If it weren’t for a running tally on my calendar, I’d lose track of the days since diagnosis. That’s where I am now – ready to be done marking time. And this morning I got the girls on their buses, walked two miles, drank a green smoothie, did some yoga, checked emails, and logged on to see the NaPoWriMo prompt. That’s National Poetry Writing Month, for those who are unfamiliar. I’ve never done it before, and I usually make fun of National Novel Writing Month every November (because, seriously, one month!? The novel I’m re-revising now has taken me something like three years). But the new, energetic post-chemo dynamo that is my current self wanted to tackle NaPoWriMo, despite the fact that I typically write prose. So I cheated a little and wrote a prose-poem, and cheated even more by using NaPoWriMo’s “get ready” prompt from yesterday. Yesterday, the prompt was to write an ekphrastic poem, or a poem about a work of art. If wall art in home decorating catalogues isn’t really art, then I cheated all around. Nevertheless, here’s the result:

Minding the IV I shift in my seat to see the home decorating catalogue my sister unfolds. She’s driven roughly 300 miles to sit beside me, chemo snaking through the loose plastic loop pinched between my fingers. It’s like talking to a drunk, I’ve warned her, and the mass-produced paintings on canvases in the catalogue drift one into the other like liquid beads. Blues and grays. I can do that, I tell her. I’d been an art student just long enough to learn to copy.

And after my last treatment, the toxins having done their work, sixteen weeks of squeezing the tumor down so small fingertips can no longer find it, I stand in my studio, a bead-board room in the back of the detached garage, stand by the drafting table that takes up half the space and holds three crates of vinyl records on its crossbar underneath, stand and paint the same squares of color from the catalogue. Blues and grays. I add only a touch of sunrise orange, a nod to George, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. Brush to canvas, bristles dragging, long strokes like drawn breath.

Some nights I’d curl around my little girl and teach her how to breathe deep. In, out. Ocean sounds. Can you feel the waves chasing after your toes in the sand? Can you hear them wiping the bad dreams away?

I paint the squares. I paint over the squares. I wipe color on and off again with a rag dipped into the mud-colored water of a plastic tumbler that reads in scratched, black print: Eskimo Joe’s – Stillwater, Oklahoma. I let the canvas dry. I remember why I’d changed my major. My copy is like a slurred version of the original, like me trying to tell a story while the chemo slips along the IV. But it’s the end, too. It’s the first morning I spend post chemo listening to the raking of the brush bristles while I hum “Here Comes the Sun.”

And here’s the copy of a copy itself (see what I did there? I just copied Trent Reznor):

Hello from the other side of chemo! It’s been a little over a week since my very last treatment, and I’ve been celebrating ever since. Of course, it’s just one phase that has ended. I still have a lumpectomy and radiation to look forward to (gah!), but in the meantime I’m happy to be almost all done with this cancer business.

One thing I had to stop doing when I started chemo, since I had to avoid crowds and germs while my immune system was more fragile, was venturing out to movie theaters. Roll up to the top of this blog, will you? You’ll note that it says: Cynthia Hawkins, Girl on Film. Mostly because I typed it in as a joke and now I can’t figure out how to undo it, but also because many people know me as a film connoisseur.

And few things along my journey have been quite as depressing as reaching the start of Oscar season without having seen any of the nominated films because this told me, unequivocally, that no matter how hard I’ve tried to keep things normal since diagnosis, things haven’t been normal at all. So, this past Saturday, Joe and I stood in our room having this conversation:

Me: “Ah man, I’d love to go see The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Joe: “Then go. You can do what you want now.”

I can do what I want now! (Not exactly, but I’m sticking to it.) So off to the movies I went while Joe stayed home to babysit the girls. No worries. I usually go it alone. That’s how much I love movies. And then on Sunday, my friend George Gaytan, who is a wonderful classical guitarist, invited us to the Hotel Contessa on the Riverwalk where he played “Here Comes the Sun” and gave me a bag full of movie books.

As I contemplated my weekend return to the movies, in a sense, I remembered how several posts back I told you how I altered my guided meditations to be film-infused and that I should record one of my own. Well, I did. For you. And for movie lovers everywhere. You’re welcome.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

Day 74

Day 89

Day 113

+Read more

This is me. This is the me you’ll see shopping for dishwashing detergent or walking to the curb when the kindergarten school bus pulls up or standing at a lectern at the university. This is a woman with a bag of tricks, a bag on wheels, no less, a bag that thumps over the concrete seams of campus with purpose. A snack-sized baggie with Motrin tucked inside. A bottle of water. Peanuts. A makeup compact. A bottle of hand-sanitizer. Determination. This woman puts her hand on top of her head in a good Texas gust because she’s afraid it will all blow away. This is me when the girls want to trace hopscotch patterns on the sidewalks, when everyone’s smiling, when the sun breaks over the eaves and the bare tree limbs blur into the blue sky.

On Day 96 I ask Hannah, who’s been snapping photos of jars of Nutella and her foot on a skateboard and our dog curled into herself on a sofa pillow, if she might want to take some pictures of me.  “The real me,” I tell her, and she squints for a minute.

“With your bald head, you mean?” she wants to know.   “Sure.”

She’s come a long way.  The day I shaved my head we’d asked if she wanted to record the video, thinking it would appeal to her artsy ambitions, thinking it was her way in.  But before she even got started, she tossed the phone at me and ran out crying.

“Can we talk about why you’re upset?” I asked, my chin to my shoulder so my voice would travel down the hall after her.  I was sitting on a black folding chair in my bathroom.  Joe was untangling the cord to the hair clippers.

“I’m upset because I don’t know how to work your stupid phone!” she called back.

And while she helped me pick out the wig she preferred I wear, it seemed to be spun from the devils gold or something.  She would give it looks, the wig, the one-eye-squint you master the day you turn twelve.  And at a family Christmas party, right after my second treatment, we leaned together in my mother’s kitchen, my head tipped to touch hers, and she reared back.

“It’s going to fall on me!”  she said with the squint and the lip snarl.

“No it’s not,” I said.

“Go ahead,” she said.  “Take it off and show them how bald you are.  See if they like it.”

I cried all the way home.  And when I cried, she cried.  She cried like she might have when she was ten or six or four.  She cried like the little girl I knew her to be.  We decided that she was really mad at cancer.  Not me.  Not the wig.  But while she sits with the Nikon poised, we start with the wig.  Then, the hat.

