I Have Cancer. I Can’t Put My Kids First Anymore.
How will my two children survive this assault on my motherhood, on my capacity to care for them?
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In February, two months before my 40th birthday, my left breast became swollen and painful. I chalked it up to the catchall pile of indignities known as perimenopause. But March and April came and went, and my breast seemed worse. May arrived, and I scrambled to schedule a mammogram. I feared the worst, but a mammogram proved harder to come by than I’d imagined. When I finally secured an appointment, I brought my sister because I was so certain that something was very wrong.
It turned out, crushingly, that my worry had not been prophylactic. The radiologist was nervous and somber; she told us that she was “very concerned” by the mass in my breast and my lymph nodes, but that the hospital couldn’t offer me a biopsy for weeks. Basically, I had cancer, but no one could tell me anything more about it. Patting my arm as if I were a recalcitrant dog, she sent me to a nurse practitioner down the hall who tried to pick up the pieces of my life.
“I can’t wait two weeks for a biopsy,” I told her, weeping. “I’ll go anywhere, anytime.”
She had been officious, reassuring, distracted by her keyboard, but she stopped and looked up at me then.
“That’s helpful. A lot of mothers say they can’t do a certain day, or time, because of their kids’ soccer or something.”
I couldn’t tell whether she judged me for my indifference toward my children’s extracurriculars, or whether she judged those other mothers. I judged them. As a social worker who supports children and their caregivers, I had spent years droning on to adults about the value of a predictable routine in a child’s life, but really: What did it matter if those kids got to soccer practice if their mother was dead?
“Their father will drive them to dance class,” my sister told the nurse crisply. “We need a biopsy.”
She said she would see what she could do.
My sister and I left the hospital, stunned to have my worst fears confirmed, but knowing next to nothing of a diagnosis or prognosis. The radiologist and the nurse practitioner and their mammogram machines were in a fancy Boston suburb, and we had to walk past a Kumon tutoring enterprise to get to an expensive coffee shop. We sat outside, where a young person accompanied by two older people talked loudly and ceaselessly about her impending graduation from a very prestigious local university. The older people couldn’t get a word in edgewise. My sister and I eavesdropped, muted by our own grief. I thought again and again of the mothers driving to practice or tournaments or Kumon, their cancers blossoming within them, unchecked, while they sliced oranges, hauled lacrosse sticks, loaded math apps onto the iPad, and cheered themselves hoarse.
I was itchy with the horror of knowing I had cancer but knowing nothing more, and with the horror of all of these women putting off their mammograms or their biopsies or even their physicals because they were busy being taxis for the children they hoped to drop off in 10 years at the prestigious university. The college student loudly clarified her position on a topic of no interest to me.
But even as I raged, my children swelled to fill my mind. My eldest is 10—leggy and knowing, but still transfixed by Calico Critters—and her younger brother is 5: goofy, round-cheeked, lisping, sweetly solicitous, and still undecided on whether fairies are real or not. The thought of them existing without my care—without a mother to order their school uniforms, or to talk them off the ledge of heartache, or to bandage their wounds, or to read Charlotte’s Web aloud before bed and weep with them at Charlotte’s beautiful demise—was unbearable and all-consuming. Their vulnerability was all I could think about; it shoved out my own pain, my fears for my body and for my life.
In the following weeks, I secured a biopsy, an oncologist, and finally a diagnosis and a plan: The cancer is aggressive, but it has not spread to vital organs or bones. The tumor will likely be responsive to treatment. My children will probably keep me, but first I must endure trial by fire for a year: chemotherapy, a mastectomy, daily radiation, and regular drug therapy.
My life has crumbled around me; my husband’s brow has formed a permanent furrow. Two years ago, I had surgery; he took the children away in the immediate aftermath so that I could sit in a quiet house with my father, my sole tasks to eat and sleep and heal. We both know that he will give me the same space, or try to, over the coming months. But I will have to accept it, again and again.
I began treatment in early June. And, in short order, I began to feel terrible.
Chemotherapy poisons the cancer, and it poisons the body: the membranes of the mouth and nose, the stomach lining, your bone marrow and joints. I spend a lot of time in my bed. My two children visit me and jump on said bed. Sometimes I indulge this. Sometimes I suggest that they go away. I long to feel less vile, with a yearning stronger than I have ever known: It is stronger than lust or the desire to protect my babies.
