August 18, 2009
Summers bring change. The end of the summer signals the start of school for children, and for some it’s their first day of school ever. My youngest child, Tristan, will start nursery school in a few weeks. This month has brought the inevitable developmental milestones of potty training and sleeping in a big bed. My oldest child, Paige, will start middle school. She went to sleepaway camp for the first time this summer (and loved it). My middle child lost his first two teeth.
As I sit and watch and listen to the waves on our beach vacation I know the summer is drawing to a close. Some of you reading this are already sending your children back to school.
The months and years go by. Like all of you I mourn the quick passage of time. “Where did the summer go?” I hear my friends asking. Projects we hoped would be accomplished — tasks we hoped would be done — sit unfinished. Organizing photos, cleaning out a closet or a room, or reading that book a friend recommended; many things went undone in the last eight weeks.
Maybe you were lazy, maybe other things came up, maybe you were preoccupied with family obligations. Maybe you had an unexpected cancer diagnosis, maybe you got the flu, maybe your parents’ health was sub-par.
Regardless the reason, there can be a bit of disappointment when summer ends. The children we send back are taller, older, more mature. They’ve had lots of experiences to tell their friends about. Maybe they’re in a new school, maybe they’re now the oldest in school, maybe they’re now the youngest. New bus routes, new starting times, new friends, new backpacks, new teachers.
Some children will be starting back with a new experience to tell their teacher and friends: “This summer my mommy got cancer.” That one will not be an isolated instance, unfortunately; women around the country will be sending children to school with that summer report.
Growth happens in fits and spurts, not with smooth sliding grace.
With each phase comes
pain,
discomfort,
unease.
Restlessness,
sleeplessness,
yearning.
When I had the tissue expanders in my chest to make room for the implants that would replace my breasts after the mastectomies, every week my plastic surgeon would add to them. And each time after a “fill” they would feel tight. The skin would not be big enough for the volume inside, and it would react. The skin would feel the pressure and grow, that was the point of the process. Until the skin could replicate there was achiness, tightness, a ripping or tearing feeling.
A similar sensation happens during the days during pregnancy when you feel your belly just can’t accommodate the growing baby inside it. And yet it does. If it happens too fast you get a stretch mark, a sign your skin just couldn’t keep up. The growth was too rapid, too harsh, too vigorous.
I often wonder if mothers and fathers get psychological stretch marks when we are asked to accommodate changes we’re not quite ready for.
What can we do? What options do we have? None. We must “go with the flow” and do the best we can. Our children grow and change whether we like it or not. We do them no favors by trying to protect them, coddle them, and keep them young. We give them wings to fly when we give them tools to be
confident
and caring
and inquisitive
and trusting
individuals.
I am moved to tears as I watch my children grow.
I am moved by the succession of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
I know that as a mother I lack many skills I wish I had.
But I also know that the words I have written in my blogs and essays will one day be a gift to them too.
Not a gift to the children that they are, but instead a gift to the adults that I am raising them to be.
Each August or September as they go back to school I marvel that another school year has passed and yet another is here.
I mark time differently now. I mark anniversaries not of weddings, but since diagnosis, since mastectomies, since chemotherapy began and since it ended, since implants, since Tamoxifen, since Arimidex, since oophorectomy. They are not just dates; they have meaning. They are meaningful for doctor visits and tests I must have done and dates I can stop taking drugs and dates I must know for other treatments.
No matter how you measure time it always goes too fast.
The growth happens too fast.
And the growing pains hurt for me.
The stretch marks might be invisible this fall, but they are surely there.
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