Dusan was right. And I'm fresh out of pudding.

One for me, and one for my homies.

Picture it: Sarasota, summer 1987.  Our hair is huge, our income is 100% discretionary, and our only rule besides "stick together" is "don't get caught."  Elizabeth's parents foolishly decide to head to Europe for  a few weeks, leaving 16 year-old her - and by extension, Hope and me - at home alone.  Those of you who secretly call John Hughes your personal lord and savior know what happens next, right?  Elizabeth promptly installs Hope in the spare bedroom; I make frequent guest appearances; and most of our classmates end up at Elizabeth's house for a classy soirée.  You know how I know it was classy?  Because I was the one chugging the cold duck straight from the bottle (and there's a reason you only ever do that once).


Anyway, the good times are rolling, the hot tub is turning weird colors, and it looks like someone is heating up a carton of pour-a-quiche in the microwave (as one does). Elizabeth, Hope, and I are debating exactly how to deal with the police when they inevitably arrive (and they do), when Dusan wanders over.


Dusan is of Korean descent, incredibly smart, a musical genius, rather tall, not someone we usually run with, and ALLEGEDLY a fan of the Mary Jane.  He is normally mellow, but tonight - daaaaamn.  His eyes are doing that pinwheel-y thing that Bugs Bunny's eyes do when he takes one to the melon, thanks to Daffy's shenanigans.

Not actually Dusan.

Dusan oozes coolness - and just a tiny bit of condescension - as he leans in to the three of us and says, "You know, guys... I never said it was gonna be easy."  He waits a beat, then asks us to open his pudding cup (in all fairness, they're tricky under the most lucid of circumstances).  We oblige, and he ambles off, mumbling "This is the BEST pudding..."  


Hope, Elizabeth, and I are stunned into silence.  What the hell is he talking about?  When did he tell us this?  Is he even more ALLEGEDLY stoned than we thought?  Or is he a prophet?  And where did he get that pudding?  Is there any more? And really, what ARE we going to do when the cops show up?

Why yes,  as a matter of fact, I DO own the road.

Fast forward to fall 2011, and it looks like our pal was a
prophet.  It is not easy - life in general, yes, but more specifically, living with cancer in our family.  And that makes ME not easy to live with, and that's why I have been off the radar for a while.  For the last several weeks there has literally been nothing that anyone could say that was the right thing.   And when I am like that, I cannot stand to think that I am going to bite off some dear friend's head for saying the wrong thing, so I have just made myself scarce.

I know what you're thinking.  "*I* would have known what to say.  You could have let me know what was going on."  No.  No, I couldn't.   I assure you, no matter what you were going to say, it was going to be the wrong thing.  Ask me how Nathan's doing, and you're an insensitive jerk for not allowing me to have a life outside my son with cancer.  Ask me about anything else, and you are an insensitive jerk for not asking me about my son with cancer.  Tell me how strong I am and how you can't imagine how I manage, and you are an insensitive jerk for not realizing that I am not managing, that I am a hot under-medicated mess.  Tell me that God never gives us more than we can handle, and you are an insensitive jerk with shitty glib theology.  Tell me how lucky I am that Nathan is doing so well and how so many parents don't get the kind of good news we have gotten, and you are an insensitive jerk for turning suffering into a competition.  Tell me how awful it must be to have a kid with cancer, and you are an insensitive jerk for ignoring all those parents who don't get the kind of good news we've gotten.  Tell me that it could be worse, and you are an insensitive jerk for minimizing the pain and horror and grief and anxiety and fear, both high- and low-grade, that we have lived with since he was diagnosed in March 2006. And God and John Hughes help you should you decide to give me advice, because that will be a bridge way the hell too far.

In short, you cannot win.  Because I just want this to be over.  I do not want to be strengthened by my struggles or admired for my positive attitude.  I do not want to be an inspiration to anyone anywhere. I don't want to be "that family" any more.  I am not a good sport.  I am a tired, ungrateful wretch, and I want my life back.

