A Moment of Gratitude

Just a note to say thank you to everyone who has used the Amazon search link in the right-hand column to order anything.

Your generosity in orders, over the course of this past year, has enabled me to get several mythology books for the unit that I have been teaching to my 5th and 6th grade library students.  It has also helped me to get some materials for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for my current 5th grade class.  AND 4 new books to read for fun for the library collection as well.

So thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Please consider using the Amazon link on this blog for future purchases.  It really does make a difference for my classroom!

Hooray! Last Day Of Radiation

It is the last day of radiation.  Hooray!

There cannot possibly be enough celebration at this point.  But we are certainly going to try our best.

Ahead, there will be more testing and a number of years of tamoxifen or something similar, and a bazillion scans and appointments and whatever else may be needed.  My doctor will be going over some of that with me today, and there will be more discussions with even more doctors to come, I'm certain.

But this is a huge milestone, and I am going to savor the heck out of it.

Thank you, one and all, for all the support and encouragement through all of this.  It really has meant the world.

PS -- Radiation comfort tip of the day:  a cheap men's cotton t-shirt, turned inside out so that the seams aren't touching your skin.  It may indeed be nirvana.  Bless you, kind nurse, who taught me this.

Radiation Begins Today

It begins.  Again.

Radiation treatments will start for me this morning and I have the temporary tattoo markers to show for it:  they use them as guides so the targeted beam hits the right spot every time.   Oh yeah, I'm a rebel, I have three tattoos.  (You have to squint to see them, but still...I want the street cred.  I think I've earned it at this point and then some.)

Looks like I will have a series of thirty-three treatments in total, five days a week, every single week for almost seven weeks until they are completed, with weekends off to heal a little.  Each treatment should last about twenty minutes.

Oh joy.

It could be a whole lot worse, so I am grateful to be here and not in hospice.  Let me just say that up front.  But this has been an exhausting slog and it is not done yet.  How do parents of small children ever explain all of this to them as they go through treatment?

The staff at the UHC Cancer Center have been fantastic all the way through this.  Am so glad that they had great facilities near our house, so that I didn't have to go far away for treatment -- that would have been incredibly rough on The Peanut and she's been through enough this summer with me as it is.

But life goes on, even if our summer has whizzed by in nothing flat and not been all that relaxing.  For us, school begins again next week.

Where did the summer go, seriously??!!??

We still have school supplies to pick up and a few assorted school clothing items to snag, so somewhere today I will be taking The Peanut to shop if at all possible so we can avoid the weekend insanity of the back to school frenzy.  Somehow, in the next week or so, I also have to get my classroom ready for the kids to return.

Or, at least, as ready as I can under the circumstances.

To See The Glass Half Full

It has been a rough weekend at our house.  We knew that it was coming:  everyone who had any experience with this had told me that at some point in every chemo treatment, you hit a wall of sorts.  With my third round of chemo last Wednesday, we knew that things were going to continue to build up in my system and that there would be a chance that the wall was edging nearer and nearer.

But I didn't just hit mine, I slammed into it going full speed which is typical for me on so many levels.  It leveled me flat out for the entire weekend.

The thing is, though?

You get through it.  Bit by bit, hour by hour, the clock keeps ticking forward.  As the earth continues to turn on its axis oblivious to the agony of any one individual, what is potentially unbearable over the course of a few hours becomes history in the days to come, and then begins to vanish entirely from the line of your horizon.

As the hours tick, tick, tick forward and away from whatever it was that was so unimaginably large only moments ago, you awaken to find that that very same difficulty has already begun to be a memory that will soon be a far distant one.  Whatever seems unbearable in the moment is much more easily borne if you view it instead as a tiny snapshot moment.  It is merely a pinprick of light in an otherwise blazing sea of stars that represent each and every thing you have ever done or will do.  It is so filled with experiences and bits and pieces that make up the whole of who you are that any singular moment -- even a really devastatingly painful and horrible one -- does not eat up the rest like a voracious black hole if you put it in its proper, long-term view perspective.

What I have learned is this:  you can endure pretty much anything if you can find a way to make it small in your mind.  I have had to learn to stop magnifying the small, annoying little bits and pieces of lifetime detritus into something larger than they ever need to be, and instead focus on the happier and shiner moments of gratitude and joy that pepper the darker spots in between, to savor the blessings properly when they come my way even amidst the darkness.

