Even when rendered illogical and unreasonable, she by raging adolescent hormones, me by the effects of Tamoxifen, we are as two peas in a pod. We have the same hands. We love dark chocolate-covered anything, ice-cream, the smell of books, toasted coconut pancakes from Cost Plus World Market and The Daily Show. We are almost the same height, and she can walk in my shoes. We know we fill the heart of a husband and father. We know anything can happen, but sometimes we forget.
When she was a baby, I was one of those mothers who picked her up the moment she began to cry at night. My mother encouraged me to do so, telling me there would be plenty of times as an adult when my daughter would have to cry alone. So far, there is only one time when I have not been there to hold her when she just needed her mother. As I lay in the ICU following a mastectomy and DIEP flap reconstruction surgery, my hands empty, she cried herself to sleep.
On this Wordless Wednesday challenge, it makes sense to choose as a favorite picture of me, one that captures me holding my girl, the summer before she entered what I once heard Whoopi Goldberg brilliantly describe as “the teen tunnel.”
I don’t care much for today’s WEGO Health Challenge that aks if my health condition were an animal what would it be? It reminds me of those frivolous team-building activities often employed to “break the ice” at professional retreats or new employee orientations. We’ve all been there, and I know I am not the only one who silently groans when a well-meaning facilitator announces, “We’re gonna’ start with a quick icebreaker. Go stand next to someone you don’t know. . . . ” or some version of that scenario.
The ensuing game will require a level of cooperation and politeness, with us showing our best sides as we reveal little known facts about ourselves, or the ever popular “two truths and a lie.” Playing along, we will make something up about what kind of car, animal, vacation destination most represents our richly varied personalities or which historical figure we would invite to dinner or what we would buy if we had all the money in the world. I understand the purpose, but in this case, the “ice” is breast cancer, and we have been skating around on it for too long, spinning on its euphemisms and platitudes, treating it like an allegory. Time for real talk about breast cancer.
Along with a low tolerance for bullshit, a diagnosis of breast cancer exposed within me a fortitude that surprised me and just enough good humor to assuage the unbelievably insensitive words and actions of people I had expected to be kinder. Being playful about breast cancer by comparing it to an animal, real or imagined, rubs me the wrong way.
I suppose if I played along, the animals crossing my mind would be the kind we associate with unwelcome guests – a snake crawling on its belly imperceptible in the desert grass, a cunning chameleon, a rodent scuttling along the boards in the attic, a cockroach in the corner of the shower. Each one unwelcome, a thief in the night who slips through an unlocked window while you slumber, barely disturbing the contents of your home, but nonetheless leaving you feeling violated and unsettled, unable to pinpoint what was stolen from you. Uncertain.
In life before breast cancer, I rarely felt such unease, but like Rip Van Winkle, I am no longer as sure of what awaits when I wander down once-familiar roads. The fast and furious flurry of appointment-making and data-collection at the beginning of the journey has been replaced by something akin to the routine of one who has been forced into exile. Banished by breast cancer to a new country, where ironically, I often feel like an unwelcome guest myself, a stranger in a strange land, wondering if an ice-breaker might be in order.
In the resumption of normal activity, the rules of engagement change. Nominally normal, this life interrupted forces me to make room for new experiences and customs, new words that have the power to transport me directly into and far away from fear. When cancer crept in, fear and uncertainty moved in too and show no sign of leaving. It reminds me of those times when our house is a mess and friends show up on our doorstep, unannounced, but overstay their welcome anyway, infuriating us by missing all the dropped hints and not-so-subtle signs that it really is time to be going. Wearily polite, we just resign ourselves to doing the mannerly thing and wait for them to leave rather than ask them to go.
If I were playing the ice-breaker game today, I might share two truths and a lie. The lie? Cancer is a gift. The truths would flow from poetry such as this by the inimitable Ted Kooser:
The third annual Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge begins today, and I’m in. As a disclaimer of sorts, lest I falter on the challenge to write thirty posts in thirty days, let’s consider this the April Fool’s Day post. That way, I’ll always have an out.
