Don't Collude With His Shadow Self

 I found this phrase written on an index card in my journal, while searching for a poem I wanted to revise.

It is a note I made during a therapy session almost exactly two years ago.  I had started doing this only recently, probably as a guard against the combined effect of age and chemo on my memory.  

"Don't collude whit his shadow-self.  Asking for help/telling the truth is letting him in, taking the pressure off.  The good parts come from sharing"

I find it such a striking phrase today, two years further into our relationship, two years deeper into my life, two years of growth and experience under my belt.  How easily our sick parts seek companionship with the sick parts of others.  how quick we are to let the small, broken, damaged bits of ourselves link up with the small damaged bits of others, replaying those old, hurtful patterns again and again because they are familiar, even though they are destructive.

Don't collude...

Like it's a secret, yet powerful meeting between the hurt child in me who does not trust and the hurt child in him who grew without tenderness.  Like they, our shadow selves, are out there somewhere, trying to drive us into self destruction and mutual destruction.

Like there is a me, desperate to keep things the same as they have always been because the hurt and betrayal are so familiar that they've come to feel like home.   A me who would rather never admit that I need help or support, and then can rage at the isolation an betrayal with a sense of vindication.

Because to break the pattern, to betray the shadow self, would be to have to live a different life, a different truth.  Live in a world where I am worthy of love and so is he, and we can give it to eachother freely, without contempt or compensation.

Because the good parts come from sharing.

Buying Peace

 Driving in to my office yesterday, I picked a playlist at random.  Some Spotify-created summer rewind playlist. 

It was all sad songs, angry songs, songs about resilience.  Songs about heart break, divorce, loss, and recovery.  The occasional bop from a Disney movie.  

It took me about half of my 30 minute drive to figure out what summer this playlist was from, and pinpoint the emotional state I was in that summer.  And then, dots connected, the songs spent the rest f my drive taking my body back to that time.  I started to feel the music resurrect the anxiety in my muscles, the sadness and betrayal in my bones.  I felt the way I gripped the same steering wheel five years earlier, when everything was entirely different.  And then I did the most important thing.

I remembered the wishes I had then, the hopes and plans I sketched out roughly in my mind while I listened to this same collection of songs in this same car on these same roads.  And I felt pure gratitude.

The peace that I have purchased over the last five years, through sacrifice and love and work and luck, is so valuable.  The woman who listened to Liz Phair's Divorce Song on repeat in between mournful used-to-love songs by The National would have chaffed in the relative comfort of the life I live now.

And so I walk these days in gratitude for all the things I take for granted now, that I was afraid to wish for a few years ago.

And I remember that the goal is to continue to buy peace, find joy, build a world anchored in love, respect, and growth.

Holding my heart in my hands

 In the morning, before he wakes up, I hold my son in my arms and smell his breath.  Inhale him.  He is getting older, longer, smellier, but he is my own flesh and blood that I made from my body, raised, sweated and bled and cried for every day of his life and many days before. 

And then I think about what it would be like to have him taken from me; to have to watch his beautiful, perfect little body be broken in ways that cause pain, in ways that don't heal, in ways that can't be fixed.

I think about the absolute searing pain I would feel, if I couldn't press his sleeping forehead to my lips, or his clean hair to my nose, or lift his body into my lap, his hand into mine.  how would  I live if he was taken from me, broken, burned, beaten.

I never used to think these thoughts, until Gaza.  Until I began to track the suffering of the Palestinian people as they watched their loved ones be beaten, crushed, burned, cut, violated, tortured, frightened, maimed, and massacred.

And now I can't stop thinking about it.  I catch myself crying at the absolute unfairness that is the relative ease and safety of our life.

The almost overwhelming privilege that exists in my ability to promise my child that I will protect him, keep him from harm, keep him safe, fed, clothed and clean.  What an absolute load of bull shit.  A government could take that ability from me, break my promises to my child, in a minute with their weapons and their heartless, soulless violence.  And render me powerless to do the one job that matters in this life, protect my child.  

Everyday I think about what a friend of mine said when her teenage son committed suicide.  She reflected on all the time she spent cutting grapes in half to keep him from choking as a baby. 

We do that, as parents, as care givers.  We strive to protect them from the tiniest risks, to shelter them and herd them into maturity, relative safety, hoping they arrive in adulthood intact and capable. 

But what happens to all of those efforts when your child is ripped from you by an occupying army, and imprisoned for years without contact?