Providence, where I live, is a small town; it turns out that my daughter’s friend’s mother’s partner practices acupuncture and specializes in helping people undergoing chemotherapy. I made an appointment; the only time available was during my daughter’s piano lesson. I dropped her off, and then realized that the acupuncture office is downstairs from her music school. I lay on the table as the acupuncturist went about his tasks, and it took me a long time to notice that the fitful piano music was coming not from the small Bluetooth speaker on the counter next to me, but from upstairs. Was that my daughter playing? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t be sure; I didn’t always pay rapt attention to her practicing at home. I had missed her recital the previous weekend, sickened by chemo.
For acupuncture to “work,” you have to “relax.” I was not relaxed. I wondered the following: Is it Lola playing above me? Had she been very sad that I missed the recital? A friend of mine and her daughter had gone, and had brought Lola a bouquet of pale pink ranunculus; this had assuaged my guilt, but what had it meant to her? Is my daughter thinking of me now, as she plays? Is she worrying about me? Is her worry capable of seeping through the ceiling, like a leak? How will my two children survive this assault on my motherhood, on my capacity to care for them? How will they survive my inability to provide them with predictable days and evenings? The music above me became consuming: I had to know if it was my familiar girl playing.
I ran my fingers along the edge of the pale-green sheet that covered my body. It was hard not to think of a shroud or a morgue covering. It was impossible not to think of my daughter.
Just before I started chemo, my friend Margaret came by and sat on my blue couch. She told me a story—a cautionary tale—from two years prior, when she had been undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. She was in a chemo slump, but there was a basket of clean laundry in her bedroom, and it looked at her insistently—it was a symbol of caretaking and mothering and a household that needed attention—so she shoved her fatigue aside and folded the damn laundry. Finishing the single basket took her hours, after which she was demolished by the effort and had to take a nap. “It wasn’t worth it,” she told me. “But I thought it was.”
I listened with horror, and repeated the story to my husband, whose brow furrowed deeper with worry. He was taking it all in—we were both coming to understand that I would not be good for much in the coming months. Friends and relatives offered to come and help, and though we might have once demurred, we said, Yes, please, thank you so much, what day will you arrive, how long can you stay?
“Who will do … all the things you do?” one friend asked me as I explained the treatment plan.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it won’t be me.” But as I said it, I knew that I would keep hearing the siren song of the laundry basket, of my daughter’s playing. And that I would have to cover my ears.
Each day has brought new reminders of my own fragility, all that I am losing or will soon lose—my hair, my productivity, a breast, bodily integrity, reproductive function, faith that my body is an ally rather than an enemy, the capacity to enjoy flavorful foods and tend to my children without risk to myself. I imagine Margaret’s basket of clean laundry, and I imagine letting it sit, unfolded.
Sometimes the children appear to kiss me goodnight fresh from their shower, or to relay some good news, and I feel like a distant mother in an English period piece. Except that I am not busily ordering frocks from London or tending to my correspondence on thick cream-colored stationery; I am lying inert, watching yet another man murder yet another woman on Happy Valley. In those moments, I wonder who I am.
The creation and maintenance of stability, safety, and routine for my children have been the prayer beads of my adult life. The idea that any upheaval in my own life—a move, a death, a pandemic—affects them as well as me has been an organizing principle of not just my parenting, but my survival. It has kept me moving forward when times are hard.
It’s hard to abandon the idea of curating my children’s experience of my cancer, to close the door to my bedroom against the cacophony of bedtime, to give in to the primacy of my own needs and simply rest. Enduring treatment and healing have become my goals, superseding the idea that my most important task is to parent in the best or most optimal way. Retreating into myself, away from my kids, feels like an unlearning of everything I have been taught as a mother, or have imparted to others, but I cannot see another way to survive.
At my second acupuncture appointment, I lay on the table and managed to focus on my breath; I slipped in and out of sleep.
My children’s experience of this catastrophe—this wrenching, miserable time—will leave its mark on their small psyches. But my task right now, I realized, is to swim through fire. They will wait, watching, on the shore. The acupuncturist quietly entered the room to move the needles around, to shift my limbs up or down. He said nothing as he did this, and I, too, was silent, perhaps afraid to break a spell. I will blow them kisses from the river, I think. Someone else will need to stand with them on the water’s edge, holding their hands.