Would be a one-of-a-kind tramp stamp.

Which is right up there with "oompa-loompa" and "date with the guy who played Tuco on Breaking Bad" (don't judge) on the List of Things I Deserve But Am Unlikely To Receive Sometime Soon.  My time in Camp Suck-It-Up is half over, sort of.  Nathan will finish chemo in July 2012 (screw the Mayans), and we will for sure pack up and vacate the cabin ASAP, but I suspect that no one checks out without commemorative camper tattoos.  


Nathan will continue to have MRIs every 6 months for the rest of his life, and we will continue to hold our breath and wait for the doctor's follow-up call.  And the odds are that he'll have further NF-related complications at some point, and that we will be shattered all over again.

So, why did I climb out of the hole and back in your face?  Because I taught my 5th graders last week that we have to be willing to unpack some yucky places in ourselves in order to connect with the characters in the books we read as well as the ones we encounter in real life.  Because when I mentioned that I could think of one of those yucky places right off the bat, a very wise 10 year-old looked dead at me and said, "Maybe you should write about it."  And because I may be a lot of things, but a bullshitter is not one of them, in the classroom or anywhere else. 

So, no. I am not getting what I want.  Probably not ever.  But I am learning to live honestly with what I have - ungraciously, kicking and screaming, pudding-free, and with my meds clutched in my hot sweaty hand.  Bless your heart for putting up with me.

Love you -

MA

I miss Boolean logic.

So after my one disastrous year at the University of Free Liquor for Freshman Girls, I came home to Sarasota, and I started taking classes at The School Formerly Known as MCC.  This is where I was introduced to Boolean logic, and oooooh, I love me some black-and-white-no-gray-area business.  Very cut and dried. If A, then not B.  If Y, then Z.  I was all over it, it made perfect sense, and my GPA started the long, painful climb up from the netherworld.

Fast forward to now.  I am here to tell you that life does not work like Boolean logic.  It should.  But, it doesn't.   If it did, then the following would be axiomatic:
* If your son is ill, then your parents stay healthy and NOT your mom, your rock of strength, goes through her own health crisis.
* If your son has a brain tumor, then NOT your oven blows up on Holy Saturday while you have your Easter cake baking in it.
* If your son goes through chemotherapy and loses his hair, then NOT he develops a severe palsy, resulting in facial asymmetry.
* If your son is granted a Caribbean cruise by the lovely and generous people at the Make-a-Wish Foundation, then NOT the State Department requires his biological mother's signature on the passport card application.
* If your son's passport application must be signed by his biological mother, then NOT due to her mental illness, she is unable to understand the paper or the need for her to sign it, thus necessitating a Statement of Special Circumstance to be sent to the State Department asking for an exemption to this rule.

The hits just keep on coming.   Plus, there is the usual day-to-day business of keeping a family running that I frankly found a tad overwhelming even in pre-cancer days: supervising homework, making dinner (except on Wednesday - YAY!), doing laundry, battling the crowds at WalMart, occasionally remembering auto maintenance and yardwork, paying bills, cleaning house, wrestling Peeps and Cadbury eggs out of the dog's mouth, finding out at 1 a.m. that both toilets are stopped up and there are no more clean towels in the house, threatening to throw that damn X-Box right into the damn lake if you don't put that controller down RIGHT NOW - well, you know.  The usual.

And then, there's the wire hangers.
Dear Lord, don't get me started on those wire hangers.

But what really sucks is that there is no rule that says "If you are feeling super-dee-duper sorry for yourself, then NOT other people have it worse."

Other people have it way, way worse than I do.  Lots of them live in my home state, Sweet Home Alabama, where homes and lives and entire communities were devastated on April 28 by some of the worst tornados in recorded history.  Thirty-five miles northwest of Birmingham, my hometown of West Jefferson (one blinkie light, one gas station, one school, and five churches) was spared, but communities less than an hour away were just wiped out.  It is beyond my comprehension.