What happens when a bomb or a sniper's bullet pierces your child's skin, tearing through the flesh you carefully nourished and cleaned day in and day out.

What happens when your child's fears are no longer irrational fears of monsters under beds, but very real fears of death, destruction, and unthinkable loss.

What happens when your child is hungry and you are powerless to feed them, when they are thirsty and you are powerless to quench their thirst?  What happens when your child needs to be comforted by love and hugs and kind, soft, nice things, but you are dead and your poor child is huddled alone in a tent, bandaged and hungry with all of the orphans of a genocide that global powers refuse to admit is taking place.

How is anyone walking around right now, functioning?  How did we pay our taxes and plan out meals without remembering the mother who asked to cut of her own hand to feed her child, the 2 year old orphaned and amputated alone in a tent, the child crying for help, isolated in a car full of dead relatives, and the bombed out ambulances driven by aid workers murdered in their attempt to rescue her from what must of been a horrific final day of her incredibly young life.  

There is so much pain, suffering, frustration and angry boiling in my broken heart, and you have the audacity to discuss the appropriate way to protest, the right time to speak out, the civility of sharing images of the destruction my government has spent billions funding?

Fuck all of the way off.  I will help burn this system down until a new one is born.

New Year, New Bullshit

 There is a tradition, at least around here,  of beginning a new calendar year with a statement of goals.  A reflection of the last year and a resolution or two for the new year. 

I respect this tradition because I truly believe that as humans we need to mark time with traditions like this.   I respect the ways the goals of my past new years have helped to shape the life I have today.   

But I don't really have any real resolutions for 2024.  I've heard a lot of people lament this past year,  and I get it, globally a lot is going wrong; the climate deteriorates, civil rights are deteriorating, global conflict has intensified in violence and severity.   But my life was good.   2023 was a good year for Andrea.  I am cancer free.   That's huge!!  I grew in my career at Sac State,  and at Folsom Lake. I gained recognition, confidence, and grew in my sense of self.   I am watching August grow as a human,  watching my relationship with Chris grow and watch him grow as an individual.  In watching Nathanial grow,  my friendships grow.  Everything is,  as I like to say, on its trajectory.   Things don't need to be perfect today,  and they aren't,  but they are getting a little better every day. 

So what are my goals for 2024?

More.   Keep going, do a little more. 

I want to keep doing what I'm doing,  because it's working. I want to keep being me, keep being healthy, keep growing in my career and relationships. 

I want to get weirder. I want to get Witchier.  I want to do more Wiccan things,  more earthy/crunchy things. I want to trust my instincts more often.  

I told Chris,  twice now,  that I'm going to get weirder.   But that's short hand for what I want to say in a more complicated way,  which is I know who I am now, and I'm not pretending anymore. I'm going to be more me, and I'm not apologizing to anyone.

Fighting the Tide

 There are times when things seem to go our way, when the energy flows, good things, come, and we feel as though we are being taken by the hand through the universe with kind admiration and support.  Good days.  Found a parking space, no line for coffee, someone brought donuts kind of days.

And then there are those days where the universe seems set to destroy us, or at the least our spirits.  Everything seems to be aimed at obstruction and we struggle with simple tasks.  Step-in-a-puddle days.  Days where it feels like you are the fly and life is the windshield.

We seem to regularly need reminders to be patient during the dark times, but we fly through the good times, bouncing from one morsel of goods news to the other as though there is no end in sight.

The hard but valuable thing is to remember that we are just grains of sand along a vast beach.  The tide comes in and then ebbs, leaving us.  But no matter how long the tide's absence feels, it is always temporary, it always returns to bathe us in its salty fresh water.  

 

i think that is one of the great benefits of time...after years of living through these ebbs and flows of life's fortunes, you learn how temporary each state is, how inevitable each next phase is.  

Port Day

 Next Friday I will have my chemo port removed. 
For those not in the know, this is a big milestone; the chemo port was surgically implanted to help protect my veins from the chemotherapy drugs, and was the site of so many saline flushes, painful sticks, and colorful bandaids.  Because it was difficult to place and is a easy to remove, the protocol for taking it out means it's another step closer to achieving 'cured' status.

It has been 16 months and a few weeks since my initial diagnosis, 15 months since the port was implanted and I began chemotherapy, and 13 months since I had my first clean PET scan.

I hated my port when it was implanted.  It was the last of a series of quickly scheduled surgeries, procedures, and scans.  The previous surgery, performed by Dr. Natasha Bir, had been a surgical biopsy of my lymph node to diagnose the cancer I knew was there.  She was patient, kind, and relatable.  She talked to me about my cancer and how treatment would affect me as a person, a mother, someone who planned to work full time through treatment.  Her incision was clean and healed to the tiniest scar.  I trusted her.