I love my hats.  I have one my mom knitted for me.  The hat of many colors, she calls it.  Before she brought it over, she’d sent me a picture of herself modeling it.  Reds and blues and purples.  A lip of knit yarn rolling back from her thin eyebrows, arched exactly like mine.  I sat forward with my laptop on my knees, looking into the face of my own mom, living with Hepatitis C, months after a cancerous tumor was removed from her liver.  But I don’t see her struggling.  She is only the woman who wears the hat she made for cold nights, the woman who brings a pot of soup for us every chemo Friday, the woman who climbs the narrow steps of a tree house in her backyard to help Firecracker dust the corners.  All I see is mom.  I took a picture in the knit hat and sent one back to her.

This hat, though, is my Ralph Kramden hat, and I arrange the brim before Hannah snaps a series of pictures.

Hannah asks if I’m ready for a bald-head shot.  “Sure,” I say, dropping the hat to slouch beside the leg of the upholstered chair.  No filters, we agree.  Everyone should see what a bald woman looks like, straight-shouldered in the front room windows.  Otherwise, this woman can usually be found in the corners of the house, the bathroom with the door locked, the walk-in closet where the wig stand waits.

Joe slipped past a gap in our door once when I was changing from the wig to the Kramden hat.

“Stop!” I said.  “I don’t want you to see just how bald I am now.”

“I already know,” he said and kept walking.

I have another hat I wear on nights that aren’t that cold.  A sort of thin, slouchy cotton turban that rearranges itself across whatever snagging stubble I have left.  I wake from a Dickens book everyday in this hat.  But here I am, without the security of any hat at all.

Remember just a few weeks ago when I was worried Hannah would remember the “saddest moments” between us?  That surely everything through her perspective as a kid of a mom with cancer was gloomy?  When I say between camera clicks, “I look like a tough sci-fi chick,” she says, “Yeah you do.”

Whatever it was she’d had to accept about the way treating cancer was changing me, she’s made it through.

Then we decide people should see that woman, the woman on chemo.

No filters.

No makeup.

This is me.  This is the me who has lost half of her eyelashes, who’s brows have thinned.  I feel wonderful as I sit for this picture, but I know despite how I feel, despite the fact that I’ve walked a mile and a half today and made tabouli lettuce wraps and wrote this blog, I look sick.  Almost eight weeks of chemotherapy has made my skin tone change to a pallid gray, darkened circles under my eyes, dried out my lips, creased new wrinkles in my chin, turned my nail beds purple.  I spend a lot of time covering these chemo signs so I don’t look sick, so no one worries when they shouldn’t.

Last week when I met with my surgeon to plan a lumpectomy in April, he asked how I felt, that I looked like I felt great.  The woman in the wig and makeup went to this appointment.  “Oh, I can’t complain!” I said, which he thought was the funniest thing he’d ever heard a cancer patient say.  But I can’t.  I’m doing okay.  I promise you.

Hannah checks the pictures on the Nikon’s display screen.

“It’s alright if it looks bad,” I say.  “That’s the point.  To show how bad I look.”

“You could never look bad,” she says.

We’ve both come such a long way.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

Day 74

Day 89

+Read more

Three a.m. on Day 89 and I’m sitting on the side of the Firecracker’s bed while she howls over my many reasons why we can’t turn the clock radio on high in the middle of the night.  INXS is playing.  “What You Need.”  I turn it off.  She balls her fists over her eyes, begs to go to my bed, squirms under the new Minnie Mouse sheet set and blanket we’d bought to lure her to her room to sleep in the first place.  The clock radio had been part of that package.  Along with one plush penguin with a flashlight tummy and a zebra-striped beanbag chair she’d pushed into her inflatable igloo in the middle of the room.

On Day 17, after my first round of adriamycin and cytoxan, I’d stuffed myself full of anti-nausea meds, curled up under my blue blanket, and found the Firecracker beside me.  “I want to sleep in mama’s bed,” she said, and we held fingertips and whisper-sang her usual bedtime songs and somewhere in the middle of “When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” I drifted off.  That’s okay, I thought.  Her mom has cancer.  She needs comforting. And hadn’t it been a comfort to me too, to roll over and find her softly snoring away on her dad’s pillow.  She’s pretty much been there ever since because it would seem the corners of her room at night yawn wide with terrible monsters, like the one she met in the Whole Foods fish case earlier on Day 89, the red wide-eyed dead fish which sent her into a blood-curdling scream-run toward the bulk bins.

The problem is, she’s a restless sleeper unless she’s in her own bed.  She’s been staggering off the school bus in the afternoons, wild-haired and half-awake, having slumped to sleep on the ten-minute ride to our front door.  She’s been in a bad mood.  She’s told her best friend she’s not her best friend anymore forever and ever, sparking a meltdown worthy of a call from her teacher.  The problem is, an overtired Firecracker is even more fervently firecracker-like.  So I turn INXS off, though the song keeps playing in my head.  All night.

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer and given the treatment plan back in November, the first thing I did was research.  I learned what to expect on chemo, what to do to curb side-effects, what to eat, and so on, but nothing explained that while I was on chemo the kids would take over like kudzu vine through window gaps.  One reason is ease.  It’s so much easier from under the throw blanket on the sofa to wave a hand and let them play video games for hours on end and eat all the snack packs meant for their lunch boxes and gather every cushion and pillow in the house to make a fort and scatter uncapped markers across the wood floors and accumulate laundry.  It’s so much easier to shrug off a sibling shoving match with something like, “Just ignore each other for awhile, please,” than to actually bring down the hammer of discipline.

The even bigger thing is the cancer guilt that functions in at least two ways.  For one, I never want to be the reason why they can’t do something – have friends over, go to a movie, stay after school, play outside – whatever it is they often ask to do that requires a little more effort, a little more planning than playing video games and inhaling Oreos at home does.  I don’t want to be the reason, or, more to the point, I don’t want cancer to be the reason.  And when they want something – a shopping spree, skinny pants, a second Instagram account, another dozen stuffed penguins, a spot in mommy’s bed forever and ever – my default reaction is to think, That’s okay.  Their mom has cancer.

