2005-11-14 - 12:28 a.m. Today on a Very Special Gumphood I learned last night that my mom has cancer. How do you talk about stuff like that? Shelly commented that it seems everyone in modern books has cancer. I�ve always equated cancer with death. � Guess its time to change my view� Particularly two days after trashing chicken soup for the soul. I imagine the proper thing to do is to tell you how I feel. I also will tell you about her. I am an only child, and I am also adopted. I feel in a way that those things have defined me. I think my parents always knew that since I wasn�t theirs that I would need to accept them more than a regular child would. I did. They are my only parents and always will be. My Mom did not work. She stayed at home and raised me. My mother went to school for her graduate work while I was in High School and College. I was not a difficult child. I never have had an altercation or blowout with my mother. Sure there have been disagreements but we have always been close. Raised as the oldest of eight, my mother has always been a strange dichotomy of both a faith based conservative view points in how the family should be run with a very liberal mind for the values of society. I�ve always suspected the combination of being the oldest of eight all while living through the 60�s will do that to you. She always taught me the proper ways to do thing and the polite and kind ways to act towards people. She then taught me that it was my choice to follow those or not. She taught me tolerance and to respect the differences in others. I wouldn�t change a thing about the way I was brought up. She graduated with her Master�s in Divinity. This is the same degree that you achieve when graduating from the Seminary. I was raised Catholic. She was raised Catholic. Our religion demands that she may in not be a priest, and hence she looked to other churches to work in. The degree was for her, and not something I would deem �marketable.� She joined the CCU, (Christ Church United) and worked in charge there for nearly three years. Before that she was working with seniors with a local non-profit providing them with benefits, information, and needs that they were not able to provide. CCU is an every-faith accepting church that has no strict dogmatic value that segregates people based on different beliefs in Christianity. I live in Massachusetts, and for those living in a box, we have had some issues over gay marriage. Namely, we allow gay couples to become legally married. My mother was a justice of the peace and has followed with the laws of Massachusetts. She while working at CCU, which is an open and affirming church, she was also still Catholic. She was instructed as a justice of the peace that legally she had to marry gay couples under a penalty of jail and fines if she knowingly refused on those grounds. Meanwhile the Archdioceses instructed her, as a Catholic, that if she married gay couples she could face spiritual penalties as strict as excommunication from the church. Which boiled down to an interesting choice between life in jail or death in hell. Thought I expressed my opinion that they could never condemn her immortal soul, she didn�t take the threat lightly However, in the end she didn�t make the choice on those terms but rather she felt there was no reason for her not to marry gay couples. I applauded her for the decision. Others did not. Namely the older members of the committee that ran the church were not pleased. They looked at a woman who supported gay rights and caused the church to be seen in that light was a bad thing. In the end they blamed her that the outreach the church was too expensive and released her from her position, opting only to have a part time male minister to do church on Sundays. It was a long year already. She was out of work for several months and recently got a job. The job is doing outreach in New Hampshire which is a long commute. That started about six weeks ago. She used her one saved up vacation day to go to the doctors for a biopsy. With that visit we discovered the lump in her breast was in fact cancer. Let�s talk about me. Take the title of this entry; the semi-sweet/semi-bitter view that I have towards most things in life makes my stomach turn when something truly bad happens to me. Yes, to me. Selfish? Of course I am. I make myself sick. Anytime I think about things as how MY life will change I want to claw my own eyes out. Yet I still think about it. Sure I�ve had a rough year with broken bones, and kidney stones, but that�s not tragedy. That�s physical pain. Neither of those causes death. Now I am facing something permanent. And I guess that is where I am scared the most. There are very few people in my life that I �can�t lose without my life and my world completely changing. My mother is one of those people. I am heartbroken and lost. I am lost because there is no good reaction to this. I feel guilty. I feel like I my feelings are wrong, and yet there is no way else I know how to deal with this. There is no way that I want deal with this. I don�t want to deal with this properly. I want to be angry and upset, and confused, for whatever its worth. I want to burn myself with emotion at times, but then I just sit here like a stone. I keep getting angry with myself. I�ve always felt not good enough and now I feel like I have a reason. I don�t know how to talk to my friends about this. Do you just mention in idol conversation �by the way, I�ve had this happen to me, thought you should know.� What does that do? It would seem that I would be looking for a reaction from them, but when I just am doing it more so that they know. I don�t expect anyone to do anything for me. There are so many things that happen to us behind closed doors that it�s just so hard to express to those you see daily; even the ones who you trust and care about. I am heartbroken because I am just sad. I love my mom. This is killing me. There is so much wanting to know and waiting and things that needs to be resolved. I have absolutely no power or ability to change the results of what will happen. All I can do is support her and my father who took the news 30 thousand times harder than I did. And then I see her. She�s fine and happy and feels fine and its sooo easy to trick myself into thinking that nothing is going to change. It�s so easy to convince myself that tomorrow everything will be the same. I must be a sentinel. I must be aware. I cannot allow myself to sink into negativity and a morbid morass of internalizing. I cannot allow myself to escape my feelings. I think about my Dad, and how hard it�s been for him. My mom will be strong no matter what, but I don�t know about my dad. I think about David Eggers and the heartbreaking death of his parents. Is that me? The bitter sarcastic bastard that you pity and laugh with all while his story touches you? Am I going to have to go through that with my parents? I think about Sam�s mother who had breast cancer. I grew up with him, and I knew that it happened but I was too young or too stupid to realize what it meant or how I should act or what to say. I think about Shelly�s sister who has gone through leukemia treatment for over a year, and was hospitalized for nearly 3 weeks for a spiderbite. I think about Jen who lost her mom, and still grieves for her and thinks about her constantly. I am scared to do that. I�m not ready to. I think about Jay, who�s mother died when he was in high school, and how his life changed and what a sad person he became after that. I know there is a very real chance that she will recover fully and healthy. But I also know that there is a very real chance that things won�t go that way. And so I just have to thing and wonder and speculate and hope. And hope isn�t something that I am familiar with. I�m much more familiar with fear. I do think that I don�t deserve pity for this, nor do I want it. I can be a caring and sensitive person, but I am not a compassionate person. I will take support and thoughts, and my mother will take any prayers you have, but I don�t deserve any compassion for this. | |||||||||||
