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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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Terrifying Atypical Images on my Baby Girl’s CT Scan

I don’t know if I’m reacting the way a typical mother should. I don’t know what the “typical mother” should react like, feel like, process like.  I’m not paralyzed in place. I’m not gnashing my teeth, nor wailing like a banshee. I’m not ready to rip heads off strangers, or the roses in my back yard… or God.

I mean, that would be pretty typical, right? Blasphemous, yes, but typical — to be angry at God, right? And everyone else out there walking around perfectly healthy in His perfect image?  

Instead, I’m still going through the motions of my normal life… considering all the things I need to do for the day, the places and practices where the boys need to be, what I should make for dinner… even proceeding with this two-week trip to the UK. Surely that one is blasphemy, right? That’s definitely not how I should be acting is it? That’s not typical…

But then, what is typical anyway? 

Because my daughter surely isn’t the typical patient for this disease. This clear cell renal carcinoma that appears to have spread to her liver. As in Stage 4.

That diagnosis is typical of an older person… and a male. Bethany is neither old nor a man. She is a thirty-five-years-young mother of three, who was 33 when she first learned she had a tumor on her right kidney. Thirty-three when she had her partial nephrectomy. If they’d taken her whole kidney, would it have made a difference? Is that typically what’s done? 

No, none of this feels typical. So maybe my reactions don’t need to be either?  

Besides, we still don’t know for sure that’s what we’re dealing with. Although our family’s margin for error is much slimmer than for most. A typical patient’s family would only know that an MRI has been recommended to supply additional detailed imaging at this stage. (This stage. The irony of that phrase is not lost on me.) But we have our own staff of surgical oncologists as kith and kin. 

So while a typical patient’s family would have only been notified of the suspicious lesions on the CT scan, our patient’s surgical oncologist sister immediately asks for a cd of the scan, watches it remotely, knows what she sees, shows the images to her most-trusted radiologist and fellow oncology colleagues, along with every other physician friend she trusts and loves from all over the United States, (because it’s her sister, after all, and she really, really wants to have been wrong),  and they all agree the lesions are characteristic of metastasis from renal cell… so much so that the sister-surgical-oncologist  immediately has her sister’s treatment moved to the University of Miami where she practices and where her surg/onc partner is installed as caregiver, who then immediately orders a chest CT to make sure there are no additional mets in the lungs, along with a referral to an interventional radiologist for an immediate biopsy, as well as a timeline for immunotherapy and eventual (hopeful) liver resection.

No, a typical patient’s family doesn’t have all these experts and referrals and scans and biopsies and treatments fast-tracked to near hyper-speed. Most patients don’t have that privilege.

I understand how privileged we are. I am grateful. So grateful. 

But I’m also here to say it doesn’t feel like privilege. It feels like awfully bad fortune. My daughter faces a terrifying fight. And while the storm howls all around us, I’m doing my best to focus on the tasks at hand. The rehearsals and practices, the dinners and laundry, flights and itineraries. Doing my best to move forward. 

Because there is a slight, oh-so-slight chance, that the spots are perfusion abnormalities. That the contrast pooled. Or that they are solid, but not malignant: hepatic adenoma, hemangioma, or follicular nodular hyperplasia… all benign.

And even though 10 out of 10 experts believe that’s most likely not the case, we are praying for and believing in a miracle.

Most patients and their mothers would do the same. At least on that, I’m pretty certain we’re typical.

Miracles aren’t typical. That’s the nature of miracles. If they were, they wouldn’t be miracles. They would be ordinary occurences. As in, typical. But my daughter, her diagnosis, the whole situation, isn’t typical.

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Verily, A Memoir

The Preamble to my Constitution

               In the beginning was Our Father and his Word. Always there, just like my sisters, stair-stepped, dodging muddy hoofprints in the horse pasture. An unholy trinity because we were girls, the Word always spoken in tongues over our quaking bodies to ward off evil. The curse of the fall.

               But you can’t ward off what you were born to. May, August, September. Blossom, heat, and fruited trees, despite our father and his fundamental faith and expectations. We took to our seasons like Eve to the apple, even our hair played its role: honey crisp, wine sap, and golden delicious. Sprinkled tufts of owl feathers from the minute we flew from our mother’s warm nest into this cold world, eager to start a fire. Maybe we were what initiated his intrigue with chaos theory. He searched for balance and order forever after.  

               I’m the firstborn. Heather Leigh, a name my mother came up with after watching Brigadoon. Officially, a flowering shrub that grows wild on the rough Scottish heath, so maybe that’s why I’ve always bucked subjugation. In the summer, my hair and skin turned the hue of the hickory switches I got whipped with, thanks to what Dad called my dark countenance. Surly, he’d call me, but I disagree. While I do tend to slip toward solitude and silence, I’m a far cry from surly – I just don’t want to be controlled. I have waged an eternal war against being reined in. Rest assured, I’ll always fight against a bit. Take, for instance, back when I was labeled a Jezebel. When I snuck out. Shut down. Found myself shipped away before the hounds of the hell we were living with could devour me. I have to thank my father for that. And thank God, before he died, we’d mended our frayed connection. Though he never gave up preaching to me.

               My second little sister is named Leslie Joyce. Her hair’s now the color of caramel cake, but back then, it was the curled black of burnt candlewicks – closest to his color. And if Dad was partial to any of us girls, it was Leslie. She’s still the closest one of us to taking up his holy mantel. The only one who still attends church. Her husband, her second – she and I are both on our second marriage – even teaches Sunday School to senior citizens. Daddy definitely approved. And honestly, I approve too. I’m happy for her. Happy she wasn’t scarred so severely that a house of worship raises her hackles and sends her scurrying away from the ghosts that still float in my mind, eager to froth up some mayhem.