The surgeon who placed my port was new.  He said he could tell by the sun damage on my chest where to place the port, so I ended up having to wear low cut tops to every chemo appointment.  The scar, perhaps inevitably, was larger, more obvious and more visible to the world.  I hate that scar.  

I hated my port.  It was sore for months, and August would accidentally kick it regularly when we played, making me feel like 'sick mommy' more than ever.  My seat belt irritated it, and the generously provided port pillows were kind but made me feel ridiculous.  It was a visible outward expression of my internal illness.  I have been waiting for the day it is removed since it was first implanted.

And now that day is coming, and it feel anti-climactic.  The new daily reminder of my illness is this awkward haircut that refuses to grow out, and my port no longer aches, is no longer irritated by my seat belt or painful when kicked by August.  I sometimes even forget about the scar, and wonder what new scar the removal will leave.

I wonder when I will get my hair back, if I will ever feel the same as I did back on February 1st, when I excitedly made an appointment for a physical as an early 40th birthday present to myself.  

I wonder if  "Stage 3-B Hodgkin's Lymphoma" will ever feel like a real diagnosis, or if I will ever feel like I have truly beaten this thing.  I wonder what will come next, now that my body has been through some of the most rigorous drugs on the market.  

And I want to celebrate this port removal, like I wanted to celebrate shaving my head.  But I am afraid to celebrate it, afraid I am asking for too much, afriad it will turn out odd because it is still so near the surface (like the port!), the vulnerability around being sick, getting better, trying to define this new cancer survivor self that I am.

Which is all a very long way of asking, would you like to go out for cocktails and appetizers after my port removal?

A Story About Recovery, Nine Months Later

 Nine months later, and my hair is still so sparse.  It's thicker, to be sure, because people are commenting optimistically in careful tones about how great it looks.  Talking to me like I'm a sick person, because I am.  I was...I am still at risk, still vulnerable...still recently 'recovered'.  

I am still processing the feelings of this all...how to feel, who to be.  What does it mean to be a cancer survivor?  It sounds so cliche, so much like someone else, like not me, but it also is me, definitionally.  I am a person who has survived cancer, I am a cancer survivor.  So now I have to figure out what that means to me, for me.

Which is not to say that cancer or recovery define me, but I am undeniably changed.  I supposed that's the weird, back-handed gift of my short hair; every morning I wake up to a reminder that I am never going to be the person I was before February 2022, before that first physical, that first imaging appointment.  Before I felt that little lump start to grow in my neck and then, later, saw the bugling image of my cancer straining against the barrier of my collar bone, struggling to grow beyond the confines of my body, my neck, my spleen, by shrunken stomach and infected heart.  

It makes sense, something like that, seeing an invader lit up in bright yellow inside the deepest parts of your own body, entwined with your lymphatic system, impossible to cut out.  Something like that should change you.  No one should be able to stay the same after that. 

And after everything that came after that.  The many tiny losses.  The total physical change that slowly overtook my body as I gripped my past life, my 'normal' life with white-knuckled fists.  

I comfort myself with all the things I managed to keep, all of the normal I managed to preserve and insert in that time.  Rather than focus on the loss.  The times I told my son I couldn't because I was too tired.  The times I felt myself start to faint.  The time I fainted, and lost a bit of time between when I was standing, focused and alert, and when I was on the ground, the man I love standing over me looking as scared as I have ever seen him, me not understandinghow I got down there in the first place.  

The times I would enter the hospital to undress, don those paper gowns and be scanned, imaged, cut open and sewed back up, explored and biopsied.  

The many, many, many ways I lost control over my own body. Or, really, gave away control.  But is it giving away if it is under threat?  If you don't do this you might die, that was the constant fear.  And I am nothing if not obedient in the face of authority and death.

So now, here I am.  Trying to keep up the same face, the same facade.  But now the fear and adrenaline and fight are all gone, because I've won the fight.  

And I am just left here with my body, altered forever but technically health.  My mind, also altered forever but reeling from everything that has transpired.  My thoughts, also reeling, flying from memory to invasive thought to missed deadline to next task, as if getting back to normal is the new goal.  As if getting back to normal is a weighty enough goal to replace my former goal; beat cancer with a smile.

How can anything fill the hole in my to-do list that Beat Cancer With a Smile left?