So why do I write about my health online? What was it that got me started? I suppose it was the cancer. But it was also growing up in Northern Ireland. Ironic, when I stop to consider the teenage version of myself, slouched over a desk at Antrim Grammar School, twirling her hair and whining with unparalleled ennui to her teachers that there’s simply nothing to write about. Be careful what you wish for. Out came the writing prompts, as they still do, provoking in adolescent students already bored with, well, everything, a reaction like this from my daughter during a recent practice run for the AIMS (Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards) Writing test: “Has technology improved life? Write a persuasive essay as to why or why not.”
Admittedly, the rebellious part of me that lives in my daughter, half-hoped that she would turn it in for credit, reminiscent of the impervious student in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, who, when asked to write an essay discussing how to resolve the staging difficulties inherent in a production of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” writes one sentence, “Do it on the radio.”
When I was my daughter’s age, I too rolled my eyes to the heavens when I opened the examination booklet to find some of these writing prompts. Beyond “What I did for my summer holidays,” I rediscovered hese gems in Section A of my 1979 O Level English exam. As I recall, I chose (b) and the detestable occasion most likely involved some skill I had not mastered in Domestic Science. I have to wonder who in her right mind would have picked (d) “The nearest I have come to committing a crime.”
Perhaps (i) should be. “A woman approaching 50 years of age still has her O-level English exam questions.” Write a persuasive letter to her in which you explain the merits of recycling.
Bear in mind, we were taking our O-level exams during turbulent times in Northern Ireland, just a few years after the end of Internment and two years before Bobby Sands refused food, thus beginning the Hunger Strike. Hardly a time of nuanced questions and circumspect diplomacy. I remember always being afraid of what went on behind the walls of Belfast’s Castlereagh Interrogation Centre. Eventually, police officers would admit that prisoners held there had been subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation, burned with cigarettes, systematically tortured into giving confessions. As my old friend, Roberto Reveles, once told me, “if you live long enough, eventually, you’ll see everything twice.” When those pictures emerged of a young and grinning United States Army Reserve specialist posing with a pyramid of naked Iraqui prisoners behind her in Abu Ghraib, my mind went back to the Castlereagh Road.
As a young woman, I never had any trouble thinking of things to write in my diary. Unprompted, I filled page after page with stories, some of them true, some embellished. Along with angst-filled poems, bits of social commentary, dried red leaves from maple trees that lined the roads upstate New York on my first trip to America, letters I never sent, and all those things I wished I’d said at the time, there was always plenty of material. A college student, just starting out away from home, I had all the time in the world to carve out an hour to to set down words on a page. But the business of adult living got in my way, and my cherished daily ritual gave way to other routines and responsibilities that turned out to be far less important, costly, and simply not good for me.
Even with a cancer diagnosis, the thing that everyone dreads, I have had to stop and remind myself that my career is but a thin sliver of my life, that my family matters most, that my well-being is my priority. Such words roll easily off the tongue, but unless reflected in daily practice, they ring hollow.
I was diagnosed on 11.11.11. At once, everything changed and nothing changed. I could be contemplating my mortality one minute and paying bills the next, shifting in an instant and imperceptibly, from the philosophical to the pedestrian. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. I am more awake to the fact that all these moments that make up a life, are not of equal weight. Some I want to freeze forever, others I want to forget immediately. But for too long, my priorities were askew.
In a 1992 interview, the late Senator Paul Tsongas reveals, “Pre-cancer, I was one of the pettiest people you’ve ever run into … I would get angry at my wife for leaving the top off the toothpaste. I’d get angry at my kids for the dumbest things. Looking back on it I feel mortified. I was a fool.” Taking stock, in Heading Home, Tsongas explains that it was a letter from an old friend, Arnold Zack, that helped put in perspective the senator’s promising political career:
No one on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time on my business.
In this same year, he also regretted choosing not to disclose the recurrence of lymphoma five years earlier, and he made a pledge to submit his medical records for review by independent experts should he ever run for office again.
