People ask me what my blog is about, and every time I pause. I know I’m supposed to have an elevator speech prepared, I guess it’s time I start thinking about that.
This blog has been through so many iterations. I started the first CoffeeJitters blog on LiveJournal back in 2001. It’s hard to believe it’s been more than ten years since that first blog post. A lot has changed over that decade.
CoffeeJitters has been a single girl making her way in the world blog, a wedding blog, an infertility blog, a photography blog, a quitting my job and going back to school full time blog, a wow! I’m pregnant! blog, a mommy blog, a cancer blog, and a relearning how to dream after cancer blog.
Mostly, it’s a love letter to my daughter and husband, and an ongoing autobiography. It is my story, and my practice honing my voice. It is my chance to be heard.
I think in a way, that’s what a lot of us bloggers are doing. I keep picturing all the bloggers of the world at their computers furiously typing away in a clackity-clack version of the Whos that Horton heard, yelling at the top of their lungs, “We Exist!”
Blogging allows us to make our mark on the world. To show that we exist. To have a voice and have it heard. To contribute to the ongoing story of the human race.
My studies recently have centered a great deal around women’s history throughout the world, and the difficulty involved in truly understanding what a woman’s life was like. Mens stories were recorded, by men. Women’s stories… not so much.
I look at blogging in comparison to that and I think: what a gift we are leaving for future generations. Is there any comparable resource in history to the wide range of women’s stories now available? Sure, there’s a good deal of exaggeration. That also exists in our history books. But there is so much more variety of stories and lifestyles represented. I’m proud to be a part of this movement. I’m so happy that future generations will have such a wealth of information about their ancestors – us. (On second thought, maybe I’d better go clean up a few of my posts)
In the cold, dark, fear of 3 a.m., when the cancer patient is most alone, I found ToddlerPlanet, a blog written by cancer fighting princess warrior, awesome mommy, and astrophysicist, Susan Niebur (also known as @whymommy).
Days after my diagnosis, before I learned to reign in my imagination and to view Dr.Google for what it is, I found Susan’s blog. I read for hours: post after post, page after page. It seemed she was speaking directly to me, addressing my personal concerns about life, death, love, cancer, and most important to me at that moment, the well being of my child. No sensationalism, just an honest look at life and parenting as impacted by cancer.
It would be difficult and frustrating, and at times, extremely painful, she seemed to say, but my days would still be full of love and joy, and I can still be an awesome mom, and my child can still be happy. I read those pages through tears; I was so relieved and hopeful. In the two years since then, we formed an internet friendship, tweeting and commenting on each other’s blog posts. The internet has made possible friendships between people who have never met.
Who will never meet.
Today I read her blog again through tears. Susan passed away today. She touched so many lives, her husband and little boys, her friends and family, the science community, the blogging community, the cancer and health advocacy community… and me, a girl at a computer Seattle, whose life was blessed by knowing her, even though we never met.
Is it just me, or does the moon seem to be a bit bigger and brighter tonight? I’m going to think of it as Susan’s moon.
Thank you, Susan, for the love and hope and strength you shared with all of us. Godspeed.
Flannery O’Connor was not kind to the characters she created for her stories; they were deeply flawed, and in need of redemption. Ann Napolitano does not spare Flannery of those characteristics in her own novel, A Good Hard Look.
It takes a certain level of confidence to fictionalize the last months of a famous American novelist’s life. Napolitano handles the challenge with grace; O’Connor could be walking around in one of her own stories. But does she get the one thing she really needs, that all her characters needed? Does she get a little grace, and forgiveness?
I like to think of myself as having superpowers. My favorite superpower is the ability to make things go away by not believing they are true. I’ve had a lot of practice using this superpower; I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer while I was still breastfeeding my baby.
That was practice using this superpower, but no success.
One of the first things that hits you over the head with a cancer diagnosis, after confronting your mortality, is the understanding that you are not in control. Control is an illusion. This is a very difficult concept around which to wrap your brain.
We’re constantly bombarded with messages about how we are in control. Make a plan and execute it. Just do it. We are the product of our own choices. Metaphors abound: in the drivers seat, steer the ship, drive to success, master of your domain (giggle, snort – if you got this Seinfeld reference, you’re old like me).
There is a lot of truth in these ideas. We are the product of our own choices – to an extent. But there is so much we can not control. The child with neuroblastoma did nothing to deserve that disease. They did not earn it. Neither did I.
