Mixed Metaphors

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

This line has always moved me immeasurably--what a profoundly lovely contract to make with the world--and an impossibly poetical aspiration. How would you know the calculus? When would you run the numbers?

As many of you heard yesterday, from my beloved game time analyzer, I got some good news from the treatment and prognosis side of the house. My medical team could possibly be described as looking tickled when they came into the room to share the results of the genetic testing.

At the moment, and at that specific moment, I happen to be experiencing pain in some new ways: the pain in my bones is uncharted territory for me. I'm not going to really cite to Pollyanna right now (oh, yes I am: the first in a line of best-selling Glad books published in 1913 by Eleanor H. Porter.) When Pollyanna is struck by a car and loses the use of her legs, she realizes that the loss has made her so glad she ever had the gift of strong legs, which she can finally only appreciate in their loss. The pale, chalky saccharine of the message bears other resemblances to my daily regimen right now, but I digress.

At any rate, when the team came in yesterday, beaming, I found it hard to strike the right orientation to the news; I still am. Kyle shouted "yes!" with joy, which was a great clue, akin to when she yelled "Fuck!" when our doctor gave us the original diagnosis a couple weeks ago.

And I know I mustn't attend to guesstimates of time left on this planet. One doctor cheerfully reminded me earlier in the week, that any of us could be hit on a bus on the way home. A dear friend who has recently emerged (is that the language? Stat--get me a list of the right way to speak about these things aside from the dropped hush whisper of "cancer" from that 80s movie, St. Elmo's Fire) told me people with cancer really are snowflakes--each journey is different, his four years is another man's six.

But I still am struggling to find the frame, any frame to try to become slightly disoriented. Kyle said the new range of treatment options now open to me is an unmitigated good, which is clearly true, because in some kind of rough calculus of three months instead of three years, I won't wander around hysterically saying, well, that's the last time I'll ever eat at Wagamama (although I can say definitely I will never enter at Chuck E. Cheese's again--that's the 51 year old mother of six's grand gift to herself).

I think that better pain management is on the way along with actual treatment and I have small, delightful fantasies under construction: more writing, more dinners with friends at my house or out in the world, watching the twins learn to read, making a set of instructional videos for the kids (open in case of being left at the altar, getting fired, saying something outrageous in public that was really, really meant to be interior dialogue, knowing when chicken is cooked all the way through).

One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain. That's another sentence I've been floating around with a lot in the nighttime hours (Julia Kristeva). Depending on your local care and preferences, plus lots of circumstances that tumble right out of your attractively bound birth plan), birth itself, giving birth, can be painful. And then you have this child who immediately starts running from you, starting the long good-bye. Sometimes that child doesn't leave that hospital. Sometimes, around 15, that child chops away at her hair and skin and seems unable to recognize you as a fellow traveler (or at least not one who has been found guilty of treason). Sometimes that child grows up and goes to a fancy college, and gets a job with healthy bonuses, and moves across the country and lives in a suburb where all the streets are similarly named (Dublin Road, DublinMeade Crossing, Dublin Acres). It's all a long good-bye, it's all giving birth to loss which wasn't there before you created something to lose.

It's the middle of the night. I just wanted to thank you all for the many, many private notes and gestures and the many, many public layings on of hands and gifts of myrrh and sea salt and gold leaf (or, in our case, macaroni and cheese, and chocolate chip cookies and spanakopita and potato pancakes and kugel and brisket).

I feel this active knitting of love and support happening around my family--words and gestures and such bare and bold expressions of love--and I think that is where my struggle to accept the gift of time being offered to me, and to us, and the new ways of responding to and accepting pain (not defensively, which hurts more) and the real pressure I feel to have the love I make equal to the love I am taking right now--in huge, greedy gulps of air--is being worked out: knit a row, purl a row, drop a stitch and work back in the dropped stitch on the next pass through.

Thank you so very much.