes and zygotes and sperm as if any of that bears any resemblance to what a kid wants to know. I can’t be one of those parents who says sex is something you do when you’re an adult, when you’re in love, a man and a woman blah blah. Because none of those things are true. I remember learning the facts of life, from one of those books that my mother read to us. She allowed us to laugh at the funny parts, which was pretty much all of it. I was maybe 3 or 4, my brother 6 or 7, the same ages as my kids are now. My mom answered our questions—the ones we felt we could ask. I never asked the only question I wanted to ask.

Is that it? There has to be more to it than that, right?

Because I knew that I was a child, and my mother was a mother, and she would not know how to answer that question right then. Just as Lenny knew to pretend to go back to sleep and wait a few hours for the test run. Just as she will probably never ask about the rest of the facts of life—we will just have to offer the information. She doesn’t really know, and yet—she does. She’d like to spare us the trouble.

She knows that adults get to do things kids don’t get to do. I always say, who makes the rules? And she says you do, but I make the rules for my guys (stuffed animals). She believes this to be true. She believes I make the rules for Gabe, though I let him make some of the rules some of the time. And that’s what being a parent is—making the decisions, taking that burden on yourself. My daughter wasn’t sad to go to a new school—how could she be? She has been in daycare since she was three months old. I was not letting go of her and entrusting her in someone else’s care for the first time. She made it clear that at first she did not want to go to this school for “gifted” children, as she wanted to be in school with her best friend. Then she changed her tune, saying she wanted to go but not for the whole 8 years. And now, she isn’t saying that anymore—and it’s not because of her new-found love for the place.

She knows she lost. We made a decision for her, and she had no say in it. She had to take the test and pass it, she had to get through the crazy lottery system. But then, we signed the papers and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. We aren’t alone. No matter what you do—stay at home until they’re six, homeschool until they’re 17, private school, public—YOU are making that choice for them because you feel it is the best one. Parents can tell themselves that their children should make choices, and that’s right. Small choices are empowering. And they are the only ones children get to make, as we shape their lives for them because we know better, because it is our job.

We switch their school or move to a new house in a new town and they see their friends less because they cannot control their own schedules or drive 30 miles. They get over it. Or do they? Lenny still remembers her best friend from her old daycare—and she hasn’t seen her in four and a half years.

Augie will get over not seeing his sister all the time. Or will he? He will accept it, of course, but it will make him sad and his sadness will be real, not a three year old sadness but the sadness of someone who understands that even your most beloved people leave and live their lives without you.

I know I sound dramatic. I should say that I do not believe that children are like adults, or even that teenagers are like adults. But I also don’t believe that childhood is lived the way that parents think it is lived. We think that kids don’t know that their childhood is short-lived—but they do. They know just about everything we know.

When I write a facebook status about my three year old telling me he will listen to me when he’s six, dozens of people "like" it. It sounds so cheeky. But he was serious. He was saying look, I know I won’t get away with this forever. When I’m six, I will be twice the age I am now, and maybe then I’ll start to mind. Of course, he won’t—not really. I never did. I never listened to a thing I didn't want to hear. Now, my parents might disagree. I was very well behaved. I never talked back. But WHY NOT? Because I knew that if I had a track record of being good, I could get away with more later. I did that at home, and I did that at school. At home, I minded, and I did well in school, and I didn’t cause trouble. So I got to drive my mom’s car, and be left alone in the house and go to parties. Hell I got to go to my boyfriend’s parents’ lake house for my 16th birthday—JUST THE TWO OF US. At school, I studied and wrote excellent papers and served as vice president of my class and volunteered—and so I got to wear what I wanted, and I never got in much trouble for ditching, and when I stopped trying entirely I was forgiven.

I can see what Augie will do, because I have done it myself.

How different am I today? How is adulthood that different from childhood? I think it is different in that we learn to keep things to ourselves, we gain coping mechanisms to manage our losses. But the things there are to keep, and the losses--those are really all the same. I still think about my best friend from 1st grade, who moved to the Philippines. I knew when she left that she would fade into the world and I would never know anything about her again. I wrote a story about her, and it won an award. I was seven.

When Augie tells me with pride that he can finally pump his legs while swinging, because Lenny told him to close his eyes, and he does that to concentrate but also because he says he feels like he is flying, I smile. I smile not because he is cute, but because he is RIGHT. When he gets stir crazy and needs some exercise and gets aggressive and out of control, I lose patience with him not because I don’t understand him but because I DO, and because I have learned how to tame myself and I don’t always know how to teach him. When a stranger stops me when I’m ordering ice cream and grabs my hand and says “my god you have beautiful children,” I look at them and not at her when I say thank you. I remember hearing about my hair all my life and how the attention made me cast my eyes down, and I want to say to her “you know, they are short, but not deaf. Why are you saying that to me, and pretending that they aren’t even there? I don’t have children at all, not really. They have themselves.”

