Dear 2013

What a difference a day makes? You should see the nuclear wasteland a few years make...2013 has me very conflicted. It's the year my oldest daughter will turn 18 and begin her senior year in school, my baby boy who would still nurse if I let him is making his pioneer voyage into kindergarten...Ava turns 13, Livvy is reading and speaking spanish...and then...of course, there is Joseph and me. Stronger, wiser, faster...and yet cautious and frankly - pretty fucking tired. I'm down a few boobs, he's down a gall bladder but we filled up a huge vault of humour to carry us onward. He still makes me laugh...and blush...and flutter my eyes. I still make him crazy and wear his socks and choke down my cooking. Every year I make resolutions that I never keep. Every year I have mountains of zeal and excitement about what the new year holds and what my next big decision will be. This year - I am counting on a little less zeal and a little more warm banana bread. We ended the year with 20 1st grade children being shot to death - can I possibly ask for a single thing? Can I bemoan about the extra 20lbs when mothers are burying their children? Can I wrap my arms around my own 1st grader and not feel a dull ache for the missing 20 who will never again be held by arms that are now broken? I'm not a buzz kill...I hope for good things, I want peace and I want to lose the 20lbs but I also want something less. Just some quiet...maybe a nap, a few more movies, a few more trips to the gym, a lot less chaos and a few glasses of wine. I want more of less...I really do. If I conduct my own version of my Year in Review, I feel like gagging. It's like when you order a pizza but Chinese shows up...you don't not like Chinese, you were just ready for pizza. So this year I wasn't ready for you but in the end, my children are under my roof that is currently being paid for, my husband is employed and there is enough food in my fridge to feed a small county... If Cancer gave me anything its the ability to be a little more selfish with my time and my energy. To avoid the people...who well, let's face it...suck the life right out of me. The energy vampires who need my life line to survive... Dear 2013 - you didn't ask but pass me a huge heaping platter of peace and hold the drama. And Cancer, if you show up here again, know in advance, I am packing.

Stings...

I'm quite used to it by now...you know...the stares. The ones that can't figure me out. First it was that I had one boob and another with poor driving skills that would roam all over my chest. Then it was the chemo, where my head covering had people thinking I was either a Nazi skinhead or a Muslim...though Maddie called me Biker bad ass chic. Then it was radiation where I would often and unwittingly pull my shirt from my chest and blow on my torched chest - often caught in a grocery store or post office with stares for days. Now it's my no nonsense approach to no prosthetics, no boobs...not even an A cup...sort of a negative A. I'm wrapped up in bandages because I am sporting three hot looking drains but beyond that, I am as flat as a Texas prairie. At the town Halloween festival this weekend, enjoying glorious weather with my girls and playing with my sister wife Tina I saw it...a man staring at me with a look of disgust on his face I hadn't seen before. Now was his disgust at me? Likely not but did I feel like it was? Yeah - and it knocked me on my ass. It brought me back to total self consciousness, total deformity, totally "that girl". He continued to stare at me - first my chest, then my body, then my face...sort of trying to figure it out and I wrapped my arms across my chest, hiding the division between me and the normal girls. It was then I realized that I am still ashamed of what I have become physically. It's not a bad thing - it's a real thing. I'm embracing all of it but hey - reality bites man. My preschool moms always make me feel beautiful - Robyn reminding me that without my boobs, she can see how pretty my eyes are. Same girl who told me when I had my head covering that I didn't have to tell people I was undergoing chemo, I can just say I'm a pirate. When I told Susanne about possible surgery moving stomach fat up to make new boobs she offered hers as well as mine. Gd I love them all. Joseph who feels the pain of every step with me and wraps my bandages every night, still looking at me like he did the day we were married and yet here I am...covering my chest from a man who means absolutely nothing. But there it is - a reality check for me - I'm still not okay, I'm slowly healing and I still fucking hate cancer and what is has done to me but it's a day at a time. A friend once asked me why I don't look at my chest like a warrior in battle. I don't know...I feel nothing but pain when I see it. It's like a surgical rape - cancer stripped from me much of what made me feel like a woman and we can all say all day long that breasts don't define us, and that's true to some degree...it's still a part of who I am and how I carried myself and fed my children and wore a cocktail dress. So I enter the holidays grateful for what I have and who I have...there is no cancer survivor on the planet with a better back up team than I have and am yet I'm painfully aware the stares still sting. And I hope they don't sting forever. I wish I could magically erase the last two years and yet the clarity cancer has given me about myself and what matters may never have found me. I don't really know yet. I just know the stares sting.

The monster never sleeps...

Y'know in those horror films where toward the end the monster has been killed or maimed or sent back into the bowels of hell and the young college girl walks back into her house...and you just know it's not dead? Welcome to my pathology results. Today heading back into my not-yet-final-but-getting there visit to check the surgical site and hear results from the mastectomy, I was told that cancer was there. Not there/there, but there. It's called DCIS...ductal carcinoma in situ. It means there is cancer in the duct - non invasive, stage 0 but answers to the name cancer so it gets a seat. There are no changes in treatment, no course I would have been offered that would be better than cutting it off, literally, at the foundation...nothing really but it was a greeting card of huge proportions from the one I loathe the most. For some reason I can't seem to shut the door flush enough to lock it. I can sleep but not deep enough...I can adore moments with my kids but never long enough to not worry I may not always have them. I can't just be left alone. It's the monster at the end of the movie letting us all know - even subliminally, that there is a sequel in the works. Please hear me - or maybe I just need to hear me - nothing changes. I burned it, poisoned it and cut it off...there is nothing left to do but because no one knows, or will know, which came first, no one knows or will know what to think. Was it always there? Is it new? Does it matter? Will it change my life? If it's mesthatic, there is no cure - is it? No way to tell. So does it matter? I guess not. Joseph said he felt punched in the stomach. I felt that too. Are we both jointly devastated? Yes. The ayes have it. There's a family at my daughter's school right now who is preparing to bury their recently and tragically mortally wounded son. Hard to feel sorry for myself now and really even later but the truth is - after two years of fighting this, I am just tired. I'm tired of outrunning this thing that keeps gaining on me. I'm tired of slamming the door only to see its fingers creeping under the door. I'm tired of being a banner for survival and a cautionary tale. Spare me the pink ribbons but do hand me a camera...my life is on record now. Memories, never more precious. Life, never more colorful. Pain, never more intense. Moments, never more meaningful. Y'know me - I go in stages...acceptance, anger, fight, flight and muffin. So I'm in. I'm never out but I am angry...pissed actually. I really thought I was taking the breast preemptively only to find out cancer had already set up shop. I would have taken it anyway - I just wanted to be first. And I wanted to rest. I wanted some peace. I will have it - just not today.

Looking back over...

Tradition is a significant thing in our family...critical to our history as Jews, important to our children, commununal and safe to our existance as parents but like any memorable moment, we try to leave things a little better than we found it. Sort of like - we Smith-er a bit. Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year is the start of the holiday season for us and is full of memories for me as well. We go back over our year, look at what we may change, some self reflection, some evaluations, a few nods in the direction of repetance and like we Jews love to say - we fought, we won, let's eat. Though we hardly ever won...why do we say that anyway? As tired as I am and as anxious as I am about surgery coming up, I am excited about the traditions before me...brisket, family, round challah, apple paintings...it's tradition disguised as normal and normal, we could use a big, healthy serving of so tomorrow, anxiety be damned because I need room for my meal prep. I also realize two years ago next week, I underwent a mastectomy staring Cancer down and completely unsure if I would live. So to Dawn of two years ago, it's okay. You will be fine, you will lean on your sisters (Robyn, Anna, Amy and Susanne...my kids are in your hand and my family will eat like royalty), you will lay in bed with Joseph and cry with a fervor that will blow your mind, you will go through baby books, you will grieve and become numb from fear, you will shave your head, you will lose your mind...you will even laugh and your family will eat better than they ever have. Your kids will like the meal deliveries just a bit too much and ask for Alaina's chicken pot pie. You will have Robin bringing you ice cream and love you enough to know your favorite flavors. Lynn will clean your house and shop for you - every day she will call. Susan will bring you flowers. You will have Robyn sending you cards about your cancer that will make you laugh - then cry - then laugh again and she knows your treatment schedule. You will even have an old friend from middle school send you the biggest fruit arrangement you have ever seen and your kids will squeal like inmates in a riot scene. Your great aunt will selflessly give up two weeks to wait on your entire family so Joseph can have some help and you can sleep. You will enter each chemo treatment with terror and strength and never without Joseph who will never leave your side and tell you he's never wanted to say before but he's into bald chicks. Kind of a Star Trek fetish...you will have people you hardly see and those you see often, take care of you, call you, take your children out and bring you meals. You will even have a few old teachers/friends make your kid star for a day. Dawn, you will be fine. You will make it and you will make it on the backs of people who love you. I promise. So for Rosh Hashana - may we all be sealed for another year and may it be THE year of healing, grace and health. That's leaving things better than we found it for sure. Well THAT and my brisket that gets better every year. Shana Tovah.

My first set of A's...

Well, I googled. Yep...googled. Googled pictures of what my new boobs would look like and as much as I love the idea of being factor new again, the lumpy, bumpy, asymmetrical mess that would be my rack is now history. I can still see the look on my plastic surgeon's face as he tried to help me realize Playboy has mislead us all...there are new boobs and there are new boobs. I like football as much as the next girl but it's a few pages over from melons which is the look I was going for so in the end, I am ordering nothing. It's not easy - how do your mourn your breasts? How do you say good bye? I used them alluringly in my 20s, fed my kids with them in my 30s and fought with and against them valiantly in my 40s. They have served me well but in the end, died in battle. The entire point of reconstruction is to make me feel more normal again. I can lose the prosthesis and stop staring in its tracks. I can wear sexy bras, I can wear cocktails dresses and I can grab whatever femininity is left after losing your hair and nearly your life. Really, I just wasn't ready to be out of the game. At almost 44, I was still hangin' in. My dad says, Man Plans and Gd Laughs. So there ya go...I planned. Glad I'm good on my feet. I am done. White flags flying...for now. I am going with the mastectomy but no reconstruction for now until the 100 plus billion dollars being pumped into breast cancer research comes up with a better model than what I was offered. Frankly, bumpy, lumpy and mismatched I can do on my own. So welcome A cups. Am I happy about this? No. Having two prosthesis will be my emergency set for when I break down or just need a moment of normal, but I will do my very best to embrace my new reality. I admit, clinging to a new set of boobs took me through some very dark moments. I hung in thinking on some level I MIGHT be a bit better off later - gave up two years and two breasts in exchange for a new set. It's like taking an old favorite pair of shoes in for a new pair - except you had to cut off your feet in the process. When I go back over it in my mind, I edit that part out. New boobs...it's all I hung on to. It wasn't denial - it was my feeble attempt to find the silver lining in a pile of dung but I kept digging. I'm willing to accept now that it just sucks. It's unfair and it doesn't always have to end well. I don't have to find the positive. I don't have to make everyone okay with it and I don't have to force myself into thinking A cups on a D cup body is perfectly fine. I don't have to tell myself saying goodbye to the body I once knew and the breasts I once had is easy and I won't publish myself saying this is nothing. It's everything. But it's my reality right now and I am done. There is some peace in that part. Being done feels a bit like a resting place. No more surgeries, no more idealizing, no more breast talk...yeah...It's been almost exactly two years since I said goodbye to one and now the other follows and I can move back home, back into my life and back into living and rocking forward. The stares be damned...beats the hell out of prosthetic travelling. No more fishing my breast up off the floor, the treadmill and the nightstand. It's. Just. Over. Grief stricken? You bet. Surrounded by amazing women, a superhero of a husband and four children who never looked at me as broken? Not once? Yes. And I now need them more than ever. I need them to remind me this will be okay. This will be over soon and I am still a victor. This is a clouded survival story - no happy ending but one I can live with and I am living. with. it. Living.

Footballs...

I have heard it said the longest nine months of any woman's life is the pregnancy after a miscarriage...the same can be true for routine medical exams. Last week my breast surgeon found a lump in my lymph nodes. The normal answer is it must be infection - the post cancer reaction is MRI and biopsy. And the waiting...I spent five days in this hell with a husband in Korea fluctuating back and forth between it's nothing to writing my will. There is no cure for metastatic breast cancer. If this lump was from my breast cancer, I am offered anywhere from 3-5 years to live. No cure. It rings in my head often...used to be daily but maybe I'm more numb to it now. So I give in to the weekend. A blessed sore throat hit me on Saturday bringing a bit of calm...maybe THAT'S the lump??? An infection? Never prayed for strep before but I was on it. Then Monday came and after a series of scans, I am fine...no lump. And the discussion begins about moving forward with my next surgery, now scheduled for Sept 24. Barely enough time to recover from the almost bad news, I learn a few things. The radiation burns were so bad they cannot recover the skin. The good news is I can still reconstruct, the bad news is no guarantee they will match in size or cosmetics. Frankenboobs I suppose. They have to remove lat muscle from my back to rebuild what will be a taut, firm breast on one side - almost shaped like a football and the other, a normal looking breast. Um...seriously these are my options? A FOOTBALL?? I share this news with Joseph who always knows what to say - he loves football...and he's sorry. He's sorry because he knows at 44 I have a lot of life left to live and shouldn't have to do it with elephant manish physique. Quite crudely, I think after two years of cancer treatment, I deserve a nice rack. The answer is always the same...at least you cut the cancer out. Yeah...at least. And in this draconian method of poison, burns and cutting I should find the silver lining, and I will. I am happy to be alive, happy to be without cancer and happy to be almost done but deep inside I am still a girl who gave up her breasts to survive. No one can say I didn't give it everything, right?

With Ava's bat mitzvah over and the blurr of planning and preparing is resting, I can sum up the entire day in a word...juxtapositioning. An interesting way to remember it but it's true. Ava was amazing...well, Ava IS amazing but on this particular day she truly was. She was poised, graceful and chanted Torah like a rabbi but in very typical Ava fashion, she beamed like a beacon and in that light sat me, her mother, like a puffer fish. Pride doesn't even cut it. But with all the hoopla and craziness that goes into the party AFTER the light, I noticed some interesting things - sort of a memo from the Reality Express. As we were walking into the sanctuary after all had been seated and Ava was positioned beautifully on the bimah, my friend Susanne shared with me some tragic news that she knew would be mentioned in the rabbi's sermon and wanted me to be prepared...a soldier friend of ours was killed in Afghanistan. I felt as if I was kicked in the stomach...yeah can I make his death about me for five more seconds? It was a combination of great sadness, great pain and great irony. Here we were celebrating the culmination of study and life in our daughter and one of our own was taken on the lines. I cried, I felt torn in this celebration and it was overwhelming...preparing to walk into the sanctuary smiling when in my heart I knew that not far from me, two children were greiving the loss of their dad and one woman is without the love of her life. It wasn't long ago that I stayed up late at night watching CNN hoping to Gd the Khost province of Afghanistan remained calm. I remember hearing my brother and my husband missed each other by hours at the same base in Kabul...my husband and my brother. Long days indeed. Susanne reminds me of the circle...within the cirle are layers - layers that matter. The immediate circle now was Ava. I had to keep her in that circle and protect it from anything else - for this moment. So I composed myself and with Joseph - grieving as well, walked in together to join Ava in the light. We celebrated, cried, laughed and shared with Ava and at the closing, honored Paul who was taken far too soon. The party was exciting and fun...a very appropriate beach themed night with slushies, games, dancing and Ava's favorite...a build your own nacho bar (thank you Amy Gold - best. idea. ever.) Without my sister wives, it could not be done. Pam and Susan swooped in to take over - set up, decorations, organization...an army formed on Ava's behalf and even Joseph said when in Pam's presence he felt scared to be standing around taking a break. Catering arrived, DJ set up, balloon lady arrived (who can remember her name? Balloon lady works, cake, slushie truck...yeah it was a party alright) - all in Ava's honor and I could not have been more thrilled. As the night moved (and so did we), it was wonderful to watch Ava so happy and dancing with her friends. Adriana and Elana wrote a poem for her, Adriana sang a song, we made a video, toasts and dancing and of course, the Hora...the Jewish hustle, all in celebration. Paul wasn't far away in our minds but we did what we came to do - celebrate Ava. As the night ended and clean up began, I found myself overwhelmed with what to do with all the food. Much was left over, it's now about midnight and I knew there was no room in my fridge to store or even use it all. I was mulling over what to keep and what to throw away when one of the helpers approached me saying she had no food at home and could she please take the left over beans..."so good to keep the kids going during the day"...words I can't imagine saying when referring to how to make a meal last for several hours for children I can't always feed. For the second time in one night, juxtapostioning. Suddenly the overwhelming task of how to clean this all up became a mission of rightousness. Susan and I boxed up every single crumb of food and drink and gave it to her. Gluttony meet mercy. I can still see her waiting for the car to be pulled up because she had five boxes of food that needed to be loaded in her car - I wondered if the kids would be excited, I wondered how much peace this might give her, I wondered what not knowing how to feed your kids must be really like...and I knew it didn't fix the problem. I knew those kids would be hungry again in a few days, but for now... As we drove home - exhausted and elated I saw the coorelations unfold. As we celebrated Ava's life, Pauls' was taken. A combination of great pain and great pride -crashing into each other at the same time. And then...60 kids left a party without ever knowing some of their own will eat tonight because of what they left behind. No music, no fanfare - leftovers on a party platter. But y'know what? I don't feel guilty for what we have and I don't teach my children to either. I have been without enough times to still feel it and even though our kids' can't relate to poverty, they get it and by sharing with Ava what we did do for those kids, it brought us back to what a bat mitzvah really is...responsibility and awareness of what your role is in life. When we shared with Ava what her party brought to those kids she smiled and said, "can we invite them to dinner?" - sure Ava...bringing anyone struggling into the fold is how Ava rolls...and the focus moves back to her and how she wants to help. And the puffer fish is back.