The Pink Month

I am flipping through an issue of Real Simple magazine, and I come across an essay competition.   I am struck by the title which is to write in about 1,500 words or so an essay describing a particular situation that made you realize  that you were a grown-up.  A grown-up, eh?  That’s definitely a slippery slope yet I figured I might take a stab at it.  So here is my entry.

The Balance of It All

I would love to begin this essay with a touching story immersed in nostalgia, brimming with warm salty summers of a childhood that transgresses into that hysterically funny anecdotal coming-of-age story.   Yet, you see for me, there are a number of different turns in my life that made me feel like a grown-up.   Hell, these turns, rather  twists even brought me through the doorway of adulthood.  And many were very funny and happy, and many of course as life goes, seemingly unhappy and downright heart breaking.   But with a bit of perspective I would like to add that I think I get it now … there is always a balance, there is always an upswing … even when it appears there is no possible way out.  See? There I go, saying grown-up things.  Something must be working around here.

Did I feel like a grown-up when I was standing in the dressing room as my mother tossed training bras over the door to me?  (And as a side bar, might I add that the term “fitted for a bra” is just plain funny, as if I was Chevy getting new tires.  Pardon the obvious pun.)  Did I feel like a grown-up in that teeny studio apartment in New York City alone with Kafka-sized water bugs scurrying about?  Actually, that was a combination of feeling grown-up and really  stupid for not taking the cute studio on Minetta Lane when I had the chance.   Did I feel like a grown-up standing on the corner of Hester and Grand in Little Italy when Ed proposed?  Or when I realized I did not own a lawnmower for the garden that came with the house we now owned?   Or wait … having that queasy flippy feeling for the first time as the baby moved in my belly.   Or standing over my father after his stroke as he struggled to say my name, a man who did things like sail solo to Bermuda, now unable to speak?  Indeed all these situations made me realize that I was now a grown-up.  Welcome to the Club, Sparky!

But I didn’t realize any of this.  I couldn’t fully appreciate who I was until the night before Thanksgiving in 2005.  The story is not unusual: there was a lump in my breast, a biopsy, a phone call, a woman spoke and told me I had breast cancer.  I was 37 years old.  Ok, so now I felt pretty much as “grown-up” as I had ever felt.  And ironically, all I wanted to be at that precise moment was 9 years old again … a  carefree girl with two blonde braids, salty and stiff from the ocean dangling over my shoulders, in my Danskin one piece bathing suit and sneakers running home.   I wanted more than anything to go back, to be someone I once was, to run again, to be that light and free again, to be …. Well, NOT a grown-up.  And oddly enough that year of treatment, that year that cancer entered and took my innocence, my lightness so to speak … all the surgeries, the chemo, the reconstruction, and the radiation did eventually bring me back to a place of lightness.  Of course I wish I had never had cancer.   I wish it wouldn’t threaten my life as it does, but cancer does help me see things more vividly, helps me unload things that are unnecessary.

The title of this essay contest caught my eye because the life lesson that cancer taught me was to live simply, and I do not mean to sound like a tee shirt or Nike commercial.  This disease helps me focus very quickly on what matters and to shed the entangling, unnecessary details that hold me down and make me heavy.  Funny, most people groan about the heaviness of being a grown-up …the responsibilities, the challenges, the weight of it all, the Visa bill.   And, I will admit that cancer at age 37 with a young family is indeed heavy, but I also am learning that it is your life and if you want to be light and happy, you have to do it.   Make each day matter.   Love as much as you can, and try to find the joy wherever it might be.  And look hard for this joy … flip over rocks to find it, even when you think it’s absurd.   Sure, cancer forced me to be a grown-up.  But cancer helped me count the blessings more and look harder for the daily miracles.  And the people, which breast cancer placed in my path are angels, who helped me shape my life, helped me grow-up and have my heart grow out.

Breast cancer handed me many situations of balance.  And I struggled with this balance: how to talk to my children, and how NOT to talk to my husband about the fear that paralyzed me.  How to be normal with a scarf on my extremely shiny bald head and how to feel, really truly feel  all the way into my heart as deep as I could go, all that was really happening to me.   This grown-up stuff was thoroughly exhausting, as well as scary.   Who really wants to look that deeply at one’s self?   Who knows what you might find.  No more black and white, rather the world was now grey and complicatedly layered.  Ok then BALANCE it is.   What choice did I have?   So even when you think you can’t make it, you are tired and angry and so alone you cannot even comfort yourself, or recognize yourself, you have to chose to get up.   You have to choose life.

This past May I helped bury a very close friend, a friend  I met in the  breast cancer support group.  Betty was about half a year ahead of me in all the treatments.  She, along with so many other warriors, paved the road for me on what to expect regarding treatment in my everyday life, and the emotional tidal wave that followed.   Betty had this contagious laugh.  We often joked that our    “to-do lists” resembled something along the lines of this:  load washer, go to chemotherapy, panic, fold laundry, panic again,  make dinner.   She taught me how to be a grown-up, she taught me how to chose to get up, how to fight with grace, how to laugh, how to live no matter what is handed to you.  But I think the most mature, the most grown-up thing Betty (without even being aware of it) impressed upon me was how to love, really honestly love.  Love your life with all its nuances of heartbreak, anger, disappointment, laughter, fear, romance, joy and wonder.

So here’s to being a grown-up. It takes courage, and you know … it’s not so much about the strength of it all, but rather just simply standing up … the strong or courageous part comes about two seconds after you  get up out of the chair, or scrape yourself off the floor.  At least that’s what I think.

Advertisement