Cancer may very well be rebuilding me as a glass half full person.

And Now? We Wait

It feels as though I am sloshing at this point.  Yesterday was the PET scan, and they emphasized several times that drinking a lot of water, and that making sure that I had some fresh fruit -- especially having some lemon or lime in the water on occasion -- was a good way to help flush the radioactive biotracer ick out of my system more quickly.

There is a lot of joy at having the test, at least, behind me.  Along with the most recent biopsy.

However, the wait for results on both?  It is interminable.  But it cannot be helped:  it will be what it will be, and we will face it either way.

I have had so many friends through the years who have stared down the long road of cancer or other health threats with an enormous amount of courage and dignity.  Looking at what they faced and how they reacted to all of the indignities and fear whilst I now do the same makes their personal strength and courage all the more miraculous to me now.

There is no real dignity in yet another scar, in yet another piece of me being lopped off for testing.   Mr. ReddHedd calls them my battle scars.  He's right, in a way, but that doesn't make the current one itch any less while it is healing.  Because each test must be done, it gets done, no matter the short term personal cost.  But I grow weary from having to slog through yet another round of something or other, and my will to summon hope in the face of yet another series of tests grows thin.

However, I refuse to surrender to fear.  I simply refuse.

This is a testing point for me.  How will this hurdle shape my outlook and my choices going forward?  Will I make better ones, moving forward with a clearer purpose and a sharper focus?  Or will things get even more muddied as the constant checks and vigilance wear at my patience around the edges?

Reflections From A Recovering People Pleaser

The last few years have been filled with a lot of ups and downs, stresses and strains, and not so pleasant diagnoses requiring the devotion of time and energy to a lot of things outside of our control.  Life is driving me, events are pushing me around and the needs of others dictating what I do each day instead of me really consciously directing anything about how I am living my own life.

What has resulted is that I feel like I am living like a ping pong ball, constantly dodging and bouncing back and forth, up and down, but not really getting to any solid conclusion...just with another round of bouncing about looming in the distance as I get a chance to catch my breath from the last round.

Alas, just bobbing about like this isn't enough.

I need goals to work toward, mountains that I consciously choose to climb, something of my own amid the din of everything else that needs doing to sustain my own inner drive. 

But how to do that without sacrificing the well-being of my family, without taking away from them too much while giving myself some desperately needed space of my own?  It's a struggle for me.

Smoothing Out The Rougher Edges

Putting the whole of life into some sort of perspective can be really useful in terms of figuring out where the pieces may not be working well.  It can also be maddening, trying to rearrange things so that everything falls smoothly into place.

Sometimes, I suppose, there needs to be a little friction in order to smooth out a rough edge or two.  But that doesn't make it easy, does it?

One of the constants in my life of late has been the need to get my act together in terms of the day to day necessities:  better, healthier diet; more regular and productive exercise; daily cleaning maintenance, even on days when I am utterly exhausted.  Doing all of this, even just to a tiny extent, would make a big difference in how things feel and work.  At least I think it would.

But when you are worn out and frazzled and past the point of thinking in the long term, doing even a little bit can certainly feel like you are attempting to summit Mt. Everest in a blizzard.

So how do you keep going in spite of that and do the things that need to be done -- not for others, but for yourself?  That is the question that I need to answer.

A Less Hectic Christmas? That's My Wish.

What about a quiet, peaceful Christmas, filled with joy and time together, with lots of laughter and hugs, with contentment and warm cocoa and as much love as you could possibly give to each other, each and every day? 

Wouldn't that be the very best present you could ever hope for this year?

It certainly would for me.  A less hectic, more family-centered Christmas sounds like just the thing I want in my stocking this year.

Here are a few things I'm hoping to do to make that happen for us:

Choosing The Lighter Path

Optimism as a choice, and not just as in inherent characteristic, is a subject that fascinates me.

While I've always wanted to be a "glass half full" kinda gal, I have to say that I tend toward the "half empty" explanation on pretty much everything if I'm being honest about it.  Always have.

No idea if this is a genetic predisposition or a trick of the mind in terms of mental habit, but here we are.

Gretchen Rubin, of The Happiness Project, has an interview with Heather King which I found really fascinating in a number of places.  To wit:

Happiness to me is a mood, and a mood that is largely dependent on outside circumstances: whether I have money in the bank, whether the sun is shining, whether I’m healthy. Any way of life where I’m dependent on what happens outside of me, I’m sunk.