               It’s sad, really, how traumatized I am by the faith of my father. How the kindest, the most pure-intentioned texts about bible studies and organized prayers before football games can send me into a tailspin. I hesitate to compare it to a rape victim flinching at a tender, well-meaning touch… how a hug could trigger flashbacks of being encircled, overpowered, trapped, and out of control. How something so innocent can thrust a survivor back into the nightmare of her violent past….

                    But that’s the scenario that feels closest to how triggered I can become. John Donne prophesied my past before it was ever present when he wrote his Holy Sonnet and the lines, Batter my Heart, Three-Person’d God. That was the existence I led in my formative years. Back when my father and those elders did their best to o’ertrhow me and bend [their] force to break, blow, burn, and make me new — when I was already so brand-spanking-new and oh-so-incredibly vulnerable. And they did it. They battered and burned me, and while they didn’t break me, it stuck. It was imprinted, all the violence and force and fear. All that fury. So, maybe they really did break me after all.

               And while I know that how I interpret Donne’s lines is not what he meant at all — and while I know how the Fellowship treated me and others was not what God’s words mean, not what God means, what Jesus means, what scripture means — that’s still what was done to me. And it’s still the baggage they left behind with me.

               Likewise, I know it’s not what my friends, my fellow football wives, my fellow football parents mean, but violence in the name of God was what was done to me, and so when any sort of organized faith comes too close to me, it sends me crashing back into that place. Still. So, please know that about me, dear friends. And know that I mean no disrespect. No ill-intent. No judgement. It’s just trauma.

               Lucky for Leslie, it does not do that to her. And I’m happy for her.

               My other sister, she doesn’t attend church either. Her name is Emily Jo – or JoJo, as we call her. She was younger when I was shipped off. I was sixteen, making her twelve, so a lot of what was happening went over her head. She just woke up one morning and I was gone.  That’s probably why she does her best to be the life of the party, the center of attention – so she won’t wake up dispatched and forgotten one morning. So, while she woke up with one less sister one Saturday, Leslie rode with Dad and me over the Mississippi River and through the Appalachian woods– to Grandmother’s house we’d gone. They left the next day in my Dad’s blue Isuzu Gemini, Leslie traumatized about leaving me, but not about what sent me there. The wrath of God and Daddy never came down on her head. She’d seen first-hand what it could do. Therefore, she remained obedient and does ‘til this day, staying in Our Father’s sights every single Sunday.

               But honestly, banishment with a flaming sword brought me to where I am today. Honestly, it’s a pretty good place out here east of Eden. I have a beautiful life, with four beautiful children, and the man I was meant to find. The man who complements, not completes me. Have there been hiccups and hang ups along the way? Absolutely.  But I have learned that I am enough. I have always been enough.  I am ample and, as Whitman declared, I contain multitudes. And what’s more, I am able to be multitudes and I am able to speak my multitudes. Fully. To be me and to speak my mind. Until you’ve been denied those things, you never know how verily important they are. Yes, I said verily. Because this, which I speak to you, is my truth. And the truth will set you free.

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Making Spirits Bright

The house, cozy at dawn, and me in my bathrobe and soft Santa socks, Christmas lights glowing, playlist carols going… sipping my coffee and sorting my thoughts, 

How lucky am I, I think — no,  I know. How blessed to be snuggled beneath a warm velvet throw in the crook of a sectional with my laptop and nowhere to go while watching the sky shift to silver at dawn.

How simple, how sumptuous — an extravagance, bar none –that not everyone has. To have a sanguine soul in a world that exsanguinates souls. My gratitude is great. My cup overflows.

My sons are nestled all snug in their beds and my girls grown and glowing in orbits they threaded and hung on their own, weaving constellations that tell their tales, cast shimmering trails of goodness and grace.

While the boys, on the cusp of their own greatness, silver their way toward their own dawns, stars blooming bright on their baby cheeks and burgeoning lives, and the sky’s (no the universe) is their limit too, destinies unspooling just like their sisters’,, but entirely their own. 

I celebrate all their stories, all their tangled strands of light unwound from my body, ever unwinding and widening, bright and brighter still, stringing their gifts like drops of Jupiter, like sun-wrangled, star-spangled miracle-bringers of goodwill and good trouble in this dark world.

There is no greater joy, no greater comfort for a mother’s heart than to see the babies she brought into this world out there in it, slaying and making spirits bright — hers most especially.


			


		
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The C Word
			

									
									
							
 
		
			

				

They come in threes, they say. Bad things come in threes. And sure





enough, bad tidings rode in on their serrated fonts in swirling





impatient portals: an unholy trinity of cyst, malignancy and mass.





One slung sideways, like a fanny pack across a kidney sack, a second,





mortared to wind pipe, spewing ash into places unknown, a third sucking





marrow from mammary glands like a motherfucker. Unsanctified settlers,





all. Mother of all that is Holy, who let in the false prophet, the devil, the





beast to cast rings around x-rays and pockets full of poison, ashen shadows





on MRI scans? All that rot and stink and bile planted like rancid Easter eggs,





tangled spiders’ nests, like hissing snakes in sacred sanctuaries… Such blatant





blasphemy. Such sick sacrilege. But then, while bad things come in threes, so





too, do good. And we believe in the Good — that Triumvirate of Truth: Faith





and Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love. Love lends strength and





courage to fight. When we harness for God the energies of love, then love will





help conquer all. Together, we’ll banish the bad for Good.     Even the dirty, rotten C word.

			


		
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