Category Archives: gratitude

December 4, 2013 · 1:41 pm

Circus (And A Giveaway!)

Perhaps you’ve heard the term Thanksgivukkah?  Or Christmukkah?  How about Thanksgivukkahbirthmas?  Yeah, this time of year, we have Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Dylan’s birthday, and Christmas.

When I was pregnant with Dylan, my actual due date was December 24th.  When he came early on December 6th, I thought, Phew, I dodged the Christmas baby bullet!  I was an idiot.  When you have a family that celebrates Hanukkah and Christmas, any birthday between Thanksgiving and the New Year is a holiday baby.

We hosted a successful Thanksgiving dinner at our house (cooked with a lot of love and just as much butter), and we’ve lit the menorah seven lovely nights so far.  We also bought our first real Christmas tree, and it smells amazing!   So far so good for this most busy stressful anxious wonderful time of the year, right?

Next up is Dylan’s 7th birthday party bonanza at the ice skating rink this weekend and a blizzard themed bingo night at Dylan’s school next week for which I am the event co-chair.  There are way too many items on my to do list for these events, but it will all get done, right?  After the birthday and bingo bashes, we’ll plow ahead to Christmas and the New Year, but smack in the middle of it all, there’s the itty-bitty dilemma of the basal cell carnimona on my face.  Carcinoma is another word for cancer.  On my face.

Remember the bandage?

bandage

Well, the biopsy came back malignant.  It’s basal cell carcinoma, and according to my dermatologist, it’s “infiltrated” (i.e. deep).  It’s not melanoma.  In other words, it’s not going to kill me.  But it’s still cancer.  Deep.  On my face.

Cancer on my face for Christmas. (You shouldn’t have.)

Cancer looks for me, I swear.  It seeks me out, which is why I go to a team of doctors regularly and why I have thyroid ultrasounds that reveal concerning nodules and colonoscopies that reveal precancerous polyps and annual skin checks that uncover “infiltrated” basal cell carnimoma.  I’m sensitive, yes, but I’m also the girl who once got pregnant and ended up with cancer in her uterus instead.

This too shall pass, but in the meantime, it feels like a kidney stone.

December is a wonderful time of the year, especially when I see the joy on my boys’ faces when the Christmas tree is lit up and when they light the Hanukkah menorah candles all by themselves.  But December is also busy and dark and expensive and endless.

The holiday cards need to go out and teacher gifts need to be purchased and the birthday cake (for the ice rink party) needs to be picked up and the cookie cake (for the school party) needs to be ordered and the cake plates and napkins and forks need to be bought and the inflatable hockey stick party favors must be inflated and the blizzard bingo decorations need to be delivered and the winter music needs to be downloaded and the menorahs eventually need to be put away and the Christmas presents need to be bought and wrapped and hid and the house needs to be cleaned up and out because Terminix finally gave us a date in January to finally tent the house to finally get rid of the termites scheming to swarm again in the spring.

And Harry.  My Bo Berry is still gone and I still listen for him when my keys jingle at the front door and I still think of him when I stumble upon a leftover hamburger in the refrigerator and I still get sympathy cards (and bills) from the doctors who treated him and his remains are ready to be picked up and I have no idea what to do with them or where to put them or how or if to tell the kids about them because how do you explain remains to children?

And the cancer on my face.  I have basal cell carcinoma and it’s deep and I need to have Mohs surgery and a plastic surgeon needs to close the wound and there will be a scar and the thing is that I’m still having a hard time with Everything.

I feel buckets and buckets of gratitude under all of It.  Underneath Everything.  I promise, I do.  Like when Dylan winks at me (thanks to Kevin McCallister from Home Alone) and when Riley gets so mad but laughs hysterically when I accuse him of having a monkey in his belly (he does!).  There’s a truth, too.  Cancer doesn’t look for me.  I know this.  I’m not that special.  And, of course, the lesson.  Go to the doctor, Mamas!  Take care of yourselves!  But right now life feels like a freakin’ circus.

Speaking of which…awkward segue in 3-2-1…the circus is coming to town.  Seriously.  Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s Built To Amaze! show rolls into Miami in January, and I’m giving one lucky winner four tickets to the show on Saturday, January 11, 2014 at 3pm at the American Airlines Arena in Miami, FL.

Color Hi-res Logo

Ringling Ringmaster

See, I told you it would be an awkward segue.  Nonetheless, I’m excited about this giveaway because free stuff is fun, I’ve never taken my kids to the circus, and I think it will be hilarious to take the kiddos to the big top when there’s circus tent covering my entire house.

All you have to do to enter to win the tickets is leave a comment here on the blog telling me why you like the circus and/or if you’re afraid of clowns like I am (damn Poltergeist!).  You can also comment on the circus that is currently my life, but please clarify if you also want to enter to win the circus tickets.

Do not enter if you cannot arrange your own transportation and/or lodging.  Winner will receive circus tickets ONLY.   

The deadline to enter is midnight on Friday, December 13th.  After that, I will pick a winner at random. 

Good luck!  Ha!  Get it?  Unlucky Friday the 13th?  Ha! 

(Seriously.  Good luck.) 

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Filed under anxiety, boys, cancer, Christmas, circus, colonoscopy, gratitude, Hanukkah, holidays, Thanksgiving, thyroid

October 23, 2013 · 10:38 am

Look Up, It’s The Moon (Or Unclogging The Toilet)

About a week ago, I was inspired (infuriated might be a better word) by something my dentist said that made me want to strangle him with the floss he’d just used to clean in between my teeth.  He started his typical small talk bit with:

“How are you?”