They have themselves, and their experiences, which we are powerless to change, no matter how much we’d like to change them. Sometimes I think about the day when I will have to explain to Augie that I had cancer, and what that is, since he has no idea. He was just a baby—it would be like telling a child he is adopted, as if that should be relevant information in his frame of reference. But the thought lingers with me more and more.

Augie has been talking about death. He asks, how old will you be when you die? How do we die? When I die, I won’t see anyone anymore, right? He sits in the car on a long road trip with his “mama” in his mouth, and then he takes it out and asks, out of the blue, “When I am ten, will I die?”

These are questions that I do not answer correctly. Perhaps if he asked about a pet dying, or an old person, I could respond well. But he asks about himself, and I cannot bear it. I tell him not to focus on dying. We all die, but hopefully not for a very long time. We are all young and healthy now. And he nods and looks down, completely dissatisfied with what I am telling him. I ask who has been talking about dying at school, as if he couldn’t have had the thought in his own mind. He makes something up to pacify me. Gabe tries to help, and tells him that there are three ways that people die: They get old, get sick, or get in an accident. Lenny chimes in that you could get struck by lightning, which Gabe classifies as an accident. Then she says, or you could get sick, like…

And I shoot my dagger eyes at all three of them and say ENOUGH. WE ARE DONE WITH THIS CONVERSATION. Not even daring her to finish the sentence. She realized, I’m sure, that it was me she was sparing. After all, she couldn’t be sparing Augie. He let it go, then ran up to me, grabbed my face like he does when he wants a kiss, and said “hug.”

I don’t know why I worry about telling him. He already knows.

Day 823: A Mother's Perspective on Breast Cancer

I have been getting a little sick of my own perspective on things, so I asked for some other points of view. Here's my mom's guest post.

Guest Post by Martha Jacob

When you asked me if I wanted to guest write your blog, I said Sure, just let me get settled from our move.

We’ve – my second husband and I - left the townhome in Chicago and settled into a little bungalow in Oak Park – back home…kind of.

I raised you and your brother here. Lived here 30 years, as a young married, as a divorced woman going back to college in my late 30s, then working and then grad school in my 50s. You were born at West Suburban (your brother was born at Central DuPage when it was one small building in the middle of cornfields). You went to pre-school here (the teachers loved your sense of humor), grade school (you played violin and basketball and floor hockey and just a year of t-ball – as for baseball, you said you would rather be your brother’s biggest fan –and you were), junior high (where cliques were formed and you found out it was better to be on the outside and you went to the high school for math as an eighth grader – understanding geometry better than all of us), and high school (when you kept your emotions locked up in your tiny bedroom, much to my dismay and when, to my chagrin, you told me it wasn’t really fair to compare your heartbreaks to the holocaust – only following my mom I said– It could be worse, you could be leading your children into the gas chambers she would say, meaning my concerns were diminished and I wish I had remembered what that felt like).

You came home from Macalester for breaks on the Greyhound. I would pick you up at the station in Chicago on Harrison at 4 or 5 in the morning after your 8 hour ride and there you would be, Pumbaa doll strapped to your back pack, signaling that absolute disinterest in how you appeared to others – the groundwork as it were for your ability to go everywhere bald and care little how it looked to others, knowing it was important somehow to get that message across.

You chose the biggest bedroom with the half bath in the apartment we rented after we sold the house where you grew up. You were sick of little bedrooms with no closets for your great fashion sense – and I couldn’t blame you. The bedroom in the new apartment had a walk-in closet and fit it all…shoes included….so many many shoes.

Then after we fought over Jon being there (not that I cared since I loved him like a son, but that I did care because it was just too small an apartment) you became at, what, 22? the manager of a big apartment building where you saved the rent you didn’t pay and bought a condo at age 25. I kept asking myself – Who is this kid? Your dad and I did not exactly set that kind of example. You worked to buy your own clothes from the time you were 15 – babysat at 11 (I hated babysitting). You knew how to do it.

We spent summers together at Rehm Pool. Summers I treasure, talking about everything, for many years, your hard break up with Jon – your best friend for so many many years – my job, your jobs, my foray into grad school, your foray into grad school, your new and forever love Gabe, and then, my marriage-to-be.

Never again I said, but never say never is so so so so accurate. I moved from the apartment to Chicago. You were dating Gabe, loved him, he loved you, the time was right, and you married him a little over a year later.

You found the house in Beverly, had Lenny, had Augie, had breast cancer. Weaned Augie overnight and our worlds crashed.

I kept saying I wish it were me. You looked me in the eye and said Mom, that doesn’t help.

It’s not fair. We both said. And it wasn’t – it isn’t. It wasn’t fair to lose that beautiful hair. But it was, of course, in the end, hair. It wasn’t fair for you to be terrified. I will never forget the look on your face the morning you came down the stairs where I was sleeping on your couch to be there with the kids while you went off for surgery. Would they have to do a mastectomy? Would it spread to the lymph nodes? Would you wake up with the cancer gone?