What I’m after is joy, and joy has pain—our pain and the sorrow of the whole world—in the middle of it. Joy, unlike happiness, becomes a state that you may experience only in fleeting stabs, but nonetheless abides.

She goes on to anchor this philosophy through Mother Theresa's life and works.  While it is admirable to strive to look at the world through the likes of Mother Theresa's eyes, I'm not quite certain how practical that might be for all of us on a day to day basis.

But then the interview hits a huge home run for me with this:

Warmth

The warmer weather continues here this morning, although a wee bit cooler than last week after a low front moved in along with some rain yesterday.

We've already started seeing some butterflies in the yard.  Everything is hatching out way earlier this year than I have ever seen it.  It has been next to impossible to try to plan clothes for the day, let alone when to plant anything in the garden.

Our usual frost free date is early May, but I'm tempted to try planting a little earlier this year with my "cool" weather crops just to get a little lettuce in the ground before it gets too warm.

This time of year, you never can tell.

But the trees have begun to peek out the green of their leaves and I'm grateful for the color against the brown, spare branches of winter.

As I watch the robins tiptoe around the yard in search of easy tidbits this morning, I'm soaking in the sunshine peeking through the clouds and spilling over into our sunroom.  It's feeling a little weak at the moment, but the bit of warmth is welcome on my skin as a hedge against the chill that is lingering this morning.

Occasionally, you just get a little reminder of how good life truly is.

And in this moment?  I've decided to sit still and soak it in with everything I have.  Find that moment for yourself today.

The Spirit of Christmas

Today, The Peanut and I went to the local WalMart to get a new microwave oven.

Ours died an ugly and smelly wiring death earlier in the week, and life just wasn't the same without my ability to make easy movie popcorn in the popper we use to make it fresh in the microwave.  And so, off we went to the belly of the Christmas shopping frenzied beast.

We got there just as the Salvation Army folks were finishing their annual "shopping spree" event with young children who get to come and shop with a parent for a couple of items.  It was crowded, but really, really fun to see how thrilled these little kids were to get a baby doll or a tea set...the sort of thing we take for granted at our house because we can afford it for The Peanut without worrying about how to then pay for a meal or medicine or something else.

We are lucky.

But we had also gone to the store for another purpose:  this year, we wanted to help someone in need to pay off their Christmas layaway.

We were hoping to find a family that needed a little help or some other way to help out.  So I took The Peanut with me to the layaway counter, and the clerk asked us to pick a letter of the alphabet, and they found an account that had a little over $200 remaining on it to be paid before Christmas...and a lot of toys for little kids on it.

So we paid it off right then and there, and got to stand by while they called the mom whose account it was to let her know they could come and pick up all their toys.  It was really wonderful...as it turned out, she didn't know where she was going to scrape together the money to pay the remainder, so I'm really glad we ended up doing that particular family.

With A Thankful Heart

This line from a song in the Muppet Christmas Carol struck home as we were watching it yesterday evening:

Stop and look around you.
The glory that you see
is born again each day.
Don't let it slip away.
How precious life can be.

So true, isn't it?

Far too often, I catch my self allowing life to just wash over me without really being awake to what is happening around me because I'm to busy in the "doing" to be bothered. Which doesn't exactly lend itself to a full and grateful existence, now does it?

If you are missing the wonder around you, then how can your life possibly be wonder-full? 

Today's mission:  savor the small stuff.  Because it really adds up.

Stripping Down To The Bare Bones At The Holidays

The last few weeks have been insane at our house. 

Between school performances and activities, then The Peanut getting sick, making peace with my slow recovery from surgery (or at least continuing to try, because it is not the easiest thing in the world for my annoying Type A personality, let me tell you, especially with a "to do" list calling out to me), and the myriad of family and friend obligations? 

I feel like I'm about to lose my mind this year.

The holiday spirit is all but invisible with me at the moment.  If it weren't for the fact that I managed to get the tree and several of our decorations up before my melanoma surgery last month, I think I'd still be struggling here.  Thank goodness the tree has been up and lovely - it's a visual lifesaver this year.

And what I really want?

To hibernate away from all the hubbub and just soak in some seasonal joy with Mr. ReddHedd and The Peanut.