Maybe few have written about managing the family on chemo because there aren’t any easy answers, no right or wrong under the circumstances.  Maybe there’s only pushing through to the other side of treatment and reorganizing in the aftermath.  And we’re almost there.  Two more chemo sessions to go.  Four more weeks.

I assure the Firecracker that daddy told the people at Whole Foods to take the red fish to the polar bears at the zoo. “They ate them up, and they’re gone,” I say. “The red fish aren’t coming to our house tonight.” Then I try to convince her again that she doesn’t need her radio to go back to sleep. She’s only quiet under her Minnie sheets when I tell her I’ll sing the song that was my favorite when I was her age:

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

Day 74

My dad had a box of fishing tackle he kept in the garage, a great silver box that accordioned into eight levels when you opened the lid.  That’s how I remember it anyway.  The glints on little hooks.  The feathers.  The spools of iridescent fishing line.  Later he’d carve his own out of bass wood and hang them on handmade racks to paint and epoxy them to a high shine, writing names on the tails he’d picked out of an English to Spanish dictionary: Pescado, Nadar, Niño Malo.  But these in the box were store bought, some still in their clear plastic containers that snapped shut.  Lying stretched straight in a tray — a rubber worm twice the length of my finger and the purple color of an old bruise.  I was six or seven, living in Arkansas.  One month before my breast cancer diagnosis, D. R. (Duke) Haney and I were working on a piece about Frankenstein and Duke told me that growing up in Virginia he was able to tune into a D. C. station to watch Detroit-based Sir Graves Ghastly present films like Whale’s Frankenstein in the middle of the night.

I told him that there was nothing cool in the seventies in Arkansas for 600 miles (unless you count that someone spray painted “Nugent” on the Dairy Queen wall) and that when I looked up the possible horror hosts out of curiosity I found this notice:  Sadly, the scariest thing that has come out of Arkansas is Roger Clinton’s music. To our knowledge there have been no horror hosts in Arkansas. So that’s where I lived once, carefully carrying a rubber worm into the kitchen on two palms so I could saw a mouth onto its small face with a butter knife, a mouth that I could pinch open by squeezing the sides so we could sing songs together.  We sang we are Siamese if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please while I dangled my legs off the balcony at the back of the house, both of us staring off into the dogwoods that lined the barbed-wire farm fence of the pasture behind us.

I did have two human friends, one named Christy who lived down the street and, I suspected, was part of an arranged friendship forged by my mom with Christy’s mom.  I got stuck in Christy’s locked bathroom once, and, after what seemed like hours, the adults had to squeeze me out the bathroom window and into the boxwoods below.  The other was an only child on the other end of the street, older than me, and bigger, oafish, two large turned-in teeth always showing in a snarl.  She had a lace-covered double bed with twenty pillows in frilly cases, a white Victorian dollhouse precisely her height, and a blistering left hook.  If she would have seen my pet rubber worm, she would have smacked me in the shoulder so hard the worm flew out of my hand.  Once, she chucked a volcanic landscaping rock at my eye, and along the socket it turned the color of the rubber worm.  My whole family gathered around me as I stretched out on the sofa with my arms sloppily crossed over my striped tank top while mom patted at the bruise with an ice cube wrapped in the dishtowel.  After that, I drew black rings under my eyes with crayon so maybe this could happen again.  It never did.  But that’s the same sofa I sat on one October night, the rubber worm coiled in my fist, to watch Whale’s Frankenstein.

The monster walks into the room backwards and pivots into the light for a closeup.  He stands, shifting his weight, his arms lock-jointed straight by his sides.  He drags his boots when he steps to Henry Frankenstein.  He’s talked to like a child.  Sit down.  Sit down! He tries to hold a light beam.  Sit down.  Go and sit down. His hands, palms up, tremble, empty.

74 Days after diagnosis, two days after the oncologist switched my chemotherapy treatment to Taxol for the home stretch, my hands and feet swell up sunburn red, painful to the touch, and I’m shuffling around the kitchen, the “V” of my loose robe showing the mechanics of the mediport just under my skin, a thin cap slouched on my bald head, trying to figure out how to open a water bottle with Boris Karloff creature claws.  Like holding sunshine, it can’t be done.

So I sit on the sofa with the bottle and quiet cry until everyone else wakes up.

“Why didn’t you come get me to open it?” Joe wants to know.

Because it’s been awhile since I drew black around my eyes for pity and maybe even longer since I admitted there was something I absolutely couldn’t do on my own. It turns out I’m in the slim margin of people who experience what’s called hand and foot syndrome from chemo, and I start to think of all the other slim margins I belong to.  I’m in the slim margin of breast cancer patients diagnosed as “triple negative,” for example.  I’m in the slim margin who are under a certain age or weight when diagnosed.  I’m in the slim margin without a family history and on and on.  So after Joe sets the opened water bottle down on the side table my dad built for me and turns on the television to find that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died, I fumble to open my laptop with my thumbs and slip into the internet vortex of doom.  My fingers can bend just enough to tap at the keys in search of Hoffman news, then “hand and foot syndrome and chemo,” then “triple negative breast cancer,” then “statistics of breast cancer survival.”  Within a few clicks, I’ve bought a book with a chapter called “Preparing for the End.”

Later in the evening, as the Superbowl unfolds on the front-room television, I direct my melancholic shuffle toward Hannah in the hallway and ask if I can borrow one of her make-up removal wipes.  She brings it to me, her eyes almost level with mine, her hair swept up in a topknot to show her bare, thin neck stretching in earnestness.

“How should I wash my face now?” she asks, blinking.

“Like you usually do?”

“But this is the last one.”  Her eyes well up.  “But you can have it because you have cancer and I can’t take away a face wipe from someone with cancer and I’ll just cry if you don’t use it just because now you know it’s my last one.”  She blinks again, brown eyes the size of moon pies, fat curls of lashes glistening.  Really, those lashes.  She was born with them.

Luna moth-like in their velocity when they bat.  They used to attract strangers in grocery stores and restaurants.

“My god those lashes!”

“I know.”

“That one will always get her way.”

“I know.”

So I tell Hannah she can have the last wipe if she can help me wash my face with a warm rag.  She takes the wipe back and follows me to the bathroom where we stand toe to toe on the gray rug as the sink faucet runs.  “Is this warm enough?” she asks me, touching my chin with the edge of a wet, pink washrag.