For all this time we spend juggling – super-moms with all their balls in the air at the same time – we also live with this fear that one dropped ball will bring them all down. If we miss a ball, a deadline, a dental appointment, 50,000-mile maintenance check, the world will keep on spinning whether we pick up the peices and run to rejoin the party, or throw our hands up in the air in defeat.
Some of the balls are going to drop.
I worried so much after my diagnosis: How am I going to effectively parent my child, keep up the house, finish my degree, and battle this disease? I realized that I could not keep all those balls in the air. I made a choice. I decided that parenting and health were my priorities, housekeeping would get attention as I had any to spare, and I took a leave of absence from school. A year later my daughter is happy and healthy as she enters her twos, I’m nearly done with treatment though still battling fatigue, my hair is starting to grow back, and in January I returned to school full time. But, my house is still a mess.
I’m still making choices about my priorities. My house still isn’t winning.
Martha Stewart has a large staff of well paid employees that help her pull off all that magic. I don’t have to be Martha Stewart, and most of us have no hope of having a large, well paid staff to make us look good. What you see is what you get. It’s just me, Baby. Lovable. Imperfect. Flawed. With mutant genes running amok.
I am letting go of the illusion of control
I don’t want to give you the impression that I’ve got this fatalist attitude where there’s not much sense in trying because there is no hope of success. I don’t believe that at all. I try. I work my butt off. I pour blood, sweat, and tears into motherhood, and everything else I do. But I’m learning to distinguish between the things I can control, and the things I can’t.
I can control whether I provide a quiet time and space for my daughter to take a nap
I can not control whether she goes to sleep
I can control the amount and quality of the food that I eat, and I can control the amount and quality of my exercize.
I can not control my weight
I can control my own reactions to my toddler’s behavior, and I can control whether she has been fed, and provided ample opportunity to play and rest.
I can not control whether she has a meltdown in public
I can provide sufficient towels and a bath mat
I can not control whether my husband soaks the bathroom floor when he gets out of the shower
I can fight like hell, do everything prescribed, and more
I can not control whether this cancer comes back
Life got so much easier when I stopped trying to unbelieve what I didn’t want to be true. I can’t control whether or not I have cancer, I can only control my reaction to that fact. A huge burden lifted when I stopped trying to control things over which I had no control. I can’t control everything. I don’t need to control everything. The fact that I don’t control everything doesn’t make me less of a person, less of a woman, less of a mother. It makes me human. It makes me vulnerable. It makes me brave and scared at the same time. It makes me real. And it makes me more empathetic to everyone else around me.
Sometimes, the best things in life are unplanned. Usually, the worst things in life are unplanned. Either way, survival, thriving, requires the ability to adapt. In order to incorporate this new reality into my life, I’ve got to accept it. The more time I spend thinking it just can’t be true, trying to control the uncontrollable, the longer it takes to find a way to make the best of the situation.
I used to work for a cruise/tour company that was smaller, and a bit more intimate than most. This gave us the flexibility to chase rabbit trails, and make impromptu itinerary changes to take advantage of opportunities as mother nature provided. The director used to say “we have an itinerary so we have something from which to deviate.” That’s a little closer to the way I live my life these days. I make plans and set goals, I work towards them, but I try to stay flexible enough to change as necessary. That helps with crisis management; it also makes it possible to savor rainbows, and jump on opportunities as they arise as well.
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This week, the girls at SITS are discussing perfection and the art of letting go. Join the conversation (Linky included). We’re also using #SITSLettingGo on Twitter.
I was running late for a meeting, but I just had to stop and capture a couple shots of this sunset. I pulled over alongside the lake, rolled down the passenger-side window, and clicked away.
As I continued on my way to the meeting, the sunset intensified. Each time I pulled through an intersection, the break between buildings revealed a different sky, full of different colors. It was changing by the second. This was during rush hour traffic. I was looking around for a place to pull over so I could catch some more shots when I pulled off on a side street – and in to gridlock. The sunset, of course, completely blocked by the concrete monstrosity of a building where the road curved in front of me. Now, not only was I late for the meeting, I didn’t get that additional shot I was looking for, and I was trapped in place by traffic. Crap.
It occurred to me at this point that the sunset was not there to stress me out, or even for me to “capture” on film; it was there to bless my day. At that moment, a spot opened up for me to pull a U-turn and get back on my way, and the next break between buildings revealed the Space Needle, backlit by a fully fuchsia sky. Breathtaking. And just for me. I did not capture that shot of the sunset, but it did bless my day.