The truth is you can not have it all and do it all every single day.  Anyone who tells you that you can has a really, really enormous staff that does a lot of "it all" for them.  Or they are running on no sleep and get a high from being a martyr, which does not exactly sound like a pleasant way to spend your life, now does it?

Since I do not have a ginormous staff staging every holiday event and transporting and picking up and doing "it all" for me, I am exhausted and not enjoying it.  And that has to stop.

Because I love Christmas and want to enjoy it this year with my family.  I really, really want to enjoy it this year.  Especially because we have had a long, hard slog the last few years of a lot of losses and one too many close calls with cancer.  We know the value of every single day that we get together far, far too well at this point. 

So as of today, I'm coming up with a way to strip our next few days down to the bare bones.  My strategy comes down to this philosophy:  More joy.  Less stress.

Some Thoughts On Finding Your Holiday Joy

I love Christmas.  It is my absolute favorite time of year in so many ways:  the joy my child gets with every little ornament and bobble that gets pulled out of our Christmas closet as we decorate the house, the late night passionate smooches under the mistletoe (woo hoo!), the smell of baking cookies and homemade fudge filling our house.

Love it.

But the crazed lunacy that is shopping and giving and feeling like you have to find the present that is absolute perfection in the quantity guaranteed to please even the pickiest member of your family?   Ugh.  Hate it.

After reading this post on BlogHer, I see that I am far from the only person that feels that way.  Which is comforting in some way -- misery does love company -- but saddening on so many other levels.  Shouldn't we be enjoying the Christmas spirit instead of miserably dragging our rear ends through the mall or getting pepper sprayed while participating in a shopping scrum?

I hate the commercial pressures this time of year.  And I really hate that everyone else's expectations have gotten so crazy and that it has begun to rub off on me, too.

Especially the pressure that it puts on me to out-perform last year's gift giving, to make everyone happy, to pull out all the stops...it just brings out the absolute worst in my people pleasing lunacy every single year.  I hate that about myself, especially because that really ruins the holidays for me.

When you add in the endless running around that your over-scheduled mess of a calendar forces on you this time of year?   Or if you have to balance all the sides of divorce in your family on top of everything else, and then feeling like you are being tugged in twenty directions at once and timed by a stopwatch down to the last comparative second of your visits?  Or your present valuations don't align precisely?

Aiiiiyeeeeeee!  It is enough to make a jolly old elf toss his cookies, isn't it?

Last year, though?  I stumbled onto a formula that works really, really well for me and allows me to ratchet back the crazy while pushing forward the true heartfelt joy of the season.

1)  Work gratitude into your day, every single day, from now until Christmas.  I have been keeping a gratitude journal off and on for years, after having read Simple Abundance a while back.  I find that I am more conscious of the blessings in my life when I am keeping it than when I let it lapse.  Especially during the holidays, when you are overly tired and stressed and running your kids from choir practice to grandma's can't miss afternoon dinner-palooza and back again to play practice and then out to the overcrowded mall and...well, you see what I mean about needing a little moment to exhale and take in only the best for a few precious moments.  Then I re-read some of my journal entries on the days when I am most stressed out or irritated, sitting back with a cup of tea and relaxing while thinking about how good my life really is.  It can really take the edge off, even from a stressful family gathering, when you put gratitude and joy on the front burner of your brain before you go.

Let The Preparations Begin

It's time to rearrange the sunroom so we can squeeze the ginormous Christmas tree in front of the windows.

Usually, we wait until after Thanksgiving for this.  But this year I have a wee bit of surgery to get past,  and I'm afraid it might put a bit of a crimp in my giddy-up.  I'm worried about having enough ooomph to get Thanksgiving dinner on the table, although I have plans and a willing husband who can't cook like a gourmet, but he can follow directions like a pro, so we'll be fine.

But I'm beginning the tree and decor preparations earlier to make sure we get the Christmas tree up and decorated for The Peanut.  Just in case.

If nothing else, it's a good excuse to drink some eggnog.

I find myself thinking "just in case" about way too many things lately.  I suppose that's a normal side effect of the melanoma diagnosis, but it is a little morbid on the day to day.

But it is also liberating.  What is it that I truly want to be doing, saying, feeling, right this minute and not really care a whit about what someone else thinks about it?  What do I really want to do in this one moment?

What if...?

What if "one of these days" could be just around the corner?  What would you be doing right now if that were the case?