“Yep.”

Eyes closed, I shimmy my hat back just enough to reveal my forehead but not the sparse stubble at the edge.  Hannah’s not fond of the bald head, unlike the Firecracker who’ll sometimes pop my hat off and call me Caillou or rub the top to see if it still feels like the shorn belly of our Shih-Tzu.

“This is like being at the salon,” I say as Hannah dabs the rag at my cheeks.

But it’s not like that at all, I’m thinking.  I’m thinking this is that essay she’s going to write one day in tenth grade about the saddest thing she’s ever had to do in life, the essay that begins with something like, “my mom with her eyes closed looking all dead and stuff while I wiped her face clean.”

But after she’s done and I say “thank you,” she replies in a sing-song voice “you’re welcome” before pivoting on her tiptoes to walk away and I realize that’s probably not what she was thinking at all.  Maybe she was thinking how grown-up it felt to be able to help.  Maybe she was thinking how glad she was I didn’t use her last make-up wipe.  Who knows, but I decide then that maybe I’m not Frankenstein’s creature to anyone else but me at my worst.  And I decide there are different sorts of slim margins I also fit – the slim margin whose cancer responds so quickly to treatment, for one.  Mine, after all, is one place, one small mass that’s at least halfway gone already.  Then the swollen hands and feet I thought were in the slim margins of those that stay this way forever begin to ease back to their usual proportions again.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

+Read more

On Day 68 the oncologist sends me back to the beginning, back to the radiologist’s office where I had the mammogram and sonogram that revealed the mass before we knew it was malignant.  This time I try to park close to the front doors because my red blood cell count is half of what it was last time I was here due to eight weeks of chemo, which means I’m walking very slowly in my wig I call “the Hitchcock blonde.”  The “Tennille” wig I wear to work, and somehow I’ve frayed it a little around the bangs.  I think from the time I leaned to pull a sheet of sweet potato fries out of the oven and felt the steam from the gap of the oven door sprawl across my cheeks.  Leave it to me to melt my best wig.  Or it could have frayed because Tennille filed for divorce from the Captain.  So I sweep the Hitchcock blonde bangs back and step into the building’s lobby, which looks like the Genesis cave in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.  Stone walls and greenery.

I snap a picture, one blurry, the other clear, and then I push the glass door back and check in.  They move me to another waiting room, a separate waiting room with four chairs where women in crisscross hospital gowns watch HGTV beside the door marked “Caution: X-Rays in Progress.”  The mammogram room.  I know where to change clothes, and I know where to sit.  I know where to go when they call my name and all the other women wish me good luck, just like they did the last time.  Last time, Extreme’s “More Than Words” played over the speakers and I couldn’t stop laughing though the technician ordered me to stay perfectly still.  This time they played “And We Danced” by The Hooters, and I’m starting to suspect someone with a wicked sense of humor is programming the music around here.  This time, the mass that had registered as 1.8 cm now checks in at 1 cm.  The mammogram doesn’t show this, because the mammogram is worthless for someone with dense tissues (my surgeon’s words).  The sonogram they complete in the broom-closet room down the hall shows this – the black hole of the mass collapsing in on itself at last.

* * *

Day 69.  I have a comedian for a babysitter.  I mean that literally.  I mean that my babysitter is a comedian who wants to write a comedic television series.  Here she is babysitting the Firecracker:

Maybe an hour after she’s left my house, while I’m packing up at work and Joe has taken over at home, the babysitter texts me to say that she just discovered our television remote tucked away in her backpack where the Firecracker must have hidden it.  I ask her if she can bring it back the next day.

“This changes everything,” she answers.  “You now owe me 12,190 Rupiah if you ever want to watch TV comfortably again.”

Later I learn that’s roughly a dollar.  When I sternly ask the Firecracker why she put the remote control in the babysitter’s backpack, she says: “Uh … I … I’m getting kind of confused,” bats at the air like someone losing equilibrium, and then runs off to play Club Penguin on the computer.  We’re all comedians around here.

* * *

On Day 70, I sit in my Lebowski robe watching North by Northwest to make sure it’s fresh in my mind for tonight’s screenwriting workshop.  This is me in my Lebowski robe back when I had my own hair and thought it was funny to send friends pictures of me dressed like The Dude.

The big difference between teaching pre-chemo and during chemo is that now I have to keep careful notes of what I need to cover in class to keep me from rambling about things like that time in second grade when I sat in the big desk in the back of the classroom wearing a metal arm brace attached to a pencil, looking all Edward Scissorhands, because the teacher thought the way my spindly fingers curved inward and slanted my letters to the left instead of the right was an abomination.  I used to call them guitar fingers, piano fingers.  She called them abnormal fingers.  No one can beat me in thumb wrestling because my long-digit-stretch is incredible.  That’s all I’m going to say, because I’m looking down at the notes in my journal that read DON’T TELL THE LONG FINGER STORY IN THE BLOG FOR GOODNESS SAKES.

So I record careful notes, and I mostly keep to them in class now – just like I did the very first class I ever taught.  That class was one I taught by invitation of a friend who thought I was ready to give it a go.  1995.  I was wearing Joe’s combat boots, a burgundy button down dress sewn by my mom, and blue-black hair I’d cut myself to hang to my chin.  My hands shook so badly I dropped a few note cards when I tried to shuffle one behind the other and I gulped an audible gulp that ricocheted off the walls and radiated out across campus.  “Thanks everyone,” I said before walking out mid-lesson.  I caught a glimpse of my friend’s face on the way out, wide-eyed, lower lip tucked in, her fingertips touching her cheek.  There are only two times a friend will give you this look – when you gloriously bomb like a Costner film in her class and when you meet her mother and try really hard not to say something like “vagina” instead of your first name when you shake her mom’s hand and you say it anyway.  As long as I don’t revert all the way back to that en total, I think I’ll be okay.

The other difference is that now I re-read and re-watch whatever we’re set to discuss in class as close to class time as I can.  I don’t trust my chemo brain to remember.

Cary Grant slips through a window and into a stranger’s room.  “Stop!” the woman orders, leaning back against her pillow before she settles her black-rimmed on her nose for a better look.  And then, “Stop.”