At first, I disclosed my diagnosis to family, friends, and people who turned out to be anything but friends. All I knew about breast cancer was that it got me. It made no sense, because there was no family history, and three clear mammograms. Breast cancer was the thing that happened to other women. Too quickly, among my friends, I was that other woman, “the one who had cancer.” Apparently striking dumb those people who would ordinarily talk the legs off a stool, I ventured online to find the resources I needed to decipher a lexicon that grew only larger as I journeyed along a well-worn path taken by too many before me – detection, diagnosis, surgery, treatment, fatigue, depression, and fear of recurrence. A quick study, the politicization of breast cancer soon dawned on me. Duped, I had fallen for the mythology of breast cancer, with its attendant pink ribbons and platitudes, and I felt angry, sad, and stupid. April’s fool indeed. So I began to write about it, the way I might have done in my secret diary years ago.
If ever you doubt the power of writing to salve your soul, Dr. Cheryl Dellasega at Why Writing is Good For Your Health, suggests asking yourself the following questions:
What other form of communication allows me to edit until I get it right?
What other legacy can I create that’s as permanent as the written word?
Is there anything more soothing than the feel of my fingers flying over the computer keys as if playing a piano concerto with ease?
Is there any other non-chemical experience that allows me to enter another world as completely as literature?
In this space that writing affords, I have control. I can set down my story against the more mainstream stories of celebrities who have “conquered” cancer or women who “have it all.” I can lean back rather than Lean In. I can light the match rather than not burn the bridge that served only to keep me down and in the dark. In this space, if a visitor leaves a comment that is unkind or untrue or defamatory, I can place it in the trashcan, where it belongs.
At the beginning, I was neither brave nor bold. I felt like I was speaking out of turn if I expressed out loud the indignation and rage I felt towards the disease that would interrupt my daughter’s adolescence. Did I not know my place? After all, even in the face of estimates such as those of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, that by 2030 – when my little girl will be 31 years old – 747,802 women worldwide will die each year from breast cancer, NBCC’s deadline for The End of Cancer is January 1, 2020. Who am I to argue? But it is just seven years away, so I am nervous. Forty years ago, Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, which has been around since the civilizations of Ancient Greece. Still, we seem stuck on the treatment of it. The same regimen of some combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation is still at work, and cancer is still winning. Just ask those who are dying from it, those who have lost loved ones to it. Dare I ask out loud if it is realistic to set a deadline for ending cancer? I am not so sure as I once was, back when I did not pay as much attention to words unsaid. Those are the words that matter, and to remain silent is just not an option for any of us.
In Seamus Heaney’s ”Punishment,” harrowing and haunting, he evokes a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, and killed in a primitive, barbaric act which he juxtaposes with the ‘tarring and feathering’ in the Northern Ireland of his day. In this poem, lies a lesson I apply to myriad aspects of my life, including my health and why I write about it – like those other onlookers, he confesses he would not have spoken out against her punishment. With heartbreaking honesty, he tells the dead woman
Photo: Belfast Telegraph. Young woman tarred and feathered for getting engaged to a British soldier.
My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know the stones of silence.
Last July, I got lost on the Internet. As you do. On the way back Home, I bumped into Lesley Richardson, a self-proclaimed unpublished writer. Before long, I discovered that, like me, Lesley has badly behaved hair that she has learned to embrace, a husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, and a cat. She has just turned fifty, as will I in a couple of weeks. We immediately bonded over the shared trauma of life in 1970s Northern Ireland, not because of The Troubles, but because we had curly hair before brilliant minds invented products and tools to tame our stressed tresses and we were relentlessly compared to Crystal Tipps. You could be forgiven for assuming the content of Lesley’s blog is a bit questionable: Standing Naked at a Bus Stop but the story behind the title is that the mere thought of people reading her writing makes Lesley feel as though they have caught her naked … and standing. At a bus stop.