No mastectomy (oh I anguished over that – moms want everything done to the extreme if there is any chance – you did your research as you are so good at doing and knew the difference was not worth it). No spread. But no clear margins and so another surgery.

Not fair. But clear margins finally.

Heart problems from chemo. Acupuncture, scares, second thoughts. You worked through chemo, ran from radiation in your neighborhood first thing in the morning to whatever else it was you needed to do. I went to chemo once, radiation once. I needed to. Gabe took so much on (and how scared he was). Your friends took on meals and babysitting when I didn’t. The support you had was incredible.

All the while bald and, as always, in fashion (something I know nothing about except to know you are). All the while exercising like it was saving your life (and on so many levels, I imagine it has), spinning, eventually even rowing – rowing? The kid who would rather be the fan?

Lenny remembered what it was like to wake up when Mommy had hair. But except for that once or so when you wore the wig or scarf, you made it clear that this was the situation and that was that.

Two years later, I gratefully write this guest blog. Grateful because you wrote it for those long days and months and I could read it and know what you were thinking because you didn’t hide your emotions in that small room. God I needed that. We have always pretty much been honest with each other, but that kind of honesty became the grace that we all needed to get through this with you….since we, I, couldn’t do it for you.

I said to you once and of course I didn’t need to point it out. But I said, You have to understand, You’re my Lenny. Can you imagine if it were you going through this with her?

Scientific advancements being what they are, we will assume that will never be the case. We have to. We, I, you, can’t do anything else.

But of course, we will go through whatever has to be. That is what people do in this situation.

There are no heroes. There are only people who do what they have to do because others are out there loving them, expecting, imploring, begging them to do whatever it takes to be there. Cancer, like any terror, changes the game. And it changes it forever. How I wish I could take away the wait for those few years to pass for you to feel (not get) the all clear. You may well get it way before you will ever feel it I imagine.

So yes, I gratefully said Sure I will guest write the blog. It’s the least I can do. You did the rest. You.

Not Gabe, not me, not your friends, not your doctors, not your legions of other types of supporters….although thank goodness for all of them.

You.

Love,

Mom

Day 783: One of Those Days

Boy am I having one of those days. You know what I mean, right? One of THOSE days! One of those days where I:

Sit in my windowless office at work feeling like I’m crawling out of my skin, with tears rolling down my face for no discernible reason, except that I am experiencing these new-to-this36-year-old woman mood swings brought on by hormone changes from my second puberty, and because I am unaccustomed to such displays of emotion, especially in inappropriate settings, I begin to think about all kinds of things that just make me more sad and nostalgic and depressed and really, just verklempt, things like:

The age I was when these moods would have been normal, and I was just living so completely, and it seemed like everything was new--my body and boys’ bodies and cars and friends I knew I would never keep and getting drunk and that whole process that is just so cliché and so real, that time when you become yourself—and the idea of a future and how hard life was, in a real and adult way even though I was really just a child

The childhood I had, or didn’t have, the way I see children who are so at home and confident in their bodies and their minds, and the things that I learned having never felt that way from the time I was six years old

The fight I had with my husband this morning that I didn’t know how to fix nor feel inclined to fix, the conversation I had in my head that began, well, it is his fault, yes but who cares what is the point in sitting on the train next to your partner and lover in silence, and being too stubborn, with a fuse too short, and too much baggage weighing down everything we’ve been through and knowing I should change and just forget it but also knowing that I’m too stubborn and I won’t

The fact that I just don’t do things the right way, the knowledge that I love to be alone even though I have those beautiful children and a young loving husband and friends whom I will meet with on several nights this very week, and that I will just have to tell myself that my kids like to know that I’m there, and that for us, “there” is relative, they don’t necessarily care where or what I’m doing but they want to know that I’m THERE, that I exist, that I come home to them, that I will always come home to them

The guilt I feel over how much I’ve needed a vice over the last few years, and how bad I am at achieving that, so rather than go for something really good, like an affair or a gambling addiction or a drastic and irrational career change, I have gone for the one thing I shouldn’t do and have started drinking regularly which for me means like one drink a day, an amount that even my mother approves of, since it helps me sleep and it is oh so hard for me to sleep, showing that I’M NOT EVEN GOOD AT THAT, and that vice has led me to gain a few pounds, literally, as in two, and that is the OTHER thing I’m really not supposed to do, damn weight gain, and because even that two pounds bothers me for various reasons I know I need to just stop and GODDAMN IT WHY CAN’T I JUST HAVE A VICE?!

The conversation I had the other night with a woman who is at the early stages of dealing with this damn disease, who doesn’t know when she will get surgery, or if she needs chemo, and is hoping she can escape it all, and I tell her that I wish she could too but we both know that she can’t, and I say just think about it it’s like any other disease that people deal with, you take medication for things like epilepsy and diabetes and heart disease and this is just a version of that, look at me, it’s two years later, you are just beginning but it does get better, and she says well maybe I could just be like Steve Jobs and do alternative treatments and I think to myself, Jesus I hope he is not the goal, and I say out loud, well think of it this way, surgery and chemo suck but it’s better than being dead, and she laughed in such a real, appreciative way, she slapped the table and said thank you, I will remember that on my bad days, I will tell myself, ok, this sucks, But it’s better than being dead.