“How are the kids?”

“Anything new?”

They were the kind of questions that elicit responses like I’m good.  The kids are good.  Everything’s fine.  Blah blah blah.

Then he asked… “How old are they now?”

Four and six.  Pre-K and 1st grade.

Then he asked… “Still home?”

“Still home?” – when you are – is as miserable a question as “Are you pregnant?” – when you’re not.  You might think I read too much into his inquiry and shouldn’t be so sensitive about it.  “Still home?” could be interpreted many different ways.  But, I was there.  I heard it.  I felt it.  Your kids are how old?  And you’re not back at work yet?  Have you lost your ambition?  Your kids aren’t babies anymore.  What are you waiting for?  Oh, I heard it.  Oh, I felt it.

Still home.

And then when I tried to write about it – about stay-at-home motherhood, choice, and everything in between – my mind clogged like a toilet.  I couldn’t write a single word, because my dentist made me doubt myself.   I honestly wasn’t sure if he was an asshole or if he was right (and an asshole), so I didn’t finish the essay, which got me thinking about how I really suck at finishing things.

Actually, there are some things I’m really good at finishing, like antibiotics, episodes of “The Good Wife,” and entire bags of Skinny Pop (and hopefully the 10K I’m running on Sunday morning).  But then there are the things I’m incapable of completing, and I’m not just referring to baby books, scrapbooks, and family photo albums.  I’m talking about the pile(s) of mail that I never quite get through.  The laundry that gets folded but not put away.  The super hero wall stickies that I put the boys’ room, except for the last one (“pow!”) that has to be applied on the wall above the fish tank, which requires a ladder and some awkward maneuvering.  The 2006 and 2007 boxes of bills and bank statements that need to be shredded but instead are collecting dust in my laundry room.  The box of stuff to be donated that lives in the corner of my dining room that I don’t even notice anymore.  The pictures that still need to be hung on the wall in the living room.  The toys that need to be sorted.  The doors for my office closet.  The book I’ve started writing a hundred times.  It seems like my life is a series of  unfinished projects.

Funny enough, Mike confessed to me in the car on Sunday that he, too, is frustrated that he’s easily distracted and has a hard time finishing things.  It’s true.  He’ll walk into a room to find his phone and an hour later I’ll find him building a bookshelf that requires a trip to Home Depot, where he’ll end up spending an afternoon researching raccoon-proof garbage cans.   Maybe we all suck at finishing things.

Speaking of sucking at things, taking care of Harry post-surgery has been a huge challenge.  If the tagline of Harry’s medical trauma was “expect the unexpected,” his recovery has unfolded in the same manner.  Even with all he endured in the hospital, he’s still fighting herniated discs in his neck and back, and sadly, his blood sugar won’t normalize, which means the insulinoma, or cancer, has probably metastasized.  He’s been on a complex feeding regime and an even more intricate medication schedule for weeks, and just when we thought he was finally making progress, we were told to consider chemotherapy as a last resort.  No matter what we do, we fail to fix him.

As long as we’re on the topic of failing, when you give your kids a surprise treat or something special, do they respond with, “What else did you get me?” or “That’s all?”  Mine sometimes often do, and it makes me want to strangle them with the same floss I fantasized using on my dentist.  Even worse (actually, the strangling thing is probably worse), I can’t help but wonder if they’ve learned this lack of gratitude from me.

Last Friday night, I took the boys to a kids’ Shabbat service and dinner at our temple.  It was a lovely event, but after an hour of standing in the middle of a category five hurricane of running and screaming children (with no wine in sight), I was ready to leave.  Dylan wasn’t happy about it, so he whined the whole way home saying things like, “This was the worst night ever.  I only got to bounce in the bounce house once.  Why did you make me leave?  This was the worst night ever!”

I wanted to pull the car over and run up and down the street screaming: “Why can’t you be grateful that you bounced in the bounce house at all?  You bounce in bounces ALL the time!  Do you realize how fortunate you are?  Do you know how bad you’re making me feel?”  And then I caught a glimpse of the moon.  It was the biggest, fullest, brightest moon I’d ever seen.  That supermoon from a few months ago had nothing on this one.

“Look up, boys.  Look at the moon.  Isn’t it beautiful?  Can you forget for one minute about the bounce house and all the things you want or don’t have or wish were different and look at this enormous, breathtaking moon?  You might never see one like this again.”

“Mommy,” Dylan said.  “We see the moon all the time.”

“Not this moon, Dylan.  This one is special.  Really look at it.”

I don’t know if they really looked at it, but I sure did, and my mind unclogged a little bit.  I stopped worrying about my choice to still be home, and realized that although I won’t ever go “back” to work, I will eventually move “forward” to a new endeavor.  Moreover, I’ll be the one who knows when it’s time (not my a-hole dentist).  I thought about how of all the things I have a hard time completing, this blog – this living, breathing journal of my life – isn’t one of them.  I realized how fortunate I am that Harry – even with his terminal diagnosis – is still here and that my still home status allows me to give him the love and care he needs and deserves.  I remembered that even though I wish my boys said thank you more often, they, like me, are works in progress, and, as usual, I’m not nearly finished.

“Moon moon moon, I can see

Moon moon moon, you’re taking care of me.”

– Laurie Berkner

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Filed under dentist, gratitude, Harry, health, motherhood, Stay-at-Home Mama