School is out. The hormones I’m taking to fight the cancer make me edgy and anxious. It’s hard to focus and the default mood is not my normal chipper self. Concentration is an issue, humor is an issue. I made a list. It includes play drums, read, write, exercise and help teens learn how to drive. I’ve made check lists to help me stay on the list. Why? Because as I said, I forget what I was doing in the midst of doing it. Lists and check lists are a survival method.
Today, I’ve exercised and folded my socks. Now what?
Somehow, the list is long but the will is short even on the longest day of the year.
So we played games and I tried to write. I didn’t get far. I went on two walks and ordered groceries online. Somewhere in the day, I listened to the mass. Reading, writing, cooking, all the normal stuff didn’t jump the spirit. I prayed for help.
Fortunately, I have a fun husband who came home and asked us to name guilty pleasures about music we loved. For the next half hour, we played song after song that we sheepishly admitted we liked even if it didn’t fit with our character and by the time we finished, all the flatness of the day evaporated.
Summer reads, summer music and ice cream and answered prayers…willful silliness and blessed indulgence from a God and a husband that love me were the cure. They are part of what I will have to learn and relearn and relearn to remember as the medication becomes part of every day, and the memory of being chipper by nature becomes something I must will back into being from beneath the surface of a bloodstream carbonated with hormones. |
Fortunately, I have an eleven year old I’m helping to deal with managing her emotions, and the reality of learning to not let hormones control everything so everything I tell her, I’m also telling myself. It’s part of God’s providence, to keep me from turning inward which is the temptation with both cancer and the treatment, by giving me all these people who must wrestle with the same things for natural reasons.
Teaching them to roll with punches, to weather trials with a smile rather tears, lessons that I’m learning too.
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