The thought that of course this is better than being dead, it all is, all there is in the world are things that are better than being dead, but if I could I would dedicate my life to the opposite of feeling dead and just feel alive alive alive all the damn time and no it's not cancer that made me feel that way, I have always felt that way as long as I could remember, but I've had to get that extraordinary feeling within this very ordinary life

Yeah, one of THOSE days. So I wrote this. And, this. As always, thank you for reading. I guess they can't all be funny. And I only have about 36 hours a month where I am even capable of being this deep, so it won't be long till I'm back to talking about completely inappropriate things. Promise.

Conversation with a Bald Eagle
by Katy Jacob

How strange to learn that eagles truly have faces,
in the same way our children have faces.
What is normally but a silhouette is now close enough to study.
I can see the beak protruding from the white head,
and it could be a picture, but for the circling.
Circling so gracefully, the world seems to pause.
I am mesmerized, rooted inside the time he has made.

Then I come to and paddle the boat faster,
away from the loons I am sure the eagle seeks.
I hope he will stay near me; I am lost in fascination.
And sure enough, he follows, getting closer.
There are no sounds but that
of my feet on the paddles and the wind in the water.
The loons are in hiding.
There is no one but me on the lake.
I slow down, stop, and wait.

He hovers, and it occurs to me
that he is thinking, how strange to see
that egg turning towards me,
why is that small bird inside such a large blue nest?
I think of the phrase “bird of prey.”
I am in limbo, in short sight of the house,
but I will need to fight the waves to get there.

We seem so small to one another,
given the distance between air and water.
Neither is sure of the other’s intentions.
Eventually, I begin to paddle home,
and he leaves me, heading north.
It is good to come to such an understanding.
I realize we all feel this alone.

It is worth knowing the right names for things.
One bird’s meal is another’s final mistake.
One man’s symbol of hope is another’s death omen.
It is important to understand that the one is a privilege,
the other a certain promise.
The rest is just air filling in the circle,
helping us to forget what lies right outside the perimeter,
in the space where we are and we aren’t.

Day 747: What's In a Word? The "Skinny" on Breast Cancer

Recently, I saw that someone had commented on my blog about reaching the critical 2 year cancer-free mark, “that was really good. Why does she keep talking about being skinny?”

It’s a valid question. So I thought I’d explain.

Cancer is a disease that seems to scare the collective shit out of us all so badly that we are always looking for a way to explain why it exists, and then to say, see, that’s why I won’t ever have cancer. Breast cancer is even worse than other cancers in this regard. There’s the infamous “is it in your family?” question that people ask, since now everyone and her mother is “aware” of the BRCA gene, but no one seems clued in to the fact that only a tiny percentage of women with breast cancer of any age are actually BRCA positive. Besides that genetic factor, however, which is clearly not your fault, most of the other breast cancer risk factors we focus on have to do with things that are already sensitive subjects for women. Things like drinking, and diet, and exercise habits, and breast density.

Things like weight.

See, being overweight is one of the only known risk factors for breast cancer, along with a sedentary lifestyle (isn’t that a risk factor for most bad things?). I have to point out that almost all risk factors are determined for estrogen-positive breast cancer, and are studied primarily in post-menopausal women. Risk factors for triple negative breast cancer are mostly unknown, and researchers seem completely at a loss to explain risk factors in young women. But I digress.

Now, if one is overweight and becomes diagnosed with breast cancer, I’m not sure what one is supposed to do with that information. Hang her head in shame? Because, look, just about everyone in this country is overweight; we focus on this as a major public health issue all the time.

So most people are overweight. And yet, most people don’t get breast cancer.

And furthermore, only 5% of the 1 in 8 women who will have breast cancer in her lifetime are under age 40 at diagnosis. Only 2% are like me, and are diagnosed before age 35.

How many of us are overweight at diagnosis? Is weight even actually an issue for very young women with breast cancer? The answers aren’t clear.

And yet we have to constantly be told to watch what we eat, to try to be thin, to be active, or the presumption is that cancer will return and it will be our fault.

But what if we were already thin and active, and we got that shit anyway? It starts to get tiring.

I want people to get out of my size 26 pants and start thinking about how this focus actually makes breast cancer survivors FEEL.

It is a strange burden for someone like me, someone who has always been naturally small and then went through a period in her life, like many women, when I wasn’t small anymore. I gradually put on about 15 pounds over the 11 years I took birth control pills. When Gabe and I met, I was 27 years old, a healthy size 4, at 5’5” and about 125 pounds. Even then, I felt big to myself, having been tiny throughout my teens, graduating from high school at 5’4” and maybe 100 pounds.

Then, I got pregnant, gained about 40 pounds, and had one hell of a time losing that baby weight. I would nurse 8 times daily, work out 3 hours a day and eat small portions of healthy food and it didn’t make a difference. I never ovulated after Lenny’s birth, even though I was having regular periods starting about three months after I weaned her. I had my thyroid checked and it was borderline abnormal but not enough to warrant treatment. And I’m telling you, I just knew something wasn’t right. Well, now we know what it was—my hormones had blown up and I had the beginning glimmers of triple negative breast cancer. But of course, we didn’t know that then.

When I got pregnant with Augie, after taking clomid for one cycle, I weighed about 140 pounds and was a size 8. I felt enormous, though Gabe told me I looked amazing. The day before Augie was born I weighed 178 pounds—more than my husband. Then, I gave birth to that crazy kid, and everything changed.

Damn, did that little boy jumpstart my metabolism and bring me back to myself—my real self, the way I always was before medication and pregnancy. Within six months of his birth, I was down to what I had been when I got married. I just kept losing. I had a ton of energy and started having normal cycles when he was 3 months old even though I was exclusively nursing. When he was 11 months old and I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I weighed what I weigh now: 117 pounds. I was a size zero or a size two, as I am today.

I finally felt like myself again, and then this shit happened. And now every day I have to ask myself if I had breast cancer because it was hard for me to lose the baby weight, or because I gained weight from the pill. All the while, I know that it might be the other way around—cancer might have done a number on my hormones, making it hard to lose weight. Who knows? Wasn’t it bad enough to just have had those issues, without putting the guilt of cancer on top of it? And isn’t it bad enough that I was thin and healthy and feeling great, and then I found out I had cancer growing in my body for years, and now my thinness is considered some kind of requirement for making it to age 40 when other people have no such judgment on their frame? Isn’t it bad enough what breast cancer actually does to your body, and to your body image?

Isn’t cancer bad enough?

Here’s my gripe. We focus so much on women’s bodies and what they look like, how they are shaped, and it’s ridiculous.

I wish being small had saved me from having breast cancer. But it didn’t. I also don’t think that having extra post-baby weight for a few years gave me breast cancer. It just seems like people want to be able to look at you and know why something bad happened, and we focus on the size of breast cancer survivor’s bodies because we are collectively obsessed with focusing on women’s bodies in general.

I have heard so many ludicrous things about my body since this so-called journey began. Apparently, these 34bs are just an abomination of smallness in the breast lexicon, as mammography technicians, surgeons, nurses, and others remark about my “small breasts.” Before cancer, I never thought I had small breasts. Perky, yes, but you know, I thought they were nice. They seemed adequate. Boys and men seemed to like them pretty well. All of a sudden, they were problematic, annoying for mammograms, difficult for the purpose of lumpectomy, and full of that god-awful “dense breast tissue” that apparently is trying to kill us all.

I have heard that I didn’t burn badly from radiation because I don’t have body fat on my chest and therefore “there’s nothing too deep to burn—you know, it’s like deep-frying a turkey; the fat burns hottest.”

Wow, you really just said that to me.

I’ve been told that I won’t feel this injection or this 7 inch needle, but oh wait, yes you will, you’re thin, so it will hurt. I’ve been told I should get a port even though “it will look weird on you because it will stick up on your chestbones.”

Again, wow.

“Your arms are thin but muscly so therefore your veins really roll, and it might be hard to get this IV in.”

Did you just blame your professional incompetence on my goddamn VEINS?

“Surgery will be easy on you! You’re skinny! We love skinny patients!”

We don’t love you back.

“You would have never felt that tumor if you had weighed even 10 pounds more.”

Thanks for scaring the shit out of me as I eat this piece of pizza.

“Wow you are in great shape! Keep it up! That’s the best defense against cancer.”

Well, it didn’t help me before.

You get what I’m saying. One of the most infuriating things about being a woman going through a difficult medical issue is how you are suddenly just DEFICIENT. Everything about me was suddenly wrong: my breasts, my veins, my everything. They gave me a chemo dose based on a 126 pound woman when I was lucky to weigh 113 going into treatment each time. It’s like they wished I was someone else, because then life would be easier for them. Do you think men have to listen to this shit? I’m sure men with testicular cancer are not subjected to tirades about their misshapen balls, chastised for having beer bellies or for having chicken legs, or told that their ventricular structure is just WRONG.

Here’s what I really want to get at—can we just stop? Stop talking to women about their body types all the time? I’ve been hearing this since I was a little girl: oh you’re skinny. Well, sue me. Now don’t I sound like a bitch saying that?

Yes, apparently I do. According to a recent article in Glamour magazine, women (more than men) are judged based on their body type for different personality traits by strangers. Heavier women are more likely to be considered lazy, on the one hand, and nice on the other. Thin women are seen as competitive and driven and also…bitchy.

