There were six people in the room with the neurosurgeon yesterday when we met to discuss Mom’s biopsy results, if you don’t count my brother and sister-in-law who were FaceTiming from Sarah’s office in Wisconsin. Our family does love a party. My mom’s surgeon feels like a godsend. She is patient, and quiet, and takes time to answer questions and doesn’t once look at us askance when somebody inevitably says something ridiculous (I’ll save the examples to protect the guilty…er, me). She is knowledgeable and experienced and we already trusted her once, so when she came into that room and sat down and immediately told us some relatively positive news, we (after extensive ridiculous questioning) walked out of that meeting weirdly, pleasantly, buoyed. Let me back up a little bit: You know the Arnold Swarzenegger line in “Kindergarten Cop” where he says he has a headache, and one of the children tells him that it might be a tumor, and then he’s all, “It’s not a toomah! It’s not a toomah!” That line has…
I’ve realized recently that I don’t write about my mom very often, and when I do, it’s always sort of about her as a part of something else–my dad’s life, or my children’s. I’m not proud of this–mom is an integral part of my life, after all, and of our life as a family. Why don’t I discuss her? Why don’t I talk about her? I mean, we’ve gotten pretty tight, especially in these past ten years, and our relationship is–outside of a bumpy decade or so I’ll just call adolescence–for the most part, easy. So maybe that’s it: maybe the easy is why she hasn’t appeared on these pages so often. See, Mom is my constant. She’s as much a part of the framework of my life that to write about her sometimes feels like writing about what it’s like to breathe, or eat yogurt for breakfast, or put in a load of laundry for Clean Sheets Day. Mom is my constant: she…
Today is Cian’s first day of kindergarten. For the first time in ten and a half years, I am alone, left to my own devices, free to use these morning hours for all of the writing work (two books! already started!) I’ve been waiting to do, waiting to concentrate on, waiting to finish, for most of the working day. It’s a whole new world out here, you guys, and boy, is it quiet. But, dear reader, this post isn’t about Cian–he was so ready to go, and that kind of happy knowledge overshadows the fact that his goodbye wave at school was more of a “please leave because I have very, very important things to do” shrug. It’s not about me, either, who’s feeling pretty darned proud of herself for not collapsing into a big snotty puddle of sobs the instant he turned away from us. This post? It’s about David. See, here’s the thing about my husband: he carries the financial weight of our family on his back, and does so with so much grace it’s easy…