Such a condition might require a professional intervention, given that Lesley aspires to be a successful novelist, which by definition involves people reading her writing (thereby making her uncomfortable). People like me. Let me be quick to point out that Lesley has an agent, and she has already written a novel, which was probably fabulous. She’s been in an anthology too, so it’s not as if she’s technically “unpublished.” And then there is her blog. I love it, even though she neglects it for weeks at a time causing me to wonder if she might actually be “on assignment,” at a bus stop on the road to Helen’s Bay. The next time I go back home, I will definitely be looking for Lesley. When we meet, I’m convinced we’ll wonder how we managed avoiding each other for the first fifty years of our lives. The other day, I received from the lovely Lesley, a Versatile Blogger Award. Hooray! Between us, the versatility part is a bit of a stretch, bringing to mind the kind of nimbleness required by your Pilates instructor, but I’ll gladly take it. When you’ve been around for almost half-a-century, shameless self-promotion is definitely in order. Especially if you haven’t been promoted by yourself or anyone else for several years. In fact, right when I heard from Lesley, I was shedding the cloak of self-doubt that is the mandatory uniform of a toxic, dysfunctional, and largely joyless workplace where sacred cows and large egos leave little room for anyone else. Margarita Tartakovsky calls self-doubt Creativity’s No. 1 Crusher. No argument from me.
Anyone who has ever worked in such a place knows that every day you don the mantle of self-doubt, it feels heavier, like armor. Why would anyone want to show up every day? Well, maybe there’s an upside in the very near future, like the departure date of the self-proclaimed guru who’s been brought in to shake things up. Or maybe you have the health, finances, and internal fortitude to weather the lies and manipulation, the passive aggressive pettiness and the collective aversion to honesty. Otherwise, you deserve so much more than living minute by minute, always waiting for the other shoe to fall, and I recommend running at high speed as far away as possible. Once out of their sights, shed the armor. And breathe as yourself, once again. Today, I am out of that uniform – lighter, brighter, and – just ask Lesley – award worthy.
My lovely Versatile Blogger Award has arrived right as I am poised to begin Act Two. Scene I opens with me testing the waters of versatility and moving away from the edges where I have had an unfortunate tendency to denigrate myself so people might like me or give me credit when it’s due me or even feel a bit sorry for me because of The Cancer that has sat like a great pink elephant for the past eighteen months among people who were entirely and shockingly nonplussed by it. I am not proud to admit that I have allowed such people to dismiss me as “insignificant” or less, when the nobler self-respecting thing would have been to just turn around and walk towards people who might raise a glass to me, interested in what I have to say or what I think about a thing or an idea.
Pat Roy, of Learning Forward – The International Non-Profit Association of Learning Educators, once said to me over lunch, “You put a good person in a bad culture, and the culture wins every time. Every time.” I remember thinking this couldn’t always be the case, but I think Pat is probably right. I vaguely recall a power point slide in her presentation, featuring a little stick figure completely overwhelmed by a Tsunami wave. Or to put it another way, “Culture eats structure for breakfast.” Think about it. You may have a million dollar idea like the one my best friend and I have been working on, albeit fruitlessly, for the best part of a decade. All well and good, but if the culture does not value the creativity, risk-taking, and vision of the individual behind it, the idea will be stifled or scoffed at, and you will be forced to bury it deep in your pocket and stand in the corner with your tail between your legs, asking yourself if you might possibly be stupid.
I have not yet read the versatile Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. I probably will, given all the hoopla surrounding it. In truth, a more accurate assessment of what I’m doing is leaning back – for a better view of the situation, to listen better, to take stock, and to figure out – finally – what matters.
The Versatile Blogger Award reminds me of those chain letters we used to pass around when we were teenagers, convinced that bad luck would befall us should we break the chain. So far be it from me to break the chain begun by Lesley’s Versatile Blogger Award. Now for the rules I must nominate 15 blogs for a Versatile Blogger Award, and regale you with seven random things about myself. These should probably be true.
Previously, I have recognized bloggers who advocate tirelessly for those of us living lives altered immeasurably by breast cancer. Their writing is frequently highlighted by Marie Ennis O’Connor, another Irish friend I met while stumbling around the Internet. In her weekly round-up at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer blog, you will find some of the most versatile women I know. Living out loud lives formerly untouched by cancer, their resolve has emboldened me to say no to pink ribbons and platitudes and one-size-fits-all treatments for a disease that should have been obliterated long ago. Thus, they write and fight for a different way. Versatile, indeed.