I’ve heard that one before. Friends joke that they call me that skinny bitch. Girls in high school would say, hey you’re skinny…I hate you. People are always surprised when I am laid back. I work out a lot and people assume that’s because I’m vain, rather than that I’m just a hopeless insomniac or because I don’t want to die from recurrent breast cancer. Think about it. You look at someone and think it’s ok to call her a bitch, or say that you hate her? I know they are figures of speech, joking expressions. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother me.

So, I talk about being skinny, even though I’m not actually skinny, because people talk at me about it all the time. Gabe said to me a few weeks ago, I just don’t get it. You’re not skinny. You have a soft belly and strong legs and arms and that bodacious booty! Why do people say that to you?

The sad thing was, his comment kind of hurt my feelings. And that fact highlights that there’s 36 years of reasons for me talking about this now.

When I was a tiny little kid, I found out I had epilepsy. The medication was really toxic and did a number on me. Eventually it made me gain weight, at the same time that it made me never want to eat. My parents worried that I had an eating disorder. In third grade, when I was no longer tiny but also not big at all, a boy asked me if I was pregnant. I was eight. And I still remember that.

When I was hit by a car in 4th grade, I was weighed in the emergency room as they medicated me and contemplated surgery that never took place. I secretly hoped to weigh 50 pounds because I thought that would be a nice round number. I was disappointed to only weigh 45. Upon telling this story years later, laughing at the fact that I was able to distract myself from my own potential death or paralysis by focusing on the scale, a friend told me “Damn Katy. There are healthy three year olds who weigh 45 pounds.”

In 9th grade, my English teacher berated me for my size all the time. Now, she was a heavy woman, and kids made fun of her for that, which was terrible. But I wasn’t like that—I never would have made fun of someone for being big—my mother raised me right. I didn’t like her much, because her class was boring and she was mean to me, but I never said a negative word to her or about her and I continued to get straight As. But really, who was this teacher to ask me if I was anorexic? To tell me I shouldn’t wear shorts because my legs were so skinny? To ask me if I ever ate? Me, that 14 year old who ate like a horse and was just getting used to the idea that girls did this thing called “dieting,” since no one did that in the neighborhood where I grew up, where I often heard such backhanded compliments as “well, you’re fine for a skinny white girl,” or “at least you’ve got a nice booty.”

For a. At least. What bullshit. What man has to listen to this crap? You can be as skinny as Mick Jagger, as big as Tony Soprano or as ripped as 50 Cent, and some women will still be throwing their panties at you trying to get next to you. Guys just work what they’ve got, buy clothes based on their actual body measurements, and focus on other things. And we let them. As a society, we give them permission to be themselves.

I mean, Gabe will talk about how he wishes he could get huge guns like some guys, he will glance a little wistfully at his own muscular arm, and then he will shrug and move on with his life. When we moms were relaxing on mother’s day after the breast cancer walk, we were talking at one point about legs, because I was hot and I needed to put some shorts on and other moms don’t like their legs and therefore don’t wear shorts. The guys were all at the park talking about the Avengers or something, and one of them kept stripping down out of the multiple layers of clothes he was wearing. I’m doubtful that the shape of legs, the relative hairiness thereof, or anything else related to any one of their bodies was on the agenda that day at the park.

We do this, because we are taught at very young ages to do this. I can’t stand having to listen to people comment on my daughter’s size. Yes, goddamn it, she’s little. So freaking what. SHE IS SIX YEARS OLD. Why are you looking at her body? “oh, she’s so tiny!” “She’s such a peanut!” “Do you feed her? “ (Yes, idiots have asked me if I fucking feed my daughter). “She’s so petite! The boys must love her!” What? Are you sick?

Not off the mark, though. Little boys have said they like Lenny because she’s cute and little. Dads have remarked about how thin she is, and said that it’s good she got my body type and not Gabe’s. Thanks for making me know that you have checked out both me AND my little kid.

We had to switch pediatricians because of Lenny’s small stature. He kept telling us she wasn’t big enough, she wasn’t heavy enough, and that we should feed her butter and whipped cream to fatten her up. Seriously—that was his medical advice. He made me feel like a bad mother. And other people made me feel that way too, as they glanced askance at my small baby and talked about how proud they were of their kid who was 90th percentile. What was that about? Were these moms implying that their baby could kick my baby’s ass? What is WRONG with people? Anyway, finally we changed doctors and he, being a very slight man himself, never seemed to take much notice. She sleeps all night? Is active? Smart? She’s fine. At one point he was worried because she only showed up as 2nd percentile on the weight scale.

“Look Doc, I’m second percentile too. Someone has to be second, or they wouldn’t be percentiles, would they?” He laughed at that, and then helped me stop Augie from escaping the room in a mad flash.

And I thought to myself, second percentile. Yes, that’s true. And she can do cartwheels on the balance beam. She can do multiple pull-ups in a row. She can hang on a bar in the park forever, holding up her 34 pounds with those impressive little biceps. She’s not lacking in the brains department either. Hell, she’s arguably smarter than me. And her doctor. And lots of other people.