This has been an amazing week, full of wonderful news and new opportunities. Much of it I can’t discuss just yet. As if full-time school, cancer treatment, and motherhood were not enough, I’ve had a few writing gigs come my way as well. I’m stealing this idea from The Bloggess and creating a regular post that will link to some of my other writing on a (hopefully) regular basis, as well as drawing your attention to other creators of awesomeness on the web.
Me: As seen on…
Goodies: Five Fabulous (and Inspirational) Bloggers – I was asked to highlight 5 amazing bloggers, and when I did, I used the opportunity to describe one of the coolest literary events I have ever experienced.
Awesome people who mentioned me (or linked to me) in their posts this week
The Pioneer Woman: Daisy the Dog – I love the Pioneer Woman, but I usually don’t highlight her because she already gets more hits than Google. However, this post reminded me of the cow I had when I was a kid. The one with the oh-so-clever name of Milky, who then calved, and I assigned the even-less-original moniker of Calfy for her offspring. Yeah, my naming skills have improved since then. No, Milky and Calfy did not have this much access to the house.
It took me a while to stop laughing – I mean, there’s not much that does contribute to my writing these days.
And then I gave the question a second look. Is that really true? The things that consume my time and my life – primarily my family and my health, but the little things as well, like laundry and what’s for dinner – get in the way of my writing. They also inform and inspire my writing.
Reducing the time and energy I spend on my family is out of the question. The new normal that is life impacted by cancer dictates that my health must remain a high priority – perhaps that should have been the case all along. Nobody wants me to stop doing laundry – ok, well maybe those of you who only interact with me online may not care, but the population of our area code might. There’s really not much fat to trim.
Oh, you mean all that time I spend on the internet – specifically on facebook? And the TV, too?
Ok, I guess I do have a little down time here and there. But – yes, there’s a but, there’s always a but – my TV and internet time inform and inspire my writing as well. Most of the time, my brain is buzzing with new ideas and perspectives I want to explore and discuss – ideas and perspectives gained through my interactions with these media. My house is full of little scraps of paper on which I scribbled little nuggets of brilliance for future rumination and dissertation.
The rumination I’m good at; I looooooove me a good think. Research makes my fingertips tingle, and my heart race with giddiness. Translating all that brain power into a post? nerve-wracking.
Writing is a declaration, a commitment. Fear of commitment does impact my writing practice. I can mull ideas in my head, comparing them to other ideas, and holding them up to the light without fear of rejection. I have yet to hit the publish button on my blog without experiencing a racing pulse, and a bit of anxiety.
So why do I blog? Why don’t I just keep all those delicious ponderings to myself? Once again, the TV informs my writing: my daughter is watching “Horton Hears a Who” as I type. At this moment in the movie, the Whos are shouting for their lives, “WE ARE HERE!” I imagine all the bloggers of the world, furiously typing away at their keyboards, and the subtext of their carefully chosen and intricately woven prose is the same existential declaration: “We are here!”
Of course, I’m projecting; I can only speak for myself. Pondering my own mortality certainly feeds the need to declare my existence. But it’s more than that; I started my first blog in 2001, 9 years before I was diagnosed with cancer, and 7 years before I found out I was going to be a mom. Long before I felt the urgent need to create a record of myself for my daughter, I was compelled to leave my mark on the world through my writing. The urge to write began when I learned to read.
Despite the urge, I still go day after day without writing. I compose entire essays and posts in my mind as I go about my day, while simultaneously washing the oatmeal from between my daughters toes (no, I don’t know how it got there), and weighing the pros and cons of returning to school in January (I just registered), but when I sit down at the computer my mind goes blank. The prose sings in the amorphous space between my ears, but loses it’s voice as I try to pin it to paper.
I know I’m not alone in this; it’s a common issue for writers.
I also know the cure: Writing anyway, despite the fact that I know the words falling from my fingers are all wrong. Fear seeps in as my fingers hang over the keyboard, hesitating, afraid that what comes out will never measure up to what resides inside. So what if it doesn’t? “There is no such thing as great writing, only great re-writing.” I know this on a logical level, but it takes practice to remind my fingers. I need to stop being judgmental with myself, and I need to write despite the urge to hesitate.
“Writing makes a person very vulnerable. It opens you to public criticism, to ridicule, to rejection. But it also opens conversation and thought. It stirs minds, and touches hearts. It brings us into contact with our souls. So how can it possibly be a waste of time, an idle act, a mistake, a betrayal of truth? Who can possibly tell us not to do it?”
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