* * *

I come home from work to find that the Firecracker has packed her bags (a few stuffed animals wrapped in an Angry Bird blanket) and tried to run away from the comedian babysitter whom the Firecracker has terrorized for the past two hours of Day 71.  The babysitter and I go over the offenses while the Firecracker kicks her legs in the upholstered chair in the front room and mock-cries.

“I don’t understand why she’d turn into Damien,” I say, hoping the comedian babysitter won’t quit on us because she’s the best comedian babysitter around.

The Firecracker’s cries cut off with the sudden quiet of someone who just found a tiny unicorn in her pocket.  “What?” she asks.  “What’s a darmian?”

“You,” I say with a little vehemence.

That kid’s going to sit in time out until her body conforms to the chair, I’m thinking.  That kid’s going to pack up her playhouse igloo she got for Christmas, walk all the way to the North Pole, and personally give it back to Santa.

“Maybe we could take her to the moon and leave her there,” the babysitter says.

So as soon as the babysitter leaves, I send this picture to lure her back next week:

But I know she’ll come back even though the Firecracker is eating this note.  Because the babysitter’s writing a comedic television show.  She needs fodder.

* * *

Day 72.  Here’s something I haven’t told you yet.  Remember how I’ve been trying meditations and sometimes they take Tolkien turns?  Well, I stopped listening to the guided meditations altogether because, as I told Joe, “I can do them all by myself now!”  Which means I imagine things like Travis Bickle taking out quivering, crumpled discs of cancer cells with his quick-draw slide gun or my red cells multiplying into a billion Hellboys.  Maybe I should record guided meditations for film fanatics.  But I also imagined, to shove myself through the day with my new rolling attaché case packed with detailed notes, that on Day 72 my oncologist would say, “Oh!  The mass shrunk by almost half!  No need for chemo anymore.  Goodbye!”

That’s not exactly what she says when I show up for chemo five.  She’s encouraged by the results and tells me we’re almost there.  I’m a triple-negative (as opposed to breast cancer patients who might be estrogen positive, etc.) and this means we need to be even more concerned with recurrence because hormones don’t explain my mass.  Nothing explains my mass.  So we need to decrease the odds, which is what the full treatment of chemo does.  Nonetheless, as of Day 73, I’m going back to imagining that when I see her again in two weeks we’re going to decide I’m all done.

Joe drives me home from chemo number five, and I’ve scrunched myself in the passenger seat, leaning against the window, drinking water and watching the scenery slide by.  Overhead, curlicues of highway ramps divide the sunlight.  Life is so beautiful, I muse to myself, admiring the curve of the elevated ramps.  Yes, they gave me just enough drugs today to find the undersides of highways beautiful.  They gave me just enough drugs – a whole IV bag of Benadryl and Taxol among them — to think, screw it, I’m eating whatever I want today, and order Joe to pick up enchiladas and chips at the diner by our house.  It should be said that I completely credit the whole-foods vegan diet I’ve been following to the letter along with the chemo for shrinking the tumor by nearly half in what the oncologist deemed exceptional time, but today, today the sun is shining in a starburst of a cracked divot in my windshield, the highway squiggles are phenomenal, next week the oncologist is going to say, “no need for chemo anymore, goodbye!,” and today I’m going to shape the take-out box into a funnel and pour a diner-variety enchilada dinner down my throat.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

+Read more

Day 55 and I returned to the classroom for the first time since starting chemotherapy for breast cancer.  I marched across campus double-time, running a few minutes late, my notebook opened to the building and room number scrawled on the ledger pad, my attaché slipping off my shoulder.  As I squinted at the closed double doors of the lecture hall to see if its number matched what I’d written down and tried to assemble the chemo spiel I’d been rehearsing for three days, I heard someone say, “Let’s do this!”  It was my assistant, Andy, who I wasn’t expecting until the second class meeting.  Andy was among the students on whom I’d dropped the cancer bomb in Fiction class last semester.  He knew, and somehow this made it infinitely easier to throw the door back and say, “Hello!”  I did not say “Hello!  My name is Inigo Montoya!” like I’ve always wanted to do, but … some day.

Of course, somewhere between explaining the course materials and the grade scale on their syllabus, I had to explain the chemotherapy and how, if at all, it might affect our class.  “You don’t know me yet, so hopefully you won’t be too sad about my bad news,” I began, because the students I told last semester knew me well by the time I had to tell them, and there were long, shocked faces and tears and terrible silences I immediately filled with cancer jokes.  One class I’d emailed in advance.  The other class, I’d told in person.  Both seemed to be bad choices.  Frankly, there’s just no good way to announce cancer.  And what I’d said, about this new class not being too sad yet, that was wrong too.  Because one thing I’ve learned is that even when people don’t know you, they’re moved either by you or by the aunt or sister or mother they knew who has struggled through it.  Or maybe even by Walter White with his lung tumors.  And I didn’t miss a Breaking Bad joke in this class either.  “If you accrue too many absences, I might have to put on my Heisenberg hat and have a serious sit-down talk with you.”

My new fiction workshop met an hour later, and we started by listing our three items, unique items, items others might be surprised this person owned.  I do this every semester because I remember the students through their items the way we remember characters in fiction through their own particulars.  I always start:  “On my shelf in my office at home I have a Gilderoy Lockhart action figure because he’s little Kenneth Branagh.  And beside Kenneth sits a framed cartoon, ‘Travolta House’ by Ted McCagg, drawn in the shape of ‘Welcome Back Kotter’ era John Travolta.”

I didn’t even have to explain that reference because this class is either a phenomenal group of actors or they are my happy equals in senseless trivia from way back.  “And I have a Fender Stratocaster on which I can play Metallica.”  I didn’t say it was “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” because, well, it would suck all the mirth out of the cancer jokes I had planned for the syllabus introduction still to come.  One student, on her list, mentioned a little plastic dog she kept to blame all of her problems on.

“Does that work?” I asked.

“I guess so.  It’s all his fault.”