And she is so awesome, just the way she is. Today I told her that we were going to take pictures for the blog, because I was writing about how people always comment on who is big or small and it shouldn’t make a difference but I wanted to show that I was proud of her the way she is. She held up her hands and said “You should just like how you are. Right? You can’t change.” While Gabe was tearing up at this pronouncement , I said, more importantly, though, there’s no reason to—you’re fine just how you are.

And of course, she is fine, but her size has its advantages and its disadvantages. It will be both easy and difficult to find clothes that fit. She will be noticed, for better or worse. She will be aware of herself when she shouldn’t have to be, because she will remember how everyone talked about her being little from the time she was born. For every nice, reasonable respectful boy who is attracted to her in part because of her petite size, there will be another who preys on her for the same reason.

I should know. Especially in high school, I knew that my petite frame was one aspect of my general attractiveness to boys. It also made me a target, as boys who liked to wield their comparative large size and strength over others chose me as easy pickins. This fact made me hyper aware of my surroundings at all times, and, I’ll admit, it made me mean. I learned how to fight. I got good at it, even as I knew I could never win these fights based on strength or size alone. One time, when I was a senior, I went to an informal dance at my high school. A boy who had preyed on me before picked me up, trapping my arms at my side over my head, like I was a rag doll. He was high on something, and he told me he was taking me into the boys’ bathroom. He must have remembered that other time he picked me up and started to molest me, when I punched him in the face and head with my hands until he let me go, more out of shock than pain. There was no way I could fight him with the way he was holding me. He was a football player, so much bigger and stronger than me. He told me there was nothing I could do about it. I looked around and realized that even though there were thousands of kids there, no one was going to help me. My friends couldn’t see me, other people weren’t paying attention, and his friends were in on the whole thing, I’m sure. I thought I was beat. I was terrified. Then I realized something. I was sober, and I was smarter than him. I had to have some kind of advantage. What was it? Oh…

So I straightened my arms into a diving pose, sucked in my breath, made myself smaller and narrower than I thought was possible, and slipped right out of his grasp. I landed on my hands and feet, and I ran.

I told someone this story years ago and she said, I guess the moral of the story is that it’s good to be strong, so girls should work on that, but it’s also just good to have your wits about you.

I said, the moral of the story is that boys and men shouldn’t be sexual predators. My size and strength have jack shit to do with anything.

So let’s just stop. Stop talking about who is skinny fat, whatever that is, who is strong, who is curvy, who is tall or short, who is lopsided.

Someone once asked, ain’t I a woman? And I say, yes, you are. If you have two x chromosomes, you are a woman, so stop trying so goddamn hard to prove it. Apple, pear, or hourglass shaped? Still a woman. 2nd percentile or 98th? Still a woman. Big floppy breasts, small perky breasts, mastectomy scars? Still a woman. Long flowing hair, short pixie cut, bald as the day you were born? Still a woman. Long legs? Stumpy legs? Big muscles? Pencil arms? Curves all over the place? No curves at all? Gay? Straight? Kids? No kids?

Still a woman.

Is your body functioning correctly? Than claim it, own it. Not everyone is so lucky.

I have lost the healthy function of almost every single part of my body at some point: my legs, my brain, my heart, my left arm, my lungs, my liver, my sweat glands, my pectoral muscle, my immune system, my goddamn cellular structure. I have lost my hair. I have had chunks of my breast removed, leaving it indented on one side. I have gone through menopause. I have gained weight from medication and gotten so skinny from chemo that I could hardly walk. I have scars and tattoos. And I’ve been the same me the whole time—still small, still pissed off about a lot of things, still verbose, still sarcastic.

Still a woman. A woman who had breast cancer, and had to hear about her body, her hair, and her face all the time when she was worried about her life. That's the skinny, folks.

Day 466: Waiting on the World to Change...or Not

As I look around my completely disastrous house, filled with boxes, in a state of utter chaos as we wait to move, I find myself wondering if at some point in the last year we just completely lost our minds. I mean, really--at what point did we take leave of our senses, and decide to buy this new house with no clue when, or if, we could sell the other one?

I guess we decided to do it when the opportunity presented itself, cancer and terrible economy aside. I was reading an article in the Tribune today about how the current generation of young people are putting off major life decisions, like planning careers, getting married, and starting families, due to the economy. They are waiting for things to change, biding their time until the sun comes out again.

I was reading this story waiting for the part where it would make sense to me. This seems completely different from what happened to the generation that came of age in the Great Depression, when couples who grew up in the Depression got married after knowing each other for a week before he went off to war, when people continued to have children and try whatever line of work they could get and found out that life was actually really fulfilling anyway. Today, the options seem different--go to graduate school, wait, "turtle," hold out until things get better.

