This year, 2020, has brought out a lot of things in all of us. Some good things. Growth. Inspiration. Gratitude. Togetherness. In equal measure, the opposite. Fear, anxiety. Longing, nostalgia. Anger, resignation. Exhaustion. A lot of hard.
We know we can do hard things. But my mom? Well, she has always had to do hard things. Things she has no control over. But she never really sees it that way. Her perspective is who she is, and who she is is a gift.
When I was a kid, I have these vague memories of something big happening in our house, with my mom. I don’t have any clear memories of when they told us, but I do remember standing in line at school holding a dictionary and looking it up. I held the dictionary up to my teacher and said my mom has this and pointed to the word “cancer.” That look on her face? I knew it was not good. Kind of a mix of shock and fear and sadness, feeling sorry for me, for what this meant. The year was 1983, before pink ribbons and hope. My mom had stage 3 breast cancer at the age of 36.
She fought. For two years. Surgeries. Chemo every 3 weeks. She had this countdown of her chemo treatments from 18 to 0 on a piece of paper. It hung inside our kitchen cabinet until they remodeled the kitchen twenty years later. After each treatment, she crossed off a number. That last one, the zero, was really big. I knew we were going to make that zero a big smiley face when she got there. I now know that she wasn’t sure if she would get there. Stage 3 cancer in 1983 was especially scary.
Well, she got there and decided not to stop. She had always wanted to be a teacher. So she did it. She went back to college in her late 30s, something unusual for those times. She became a teacher at 42. And even in the midst of all the good she was doing, she had more hard. Another cancer diagnosis when I was pregnant with Ian. She had another surgery and recovered. Then she would wake up every single day and drive to her radiation treatments and be in her classroom at the end of homeroom. Every single day for six weeks because in her words, “What am I going to do? Sit at home and think about it?” She retired at 66 and loved what she did. I think of how many hundreds of lives she impacted because she decided to take her hard and turn it into something really good.
I didn’t know hard for a very long time. Honestly, it was not until I had Ian. Up to that point, my life was pretty smooth sailing. Bumps in the road that are typical of adolescence, none of it truly hard. Making my way through college and law school, working hard and getting things done. Not easy but not hard. But I thought it was. Perspective is a fickle thing. You only know what you know, and I thought I knew hard.
Then came April 12th, 2009. The day we welcomed our second son. We had a plan. Two kids, about four years between them. Close enough for them to be close but far apart for us to really enjoy the stage they each were in. Foolish me, walking into the hospital thinking the only troubles awaiting me when I walked out were sleep deprivation and having to get Joey up and out to preschool.
I gave birth to our Ian and the whispers of the nurses around him, that look of fear and despair on Jason’s face? For all my days, I will feel those first moments after Ian’s birth. My world was cracked right open.
I remember our family streaming in and I wanted to tell everyone right away that Ian had Down syndrome. I didn’t want rejoicing and celebrating. I didn’t want them to feel like I had let them be happy too long before I took it all away. Oh, the shame I feel now, sitting here on this rainy Sunday morning as I look over at this precious soul… my Ian, my fellow early bird, enjoying some rare electronics time in the morning while I write. While I write about how I wept the day he was born.
The juxtaposition of time and perspective. How the hard might crack your world right open just to fill it back up, because it was so very empty, but you didn’t even know it.
In all those faces, I kept looking for my mom. I was holding Ian in my arms but I didn’t even feel him. I didn’t even feel myself. She came to my side and I blurted out, “They think he has Down syndrome.” I said it, let that truth out into the universe.
I now knew hard.
I looked up at my mom and pleaded with her, “What am I going to do?” She looked down at me and simply said, “You love him.” So I did. Ian has no greater cheerleader than my mom. She loves every ounce of who he is. To her, he has always been perfect.
I was not on the same journey as my mom but many of my feelings after I had Ian were the same. All that uncertainty. I was a planner and all of a sudden, I couldn’t plan for anything. I couldn’t plan for the future, for what his childhood would look like. Would he have friends, a girlfriend? Would we ever travel again? Go out to eat? Would he smile at me? Call me “mom”? What would his life look like as an adult? When we were gone? I was consumed with grief and anxiety. Googling “Down syndrome” back then and finding no hope. I couldn’t help myself and wasn’t helping myself.
And then there was my mom. Her advice, what she told herself when she had cancer when we were little kids, “You need to take it one day at a time.” She reminded me that all I could control was today and I could do this today. In the beginning it was like a prayer I would whisper when I was drowning, “One day at a time, one day at a time, one day at a time…” until it became my mantra.
A little further along in my journey of being Ian’s mom it was time to do his assessments to see how he was developing. My baby was one-year-old and they were assessing him. I know why, but it just hurts so much. How many words can he can say? What sounds does he make? Does he stack two blocks, three blocks, four? If they fall down, does he put them back up? Can he roll over, sit up? Feed himself? Does he pass an object from one hand to the other? Important information for his development and crushing my mama heart, all at the same time. I got a list of his developmental “ages” for his gross motor, fine motor, speech, academic and social emotional skills. I called my mom when his teacher left our house because it was just so hard. It is soul-crushing to see your child on paper like that. (It still is.) And she told me, through my despair, “Listen to me. It is a privilege to be his mom. You need to remember that.” Oh, the balm for my soul. It IS a privilege to be his mom. She always knows what to say.
Recently my mom has faced some new challenges. Another breast cancer diagnosis. This time, caught very early. She had surgery right before Covid. Then was recovering during Covid. Then had another surgery last week. And then this week, a bout of vomiting from the damage she had from her radiation treatment a decade ago. Can you imagine, vomiting while recovering from surgery? I cry when I have the plain old stomach bug. But what did my mom do? She just did it. Held on, knowing that this too shall pass. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but it always does. And when she comes out on the other side, she celebrates it. A text this morning telling me she woke up feeling so much better. Never complaining, never shouting “it’s not fair!” (Because it isn’t fair.) Never asking why. Just making her way through the hard. Because that’s what she does. She does everything with the same grace.
Yesterday the boys and I went for haircuts for the first time in six months. Oh, how I worried. For weeks and weeks, and the morning of. I walked into that salon trying to control my breathing, with tears filling my eyes. What if, what if, what if? We have lived the past 156 days sheltering in place, but that takes a toll too. Balance. Figuring things out. But I was still so scared.
Before I walked in, my mom texted me and asked me to send ‘before and after’ pictures of our haircuts. I texted her back, telling her I was so nervous. The calm in the storm, she tells me, “Lots of people have done this. We have to start… so start.” I texted back that I wondered if I was taking an unnecessary risk. And she gently reminded me again, “Laura, you have to begin, so do it.” And I did.
Here we still are. In the middle of a storm. And my mom is here too, again. In the middle of more than one storm. I celebrate her and share her. Here, in this space. Because of who she is, how she lives her life, how she weathers storms. Grace. Acceptance. Calm. Optimism. Always knowing stormy seas do calm, sometimes just not when we want them to. But when they do, we will all feel so much better. And be better for having gone through the hard. One day at a time.
I love you, mom.