And it reminded me of the worry dolls I’d once bought from a street vendor in New Mexico.  Five tiny dolls with bodies made of knotted yarn and spent matchsticks, miniature dresses held on by opaque glue bubbles doubling as bodices.  I bought them because I’ve always been full of worry.  About the small and great and imagined alike.  About whether or not my new sunglasses were too round or if I could still ride a bike or what I could say at the next writer reception because at the J. M. Coetzee reception all I’d managed to do was ask half the room, individually, if what I was eating on a melba toast was pepper jelly or not.  J. M. Coetzee said he wasn’t sure.  I used to put my thumb on each doll before bed, push a new worry into the narrow doll chest.  Then one day I lost all the worry dolls.  They escaped through a hole in my slacks pocket.  I imagine them making a lint rope, scaling down until their matchstick ends hit the sidewalk, whispering all the while, “Let’s get outta here!  She has too many stupid worries!  I can’t take the burden anymore.  I can’t take it!”

It’s probably just as well they bailed because my breast cancer/chemo worries would have snapped them.  I told the lecture hall class I was worried one of these days I’ll careen down the twenty-five or so steps to the stage and do a face-plant in front of the podium, and I’m worried one of them will record it and put it on Youtube and it’ll get picked up by MTV’s Ridiculousness and Chanel West Coast will cackle at me.  “But I don’t watch that show,” I said.  “I don’t know what that show is.”  Joe watches that show, for the record.

On Day 58, my sister Shelly drives down from Dallas to sit with me in the chemo lounge for IV drip number four.  Halfway done.  When I’d announced this to the new fiction class, that I was halfway through treatments, they all cheered.  I’m gradually reaching a point where surviving trumps jokes in the stuffing-of-long-sad-silences department.  But Shelly waits as I go for lab work, talk to nurses, meet with my oncologist.  She sits on the other side of the curtain as the oncologist does a quick breast exam, suggesting the tumor seems like “just a thick place” instead of the mass it once was.  I planned to write my worries down in the small black moleskin notebook I’d bought for the purpose, but I remember each one too well.  “You gave me a double dose of the red matter last time,” I say to the oncologist, pointing both fingers at her like a game show host.  In my mind, this is what Adriamycin, aka the red matter, is and does:

“There were two vials of red matter last time,” I said.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Next on my list:  My shoulder on the side of my mediport (the golf-ball looking thing sitting just under my skin, just under my collarbone, where the IVs go) feels like I’ve worked out for two hours.  My neck feels strange too.  I have a faint discoloration shaped like a crown under the collarbone on the other side.  My arms and legs went to pinpricks for two hours in the middle of the night ten days ago.  Joe made a joke about my mediport popping out like an Alien chestburster, and I now I’m convinced it will.

I guess this is what you’re supposed to do at the oncologist’s though.  The doctor is the person toward whom you push your worries, and though her face might indicate she’d like to wriggle through a magic wormhole to get away, she stays and listens and nods.  Some worries probably drift onto Shelly as well, the innocent bystander and big-sister-worrier extraordinaire.

All together the three of us head for the chemo lounge (does anyone else call it this?) to get to the bottom of the two vials of red matter.  Apparently, some nurses just like to split the dose into two vials.  Mischief managed.  This time my nurse makes sure to put it in one vial with an eye scrunched in my direction.  I suppose not many patients march the doctor and a big sister down to chemo to investigate red matter complaints.

I like having Shelly here.  I can show her around.  There’s the bathroom you can use down that hall.  Don’t use this bathroom.  It’s full of chemo pee.  This is the recliner I usually sit in because it has a plug for my computer and windows I can stare out.  There’s a candy basket over there (shhh, I’m going to go steal all the butterscotch). We look at swimsuits in her Travel + Leisure magazine and imagine summer, how this should all be over by then.  We talk about how funny it was she accidentally made a penis out of paper instead of a Christmas Tree at the family Christmas party and how funny it was I wrote the word penis in a post (and now that’s three times).  “I couldn’t have forced myself to make that on purpose if I tried!” she laughs.  Two hours seem like ten minutes, and for once time isn’t one of the things I’m worried about.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

+Read more

A belated welcome to 2014, everyone!  ‘Tis the season for fitspiration overload on Pinterest and gym promos and twenty ways to trim your waistline while eating chia seeds and lawn clippings and so on and so on.

It’s everywhere!  I turn on the television, open a magazine, click on my little safari icon and boom – everyone wants me to be Lea Michele in a thong or, rather, a tangle of toothpicks in a rubber band.  Just now, for example, as I was eating broccoli soup off a flaxseed cracker, which really does look exactly like shit on a shingle, one of these belly-buster magic pill commercials came on between news segments and my Janeane Garofalo-voiced inner monologue interrupted with, “You know what’s super for a quick slim down?  Chemo.”

It’s strange watching the usual January deluge while on treatment, when, for the first time ever, it has no bearing on me.  I’m trying not to slim down, in fact.  I’m just trying to polish off some broccoli soup and a flaxseed cracker that has been rendered by chemo’s strange appetite-suppressing ways as rich as a cheesecake the size of a Mini Cooper.  This is the kind of detachment from the unattainable body ideal I’d always tried for, pretended to have, and never really achieved.  Until now.  So I’m thinking of the ripple effects of past and present.

A week before the holiday break, my twelve-year-old daughter Hannah crossed the street and made her way under the oaks to our porch as I watched from the front windows with a cup of green tea.  She’s tall and lanky like I was at her age, and I noticed as she stepped onto our lawn that she did so with my same long-stride giraffe’s gate.  Then she shut the front door after herself, dropped her bag, put her feet together, and said, happier than I’d heard her in days, “Look!  I have a thigh gap!”

The thigh gap. This, in case you’re unfamiliar, would be one of many eating-disorder-inducing obsessions plaguing girls of late.

Yeah, I had the thigh gap too when I was her age, and it was the source of ridicule.  Like “hey spaghetti legs, you could drive a Mack truck through that gap” kind of ridicule.  My obsession was in closing the gap, doing hundreds of leg lifts with ankle weights every night until I gave myself stretch marks down my hips and shuffled into gym class like a zombie John Wayne.  You just can’t win in any era, girls, can you?

“That doesn’t even matter.  You being healthy matters,” I told Hannah.

The other day, when it was nineteen degrees outside and she was headed to the bus stop without a coat or a hat or gloves, I told her she was going to get frostbite.  She shrugged.  So I added, “You know what frostbite is?  That’s when your skin freezes and dies and turns black and they have to cut it off at the hospital to save the rest of you.”  She shrugged again and left without her coat or hat or gloves.  Point is, whatever I say has so little gravity right now.  My words flitter past her like delicate, tiny butterflies, and poof.  They’re gone.  So chances are, she’s probably still measuring the thigh gap.  And now there’s the bikini bridge.  Which was a meme-plant.  Which doesn’t matter.  Because girls like Hannah are so primed to body-obsess that the number of inches your stomach sinks between your pelvic bones when you lie flat on the floor suddenly seems as reasonable a thing to measure as the space between your thighs.