Maybe this makes no sense to me because I have never assumed that things would be better, I have never really had the expectation that life would offer me what I wanted. Shit, I have never really known what I wanted, outside of a general hope of happiness and a willingness to do what I need to do to support myself and those dependent on me. I never thought it made sense to wait, because waiting just means it's later, not necessarily better. So when I was young and single and making hardly any money I put myself through grad school and bought a condo. Why not? The worst that would happen is that I would fail and end up with next to nothing, and that was something I already knew how to do. I got married a year and a half after I met Gabe, which seems like a long time, but people have said things to us like "wow, what did you guys do, just go on a date and then get married?" as if we had some kind of shotgun wedding--at age 29. We bought a house when Gabe was self-employed and I had been at my new job for just a few months. We had our first kid relatively quickly. Now we're doing all of this crazy transitioning, right after going through one of the hardest things we could have gone through as a family--in the midst of that hard thing, actually--in one of the worst economies.

I wish I could tell some of these kids from the article what I didn't realize I already knew at their age. There never is a great job waiting for you, a perfect plan in motion for your family, a soulmate hiding around the corner. Granted, my goals were more basic, much more working class I suppose--I just wanted to graduate college, never having been married or pregnant, and I had no idea what else I should do if I succeeded. I didn't even expect to succeed, even though I had control over all of those things. I half expected for the other shoe to drop and the whole damn plan to go to hell.

But I knew I would work, because I had always worked, ever since I was around 11. I knew I would take an unglamorous job if I had to, because that's the only kind of job I ever really expected to have, even though I wanted to do other things. I had already had many of those types of jobs--including some that I really liked, such as being a secretary or a receptionist. When I actually ended up working at a job that coincided with my personal interests and mission, I was as surprised as I was when I was 14 years old and the boy I had a crush on actually had a crush on me at the same time. Boys had liked me for years, but never the "right" ones. When that finally happened, I thought wow, what a world, how strange is it that the person I noticed would notice me out of all of the other people there are to see! That's how I felt about working in the consumer advocate world I entered when I was 23. This is a job, and it's fun! I'm doing something I enjoy, and I am getting paid, albeit not a whole lot! But I never expected it. That's a different way to view the world.

I'm glad I never put anything off, never waited. If I had, I would never have this marriage, this family, these houses would not have waited for me. We might fail, I suppose, the market might never improve. But why would young people with everything to live for give up the chance of their own futures just because they might not get what they thought they wanted? They might not get that anyway, great recession or no. Some of the best things in life are the things you never planned to have, the dreams you never considered, the paths that just happened when the rest of your luck ran out.

That is some un-Katy, trite sounding shit and I know it. But I worry about how my kids will interpret their lives when they are being brought up in this upper middle class family, where they have everything they need for the most part and thank God they have not suffered much, but for the suffering I brought upon them with my cancer. I feel like everything I am, everything I've learned, has been due to something bad that happened to me, and yet I don't ever want anything bad to happen to my kids. So how will they learn to lean on themselves, to understand that life never had a plan for them, they have to plan something for life, and then be willing to just wing it? I hate all that shit about triumphing through adversity, but maybe that's what's going on with some of these college kids right now--they don't have experience with adversity, so it scares them, and they wait for it to go away.

Dealing with difficult shit is one of the only things I know how to do well. I would never say that I am not scared of things, but rather that fear is also something that I understand. I just feel like neither fear nor suffering should stop you from trying the next thing, since the alternative is not much of one. If there isn't a next thing that will happen in your life, it's because you're dead or in prison or some other inexorably bad thing has happened to you.

One of the things I ask myself when I have these strange motherly concerns or deep thoughts is, is it some kind of cosmic joke that I am someone's mother? Do I really have a clue how to do this? I call them rugrats and swat them on the butt and kick them out of the kitchen. I yell at them when they whine. I walked around bald and made them deal with the consequences of people's reactions to that. I was never really prepared to do this. But I did it anyway, and here we are, and sometimes we get a moment like we had today when I was looking at a picture of myself from a year ago, when I was bald and smiling into the camera though I felt completely inhuman, and Augie ran up to me yelling, picture of mommy! pretty mommy! As if every two year old son had seen such pictures of his mother, as if that was no stranger than the alternate perspectives shown here, mommy with the long legs and proportionate mommy.

If I had waited, that moment with Augie never would have happened. Here's to hoping something similar will come out of this crazy, potentially stupid, house decision. Some moment that makes the chaos worthwhile, because some strange and specific beauty will come out of it. Look, I'm not being sentimental. I will always be a person who had cancer as a young mother, wife, daughter sister and friend, no matter how long I'm around. My kids will always be the kids of that person. Maybe someday, whether or not I'm around to see it, they will dig deep and remember how our family did what we did during this cancer time, how we just kept looking at the next thing. And they will not be afraid, or they will be, but they won't wait to do whatever it is they're afraid to do.

I have no idea why I sat down to write this blog, because I ended up somewhere entirely different. But that's what I hope for my kids, oddly enough, that they don't go through life with expectations, but rather with the opposite of expectations--that their lives are filled with some slightly off-kilter anticipation. I hope they just go ahead, my God I hope they just DO something. I can't expect to be there to see what it is they do, but then again you never know. Maybe I will be, and wouldn't that be a trip? We'll just have to wait and see.