Balance

I've started a couple of drafts here in the last few weeks, but nothing I've really fleshed out as complete thoughts yet. It has been a busy few weeks and I haven't really had a lot of time to reflect and record. 

First, allergy season hit hard again this year. I don't tend to get spring allergies, but my husband was taken down for a solid 2.5 weeks. On top of that, I had tons of work to do, a Girl Scout meeting to plan, and all of the medical appointments: MRI, radiation treatments, clinic check-ins, PT, and meetings with the school nurse. That doesn't even account for the everyday household tasks like dinner, dishes, laundry, yard work. Life is busy and not always in good ways. 

We are done with radiation now - 10 sessions total. The first day, my daughter's favorite tech came to get us from the lobby. He is loud (probably because he has to talk to a lot of older people), tells lots of jokes, and generally just tries to make everyone comfortable. This go round, she opted to listen to a lot of Taylor Swift, so he would have that blasting down the hallway every afternoon. Her favorite album is Reputation, but 1989 makes an appearance every now and then. Everyone on the team took care to make sure she was comfortable with the mask. They had to spend a lot more time lining all the machines up correctly because they were working in some critical areas, but they would make sure to check in with her. The first day, the Child Life specialist sat with me for the entire session, about 40 minutes, just because. 

My daughter mostly breezed through it all. The sessions themselves are easy at least, and she tells jokes to everyone. Afterwards, she would get tired early. There was some vomiting at night, and the second week she started to have a sore throat impacting her ability to eat real food. Crunchy and/or hot foods made it worse. One night I made spaghetti, her favorite, and she cried because she couldn't eat it. Instead, she's been living on mostly smoothies. My mom bought us a Ninja, and I have made so many smoothies. We settled on this one as her favorite: frozen fruit (mango, strawberry, blueberry mix), whole milk yogurt, whole milk, full fat coconut milk, honey. Sometimes I'll add spinach or peanut butter, but often not. It comes to about 500-600 calories per smoothie. Gotta get those calories in! I want to drink them so bad because they taste so good, but um....I don't need the extra calories. 

We've also been trying to fit in friend time and chill time as much as we can. She went to a birthday party, had a friend over for the day, and visited with my brother and his family. We finished Gravity Falls (again) and we went to see Super Mario Galaxy last night on a whim. There are Girl Scout events the next few weekends and a friend's mom got us tickets to see Frozen at the children's theater. I've messaged probably too many people about planning something together, and I booked a beach trip for the week after Memorial Day. I know on some level I'm trying to do as much fun stuff as possible while I can. 

The cancer groups call it "making memories," but I tend to think about it as giving my kids experiences rather than memories. As an aside, I just need to state for the record that the core memory thing bothers me because who's to say what will actually be a "core memory" or even just a regular memory for me or my kids. I actually remember very little from my childhood trip to Disney, but I remember very vividly debating with my dad over the dinner table about whether there will ever be palm trees growing naturally in Montana. I doubt anyone could have predicted that as a "core memory." 

Anyway, in the last few weeks, two local kids were all over my news feed. One got a strep infection in their brain and died. Another fell off a golf cart and died. None of us know how long we get. Because our kids are young, we think they will live longer than we will, and most of them will. But that's also a fantasy of what we think our future will look like and none of that is a given. In some fucked up way, I've been given a gift of time with my kid - time to truly recognize how special it is. And maybe we just spend it on the couch watching Gravity Falls together, but that's not time wasted if I am present and know how fleeting it all is. 

To that end, I also told my Girl Scout co-leader that I am quitting after May. I had a dream about quitting and woke up thinking it was the right time to do it. If this recent round of radiation gives us at best 3 more months with no progression, then I cannot commit to being there and making scouts a good experience for anyone else's kid next year. So, it's time for me to stop and someone else can pick it up if they want or we can dissolve the troop and spend all the money at Great Wolf lodge or something. I feel good about it. 

I am also letting go of any leadership positions at my job. My department chair is officially retiring in August or September, and I don't want the job. I am truly fine with whoever takes it on and feel good that it won't be me. Time is too precious to worry about class scheduling, assessments, and faculty evaluations. If the kids weren't on my health insurance, I might even feel good about quitting and doing something else with my time. But, we've already hit our deductible and our out of pocket max for the year, so I'm locked in through December. 

To sum it all up - I am working on finding the balance. Any guilt I feel about not squeezing in enough fun between the appointments is just how I feel and not reality. All that matters is that my kids are supported and loved through all of this, and that isn't about doing the most all the time.  

A Millennial Classic My Kid Likes to Belt

Natashia Bedingfield, "Unwritten"