Since my thigh gap closed of its own accord some time around 1994, I’ve followed practically every New Year’s-resolution variety diet.  Five hours into the South Beach program, for example, I was once craving sugar so voraciously that I downed two packages of sugar-free peanut butter cups to keep from derailing and then went to a Spurs game.  Have you ever read the fine print on those sugar-free candy wrappers?  Afterwards, in my journal, I made a collage of the numerous wrappers I’d emptied in the shape of an explosion so I’d never forget.  May have a laxative effect. Spurs lost that night, by the way, and it might have been because of the tenor of my atomic stomach gurgles.  Oh the absurdity!  Every single year.  Until breast cancer.

Which brings us back to that bowl of broccoli soup.  So, I was eating broccoli because it has cancer fighting phytochemicals and sulforaphane, which studies have shown may inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells in particular.  Those wholegrain flaxseed crackers are full of protein, complex carbohydrates (as opposed to simple carbs known to fuel cancer cells), cancer-fighting lignans, and omega-3 fats which some studies suggest prime cancer cells for the effects of chemotherapy.  You see?  The 110% overachiever me has been studying up, and for the first time I am focusing on what I eat for what certain foods can do to heal and support my body as it is right now.  Nothing else matters.  Me being healthy matters.  Detachment achieved.

So instead of attempting to whittle myself into some semblance of a Hollywood bikini body this year while telling Hannah not to, My New Year’s resolution is to model for Hannah what it took getting cancer for me to finally, truly learn – bald head, pallid complexion, bulging mediport implant and all – that what you look like, that how people judge you, that how you judge yourself by some freakishly impossible set of standards, is so very trivial, so miniscule, and so utterly devoid of power compared to keeping your body, just as it is, healthy and disease free.

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

+Read more

On Day 30, Joe escorted me to chemo treatment number two, and before the hook-up we visited with the oncologist who asked me about my behavior, sleep habits, and mood. “Fine,” I said.  “Pretty good.”

And to Joe, she asked, “Is that right or is she kicking butts and taking names?”

“Oh yeah,” Joe said.

I slapped him on the thigh. “She means am I being really mean to everybody at home,” I told him.

“No, you’re, like, feisty with a good attitude about getting through the cancer and all. That’s what it means.”

“No it doesn’t!”

“Yes it does. Taking names. Kicking butt.”

“No!”

“Maybe she’s just a little cranky at home,” the doctor said in a kind of whisper, writing something down.

This is how my perfect record has been marred. The last oncologist visit, as I’d sat on the table for yet another breast exam, I was able to peek over her shoulder at her computer screen on which she’d written roughly one-hundred and fifty words about me.  Not really about the diagnosis, but about me as a person.  Cynthia is a very nice and funny person, it began.  It mentioned the Firecracker and Hannah and their ages.  A little something about them too.  One full of energy, the other, sensitive.  It mentioned that I teach creative writing.  But mostly, it said I was a very nice and funny person.  Now it probably says I am the Day One Monster and counting.

“You totally misunderstood what she was asking you,” I said.

“No, like you’re kicking butt and taking names.”  He put his fists up this time to demonstrate.  “She is,” he said to the doctor.

“I am not!  Maybe I’ll take your name down and kick your butt.”

“Sometimes,” the oncologist said with a nervous laugh, “people can really change during treatment.”

“The thing is, I’m not really changing,” I said.

But just a few days before this visit, when I was driving back alone at night from picking up a stack of exams others had been so kind to proctor for me, an impossible traffic jam materialized on an entrance ramp to the highway I needed access to.  So I kept going on the highway I was already on, thinking of exiting elsewhere to take the long way home.  This is the way I used to drive, last semester, to pick up the Firecracker from school.  For a few seconds, it felt like that was where I was heading, to that old life when everything was just fine.  And I started to cry, sitting at the light, bald-headed, listening to “Thunderstruck” on the rock station because ten miles back I’d decided the bald head required rock music.  This road was under construction, squeezed down to one lane, but it took me past the Incarnate Word University Christmas lights display.  So I sat waiting at the intersection, staring up into the mess of oak branches dotted with lights.

The first chemo went fine, and I’d rebounded fairly well according to the lab results, but this second round of chemo swallowed me whole.  I dragged myself around in the belly of the chemo fog, straining to open my eyes, forgetting to take a nausea pill on time.  I curled up in bed, watching The Returned, the French series in which the dead wander back into their idyllic village, as they were, as if they’d never left. I sat wearing the new satin turban the oncologist gave me, calling down the long hallway for things like refills of my glass of water or the next pill or a “smidgen of a milkshake” or “toast with butter cut on the diagonal!”  And after I asked Joe to make sure the knob on the toaster was turned just slightly past the first setting, he said I looked like Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest:

After sleeping all afternoon on Day 31, I found myself at a family Christmas party in a new sweater and the wig.  “Do you like my wig?  Does it look real?” I asked everyone.  I have this thing about the wig.  I feel like I have to mention it just as I would surely have to mention an armful of capuchin monkeys if I’d walked in with an armful of capuchin monkeys.  And maybe I did walk in holding monkeys.  I can’t really tell you.  All I really remember is that the Firecracker got a toy fairy stuck in her hair and that during a behind-the-back origami sort of game my big sister accidentally shaped a penis out of paper instead of a Christmas tree.

By Day 33 I thought I was dying.  No, not dying.  Worse than that.  Undead, trapped in the ethereal cotton of an Enya song.  Unable to move with ease.  Unable to swallow a piece of bread.  Unable to open my eyes wider than stoner slits.  I started to fear that the rest of my sixteen weeks of treatment would be just like this.  I left slurred messages for the oncologist’s nurse stating as much.  All the while Joe was bustling between work and home, bringing me prescription refills, taking the Firecracker along with him, buying me the Raisin Bran Crunch and milk I’d decided I had to have and then couldn’t swallow either.  And some time around four in the afternoon, when my cousin and her husband brought their baby to visit, the fog cleared.  Poof!  And I was back amongst the living.  I’d returned.  Just in time to straighten my wig and hug my cousin at the door.  “What do you think?  Does it look real?”

I’d returned, and I decided I had to change, really change, before the next chemo treatment hits just as hard.  Through a mutual friend (the wonderful Kimberly Wetherell of Spirited Bakery), I’d just met Terri Eickel, a cancer survivor who keeps a truly informative blog at Tiny But Mighty Beats Cancer.  So I started here in my panic for a little guidance, and by Day 34, Christmas Eve, I found a yoga workout to follow at home and got info on scheduling acupuncture appointments and drank green tea and read Life Over Cancer and vowed to go full vegan and listened to guided meditation for fifteen minutes that suggested I imagine my white cells rising up like an army.  I imagined an army of Tolkien’s orcs, and I’m not sure what that means.  Other than I might be nerdier than the regular cancer patient.  And a tad bit evil.

Then other good things happened.  Joe victoriously poached the perfect egg for himself, texting me this picture of his breakfast from the kitchen:

He read the Firecracker her new bedtime book, which, as one friend put it, means we “can never be sad about anything ever again, knowing this video exists in the world.”  (Seriously.  Follow the link.)  And after I’d sneaked the kids’ presents down the hallway and arranged them under the gloriously lit tree, sans wig or satin turban, Joe ran a hand over my sparsely stubbled head in the kitchen and said how glad he was to see that I was back, “taking names and kicking butt.”

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

+Read more

I once stood in front of a British Literature class of sixty and told them, after a long swig of water and a pop of a fresh cough drop on my tongue, that we call the Firecracker “Outbreak Monkey,” as in the monkey in the film Outbreak who unleashes a pandemic.  This was my way of explaining my waning voice and the magician tissue-rope poised to stream from my pocket for the rest of the lecture.  Three of the sixty offered an obligatory chuckle.  The rest – nothing.  Seats creaked as a few students shifted.  I coughed in the silence.  Then one front-row student, resting his pencil eraser on his temple, said, “Oh.  That’s cruel.  You call your little girl Outbreak Monkey?  That’s awful.”

“Well, not to her face,” I said, which didn’t sound any better.

But the gist of the joke remains true – the Firecracker must surely spend her time at school licking the bottoms of every child’s shoe, and the doorknobs for good measure, because she regularly comes down with raging colds she often passes on to the rest of us.  In the last three months alone, she’s had pink eye, mono, and pneumonia.  It’s the reason I find Ted McCagg’s Day Care Tasting comic so apropos. The problem is the Firecracker’s adorable.

Those eyes, those rosy cheeks, she lures you toward the germs like a chump.  The bigger problem is, since Day 16 chemo has been depleting my white cell count to the degree that even the slightest of colds, as my oncologist’s nurse told me with her brows raised, could kill me.  “Literally,” the nurse said with a nod at each syllable, “kill you.”

“You know we have a five-year-old,” I said, “who is probably coming down with a cold as we speak.”

She handed me a stack of surgical masks, the kind that loop around the ears, and said, “Well, we can’t exactly tell you to not be around your child, but … don’t be around your child.”

During that three-week stretch in which the Firecracker had pink eye, mono, and pneumonia pretty much at the same time, the Firecracker thought it’d be best for her to sleep in my bed.  She’d wake in the middle of the night, inchworm over to the scoop of my bent knees and ribs, hold my hands, breathe songs across my knuckles as we’d sing in whispers – Doris Day, Big Star, The Cure, Ella Fitzgerald.  And somewhere in the middle of, I see your face in every flower, we’d fall asleep again.  My first chemo night, she was still there.  She insisted.

But when she stepped off the bus on Day 26, dragging her tote bag, telling me how cold she was, her eyes bleary, her nose stopped up, we had to fast-track-phase her back to her own bed.  And on the mask went every time I was in a five-foot radius of her.  A friend, also just starting chemo, told me about Hibiclens soap, which is apparently better than antibacterial soap, so I started showering in Hibiclens and making everyone wash up to the elbows in Hibiclens and buying enough Hibiclens for a lifetime supply of Hibliclens dipping.  And every time I took the Firecracker’s temperature with the thermal-scan thermometer, I twisted it in a Clorox wipe and then took my own.  If mine ever reaches precisely 100.5, I’m to phone the oncologist’s office on a special line.  I’m not sure what happens after that.  Maybe it’ll be like that scene in E.T. when armored men descend en masse to encase the house in plastic and exit in a giant hamster tube unfurling down the walkway.

Or maybe I’ll just get to crack open the emergency bottle of antibiotics in my medicine bin the oncologist prescribed for me the first day I met with her.  One second my temperature will be 97.4.  And then thirty minutes later 99.1.  And then thirty minutes later 98.6.  The Firecracker’s, though, had been consistently 100.7.

After the Firecracker first walked in sick, I explained the mask to her.  “It’s so I don’t breathe any germs.  It won’t scare you if I wear it, will it?” I took it out of my sweater dress pocket to show her as we stood in the entryway.  The barrette that had pinned her overgrown bangs back at school had moved to the very center, guiding them between her eyebrows.  She squinted, considered the mask for a second, and said no.  She just wanted to play computer games.  Usually, I’d set the timer for her to play up to an hour and no more, but I figured she could play as much as she wanted in order to keep her occupied.  Otherwise, she’d want to sit on my lap and watch Cinderella and sip apple juice from a box in my hand and ask me to wipe her nose every two minutes.  This is what we usually do.  This is why I usually catch anything the Firecracker has.  So I put on the mask.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“It’s your fever.  I’ll get your medicine.”

She sat on her knees on the dining chair she’d pulled to the computer hutch and shook her bangs out of her eyes.  The barrette finally flopped off with a pop against the keyboard as she logged herself on.

“Don’t give me the medicine that makes your hair fall out,” she said.

I paused at the kitchen cabinet where we keep a separate bin full of children’s medicine.

“Don’t worry about that.  Only mommy takes that.”

“Your medicine says: not for children — only for grown-ups?  Is that right?”

“Sort of.”

“I don’t want that medicine when I’m a grown-up.”

“You won’t ever have to take that medicine.  It’s something just mommy has to do.”

It wasn’t the right answer, but it was the thing that came out first, my breath in my mask heating my cheeks as I said it.


Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

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