It came to me in the sweaty heaps of down purging out fever in the long deep hours of a sick mama night. The introduction to my book. Or, at least, what was supposed to be my book. And ended up being my blog. Back before I knew about blogs. (of my, this is simply not coming off with the polish it had in my green...er, I mean *dream*)
Someone who had a lot of grit and knew the toll her words would take said it first, "Write a little bit. Every single day." She meant about cancer, for me. For her, it was a little bit of every one of the last days she had with her son here on earth. She wrote letters to the sky, the thousands who prayed, before the word "blog" really existed. I came later, and so, I wrote a blog.
It started with the very beginning. A very good place to start. Oh, wait, that's "Do, Re, Mi". I mean the blog. It started with the very first day. Before surgeries and radiation, before separations from my kids and before I ever thought about dying before my 30th birthday. It started, to be exact, on June 6, 2008, 10 days before the surgery that confirmed what a biopsy had hinted at: aggressive, invasive thyroid cancer, snaking it's tentacles out out through that thinnest of all body parts, my neck...even on those of us who are not so thin elsewhere.
I remember the thud. It felt physical, like something heavy had actually dropped beside me. Turns out, I was all by myself, in post-surgical recovery, hearing myself and the word "carcinoma" (medical fancy-pants for cancer) in the same sentence. It made everything I had written for every one of the last 10 days painfully, awfully true. I really had it. That funny premonition - it was really there, and for a reason. The prayers I'd begged for - yep, I needed them. I was going to be a mom with cancer.
And a blog.
A mom with cancer and a blog. Talk about someone your parent's generation isn't going to know how to categorize. On each and every day, I wrote. And it wasn't always pretty. Okay, it was seldom pretty. Or holy. Or much to read, for that matter. But it was a mom with cancer and a blog. The daily. The dirty. The hush-now-we-don't-talk-about-that-in-public.
Somewhere along the line, I quit writing a book. And really invested in writing a blog. The daily. The dirty. The hush-now...wait. In my generation, we do talk about it, in the most public of ways. Thousands of moms, who write for thousands of reasons, do it every day all over the globe, from every computer in every land. Every entry, for us, no longer a chapter, or a part of one. It was just a day. One shared. Somewhere along the line, something started to gather around my mom-with-cancer-and-a-blog life. It was friends. The realest I've ever had. And some of whom I've never met IRL. (yeah, I had to look it up, too, once upon a time with a teenage texting babysitter. In Real Life.)
And so, I guess I'm going to keep on going. Blogging, that is. I hit remission February 2, 2012, just a month ago. And I guess I've kind of been spinning my wheels, mentally, emotionally. Something along the lines of, "What exactly do I do with a cancer blog now that I finally don't have cancer?" If you get a chance, stop by my friend Joy's blog and get her thoughts on the transition from mommy blogger to faith blogger. I think I might need to take her advice and write my one sentence disclaimer now. It's just a day: one shared.
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