Rachel Stafford, a dear friend and former colleague, lives in Birmingham, and through her beautifully written blog, www.handsfreemama.com, she is coordinating family-to-family relief efforts.  Today, Rachel emailed me about a family of 4 who is grateful to have survived. Kenyardia, Jamal, and their two daughters (ages 5 and almost 2) lost everything they owned when the storm passed through their home in Pratt City, a less-than-affluent suburb of Birmingham.  They literally escaped with nothing but their lives.

Do I know how that feels?  Thank God, no.  Do I know how it feels when people come out of the woodwork to support you through a hellish nightmare that seems to have no end in sight?  Yep, I can sing all four verses of that song.  And that is why Team Grantham is taking a break from being the takers and trying on the givers' role for a while.  For Mother's Day, I am going shopping for Kenyardia, a mom whose home is in pieces and whose heart and life likely feel pretty well-shattered too.  I can't do as much for her as I would like, but I can do something, BY GOD JIM.  And because I am one pushy broad, I am asking you to help too.

Her kid has a brain tumor! You must give her what she wants! Resistance is futile!

If you have healthy kids and a roof over your head, go buy this family a gift card for WalMart or Target or Publix.  Seriously, even $10 will make a difference.  Send it to me, or send it straight to Rachel - you can reach her at rachelstafford@handsfreemama.com.

And by the way, about Nathan?  I learned on Saturday that our hairstylist, Kendra the Magnificent, is raffling off a basket of swanky hairstyling tools and products to raise money for Team Grantham.  And Nathan - chemotherapy-getting, hair-losing, partially-facially-paralyzed, exhausted-and-weight-losing Nathan - has decided to donate that money to Kenyardia and Jamal and their girls.

If you can help, THEN you must.

I love you guys, and I promise that the next post will be all about the wonder that is SPAMALOT, and why, if I were to have another child (which I most certainly am not), that child's name would be Patsy.

For a Libra, I'm pretty lame at this.

One of the hardest things about being the mom of a kid with cancer (besides introducing that particular phrase into your vocabulary) is figuring out how to balance treating him like a kid and treating him like a kid with cancer.  From Day 1 my battle cry has been, "This is not the story of his life.  This is the story of 18 months of his life." As such, he has gotten precious little in the way of special treatment around the house and at school.  Unconsciously, I think I wanted him to get the message that while this is a crappy situation, it is not the end of the world - kind of like when you're in the hospital, the signal to panic is when everyone you know shows up at your bedside.  It's the "If you don't get much special treatment, you must not be too bad off" line of thinking.

Of course, allowances have been made.  If he doesn't like the looks of dinner, Nathan chugs an Ensure shake to keep his weight up.  If he's tired, we pry Clare off of him and let him sneak off to bed early.  He has a whole list of accommodations at school including being able to wear a hat or have a snack in class or take a rest in the clinic.  But I have tried my best to keep things as normal as possible and to keep bringing the wicked and evil back to stepmothering.

For Nathan, this means that he still has kitchen clean-up every other day, two rooms to clean on Saturday morning, and weekly laundry duty split with Matt.  He still gets fussed at for chewing with his mouth open and for spending too much time on video games. And with apologies to Erich Segal, chemo does not mean never having to do your homework.  He is still being held accountable at home and at school, and that's as it should be.

Until, of course, it isn't.  Tonight, the Teflon Kid is plumb wore out physically, emotionally, and every other kind of -ly you got.  Tonight, the stress is not rolling off his back, it's seeping into his pores, and it's insidious.  Tonight, he's a seabird covered in oil, looking at Dan and me and asking why we let this happen. Tonight, he's got a pass because there are zombies to slay, chicken fingers to chew like a cow, and a movie to watch - and that damn homework will just have to get to the end of the line.