This time, my nominations for a Versatile Blogger Award go to an entirely different group of writers who make it easy to step into their worlds, their words strung together in ways that remind me you can always find your way home. Each of these is well worth a visit. Enjoy:
In a moment of mild rebellion, I gave my ironing board to Goodwill. I couldn’t quite part with the iron, but that day is on the horizon. This is of some significance given that I was raised in a house where everything was ironed. Even socks and dish cloths.
My best friend, Amanda, is convinced that the teenage version of me is re-asserting herself. I used to get up at five o’clock every morning. Now, I can’t imagine why on earth I would entertain a meeting before 9:30AM. How fortunate am I to have found a new job where, apparently, lots of other people feel the same way.
I will never not listen to my gut again. Recently, someone I admire, asked me why on earth I would even have accepted a job when everybody told me I was insane to do so. My husband, my best friend, my parents, people I respect in the field, and, most importantly, my gut, all told me to run as far away as possible from it. All those red flags waving in my face, and I ignored every one of them. I chose not to listen to my gut. I was stupid. I forgot to ask, “How will this job be good for me?” Lesson learned.
I have rediscovered the sweet tooth I had as a child. My grandmother used to make sugar sandwiches for me, great door-steps of white bread sandwiches filled with creamy, country butter made crunchy by caster sugar. Once, my parents left me with granny while they took an excursion to Derry city with my aunt and uncle from America. She baked while I played outside and made the fatal error of leaving three lemon meringue tarts to cool on the window sill. On my tiptoes, I started by just picking at the edges of the mile-high white meringue topping, hoping nobody would notice, but I couldn’t resist. I devoured every bit of it, and left the tarts bald, glistening yellow circles atop pastry. Granny just thought it was funny.
While I don’t have the phenomenal memory I thought I had (see previous post) I can still recite great chunks of poetry from school and entire episodes of the BBC’s Fawlty Towers. My brother and I are also given to exchanging quips and profanities from Goodfellas or shrewd insights from movies based on scripts by Nora Ephron or Willy Russell. This morning it was that scene from Educating Rita when Frank realizes that, like Mary Shelley, he may have created a monster.
I just don’t understand American Football, basketball, or baseball. Any team sport, really. Over the years, scores of well-meaning Americans have tried to explain their version of a footie match to me, but I don’t get it. I especially don’t understand why football takes such an inordinately long time. It is much easier to go to the mall. I watch the Super Bowl for two reasons – the National Anthem and the half-time show, but only if it features old rockers like Tom Petty, The Who, or Bob Seger. I understand them very well. I suppose running is almost a sport. It makes sense to me, even on a treadmill where you don’t go anywhere. I like baseball, but only because I have elevated it to mythic status because of W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe which I wish I had read before watching Field of Dreams (I always read the book before watching the movie because I like to cast the characters myself) and, of course, The Natural. Were I ever to teach English Literature again, I would do a whole unit on baseball and literature. It would include Line Drives, a beautiful anthology that transforms baseball into poetry as Bill Littlefield explains: “We wait for baseball all winter long, or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.
My favorite movie is Coming Home. Made by Hal Ashby in 1978, it was the first movie to tackle Vietnam. In it, Jane Fonda, portrays Sally Hyde, wife of an army captain who has been deployed overseas. While he is away, she volunteers in the hospital, where she meets and falls in love with a Vietnam vet, played by Jon Voight. I like to think Sally and I would have been friends, as she educates herself about the war and what happens to the men coming home. Today, it has to be said, I am utterly depressed that Jon Voight, in real life, appears to be absolutely nothing at all like Luke, the Vietnam veteran he portrays with such vulnerability and humanity. Then again, he is an actor. He even won an Oscar for his performance, over Robert de Niro’s Michael in The Deerhunter, another of my favorite movies, and the venerable Laurence Olivier. The Coming Home soundtrack is essentially a time capsule of life from 1965 – 1968, with no covers. Because a soundtrack was never released, my brother once took the time to recreate it on a CD for me some years ago. This was shortly after we accepted that the days of the Mix Tape were over. I still have that CD, and I cannot listen to Tim Buckley’s Once I Was without thinking of the final scene of the movie, and all those young men who died in Vietnam or came home broken.:
For extra credit, here are the tunes from the soundtrack, but not in the right order:
