Cat, you're a sweetheart, but you're very tough on me.
Show me someone who makes it through a year of separation while hoping and trying to save their marriage, experiencing a difficult year at work, and going through the normal chaos of children entering the teen years, and lets it all roll off their back and is fine and I'll show you a liar. In fact, my life was in a challenging stage even when I thought my marriage was fine.
Ad,
I may be tough, but I promise you, I am no tougher on you or anyone else, than I am/was on myself.
Two weeks after I received one of my bombs, I was told by doctors that I very possibly, almost probably, had a form of breast cancer that would leave me dead in less than 5 years. My S was only twelve at the time. I had never seen such terror in anyone's face as was in my doctor's the day he told me. Terror, not sadness, not concern, but sheer terror as he searched his brain for what to do for me, even though he knew if he was correct, there was nothing anyone could do. He was basically giving me a death sentence. Funny thing is, I was still more concerned with saving my M than saving my life at that point. It was actually easier to reconcile, accept, and make plans for death than it was divorce.
I got very lucky. After almost four months of tests, surgery, waiting for results and quietly, almost silently except for the tears, creating items for my S so that he would know who his mother really was, have records of all the things that I thought I would want to tell him in his life that I wouldn't be around to tell him, I found out that the doctors were wrong. Five years later (the five year anniversary is next month), I thank God every day for that, for my life, and for all of the wonderful people who are in it.
Five years later...I shouldn't be here. I am. Alive. Something I wouldn't even allow myself to imagine for a long time. Even after the results came back, it took me a long time to believe that I was going to live. Not just survive but live.
When the next bomb came the following summer, even though it rocked my world even harder than I ever could have imagined, I was different. And my work began in earnest.
And I am here now, living in a time I never thought I would see, happy, in love, excited about life. And I expect more from myself than I ever did before. Life goes on and we can either go along for the ride, waiting to come out the other side, or create it.
The choice is ours, it always has been and always will be.
"Acceptance doesn't mean resignation. It means understanding that something is what it is and there's got to be a way through it."--Michael J. Fox