More Lessons Learned From Amy

I've been missing Amy a lot lately.  I didn't realize how much until mid-grumpiness over the weekend when it hit me square:  last year, on the 16th of October, we got the devastating news that our sister-in-law had passed away unexpectedly at the age of 38.

Beyond the shock and the grief came the unbearable pain that we would never again get one of her hugs or hear that laugh of hers that warmed you from the inside out.  For a while, it was as though all the light had gone out of our world, and we were left to scuttle along with a flickering candle where our hope had been.

But there were children to tend to and arrangements to manage and, as they say, life goes onward whether we are ready for it to do so or not.

Somehow, somewhere, mercifully the smiles have returned, the days have gotten a little brighter and the memories of Amy no longer carry that knife-sharp pain of loss, but instead are filled with an ever-lessening wistful loss and a whole lot of love and warmth.

We are now a year past that day when we lost her -- that horrible, horrible day -- and I've learned a few more things since my last post on the lessons that Amy taught me in her all-too-brief life. 

Let's start from where we left off:

1) Never go to bed without your spouse knowing how much you love them. Losing Amy was really hard, but knowing that her husband had no doubt in his mind about how solid their love was? Made it ever so slightly easier.

2) Who cares what size you wear, when everyone is really looking at how amazing your heart and mind are.

Artist's Way Seminar: After The Second Day

Let me tell you, digging through all the artistic blocks and censors you have built up through the years is hard, exhausting work.

It has been well worth it, absolutely.  But I crashed hard last night and slept so soundly the alarm was startling this morning.  This seminar has been incredibly energizing in so many ways for me, but my body needed down time in the worst way last night -- funny how when I need to process heavy information, my refuge has always been and still is a lot of sleep.

Woke up and did my seminar homework morning pages first thing. 

It's funny to think about them as homework, because I do them regularly these days and love them.  But it's been fun doing them here because I'm in such a creative frame of mind that I'm digging at some really useful stuff that has helped unlock so many things for me.  It's really been a wonderful tool for meditation and creativity while I've been here.

Meals yesterday were also wonderful.  Again.

Relax

I'm in my post-Thanksgiving cooking stupor today. My body is worn out, my mind is fried from all the planning, and my stomach is still stuffed even though I consciously did not overeat yesterday.

What's a girl to do?

Relax a bit. Let everyone graze on leftovers and just sit back and let the world go by around me. The Peanut is back home from Grandma's, so life is good. And I'm going to just sit back and enjoy it while we watch some Phineas and Ferb.

That's my genius plan for today.

I recently discovered the uber-relaxing music of a Tibetan musician named Nawang Khechog.

Day O' Yard Sale Update

We finished the second day of the school fundraising yard sale yesterday.  It was a long, hot, sweaty slog.

We raised close to $6500 dollars.  Boo yah!

The kids and their lemonade stand raised over $330 of that by themselves.

The Peanut turned out to be a serious force at selling lemonade and water -- she did an awesome job, appearing to have inherited both our work ethics (poor kid).  She was absolutely amazing -- so we are taking her out for ice cream this afternoon as a reward.

Things I learned?

First, the same old lesson: that a few of the people end up doing all of the work, even though everyone else gets to benefit from it.  How to change that?  Wish I knew, but it has been that way for a while and I'd love thoughts on how other school parent groups or others have motivated people to get off their butts and help out more.  Thoughts?

Something That We Do

It's a crazy busy day here today -- health fair at The Peanut's school, eye appointment early this morning because my eyes have begun to suck even worse than they did the last time I got them checked (getting old is not for the weak), my weekly Weight Watchers meeting and we're having a sleepover here this evening and I have a house that needs straightening.

And today?  For whatever reason, I'm feeling that edginess about having to do fifty bazillion things for everyone else which constantly shoves my own projects and needs way down the list.  My people pleasing ways are chafing at me this morning.

Yep, one of those days.

So I thought a little reminder of why I have such a wonderful life was in order.

This song was a huge hit for Clint Black back in the day.  It describes the approach that Mr. ReddHedd and I have taken to life and love to a tee, which is why we play it on occasion for a date night dance.

It really is the lyrics that make Something That We Do -- and for that, Skip Ewing gets the credit as much as Clint Black.  I love most of Skip Ewing's song for their lyrical simplicity -- he gets right to the heart of things in spare prose instead of lengthy, nonsensical allegory.  You have to love that, don't you?