I don't like "meant to be"s...

...but I can't help feeling like I was meant to be where I was on Saturday evening. I went to a natural hair meetup cohosted by my girl @HGKWW and saw a young-ish Black woman rocking a low fade. I made a note of her and how she pulled the style off with elegance--since my mom called me crying after she cut all her hair off after it began falling out in clumps, I've been making a mental note of bald/near bald Black women that I see out and about, so I can say with honesty that that look is in right now when I talk with her about it.

About an hour later, before a giveaway, this woman starts speaking and handing out flyers. Her name is Andrene Taylor. She is thirty three years old and has beaten lymphoma three times already. She's currently preparing for a triathlon and serving as the President of an amazing Foundation called ZuriWorks, whose purpose is to raise cancer awareness in Black female communities. And even more, she is hosting an event this coming weekend called It'll Grow Back! Loving your Hair with Natural Care, which along with dealing out knowledge and tips for naturals generally, will feature discussion about the pros and cons of wearing wigs post-chemo, when hair starts growing back, how the hair that grows back differs from the hair you had before, and how hair and healing are connected mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. 

Here, in a place hundreds of miles from home, at an event co-hosted by a friend I made at a school I had a 9% chance of getting into, which I learned about via a website that I stumbled upon when lamenting the fact that I didn't know how to make friends in the real world, I found just what my mother needs. My eyes started welling up just as I was listening to her talk, and I waited patiently while she had another conversation later in the evening just so that I could speak with her, shake her hand, and tell her that she is an inspiration. 

I want so badly for my mom to come down to go to the event on Sunday, but she has decided against it because it's a lot of travelling for her to do by herself. My Nana offered to drive her, but she's already driving her to Philly for her appointment with her oncologist on Friday and to Dover and back twice the following Thursday to move my sister in to school, so she didn't want to put that on her too. I understand all of that, but I'm still disappointed. This would be so good for her. I might go anyway just so I can pass on the knowledge. 

Though I am never anything but the picture of optimism to my mother, I feel safe enough here to say that meeting someone who has been through this again and again and is THRIVING did wonders for me. I want her to know that her very existence is helping. I want to help her help other people. I very nearly want to *thank* someone for the peculiar series of events that led to us meeting on Saturday, because few other introductions have every felt so wholly right. 

My mother, who recently shaved her head after one too many bouts of crying while throwing out the strands and strands of her post-chemotherapy hair that came out in the comb every day, to me on the phone yesterday:

I have to admit, My, I felt like you. It was so nice to go out in the rain and not have to worry about my hair. 

She also recently sported her nearly bald head in a Wawa, instead of wearing her bandana or a wig. She said people were staring at her, and it was hard, but I could barely hear that over the sound of my swelling pride.

Our first Mother's Day with cancer.

I'm glad that this post isn't called "Mother's Day from Room 302B" or something to that effect. My mother has been home from the hospital since Thursday, after going in for a planned stay on April 23rd.

Still, I was dreading calling her yesterday morning. As much as I miss(ed) her and want(ed) to talk to her, I knew that hearing her voice would hurt as much as it helped. Her voice...isn't hers. My mother's voice is strong and sassy. This is one of those times when Spanish makes more sense to me than English, because for 22 years of my life I've thought of the "is" in that sentence as a permanent kind of is, a this is how it always has been and this is how it always will be kind of is. A "ser" kind of is. Cancer taught me that "estar" can sneak up on you. La voz de mi mama estaba fuerte. Now, her voice is barely above a whisper. It is characterized only by its hoarseness. I feel bad asking her to repeat herself, because I know that the shortest of conversations is draining to her. It's draining to me too, because I don't know who this frail person on the other end of the phone is. Mi mama es una mujer de fuerza. 

But the woman on the other end of the phone, who can barely muster the strength to thank me and ask about my exams, is my mother. I guess doing the impossible for 22 years can catch up to you. She's not invincible. (She's too young to not be invincible.) Forty-two and fragile just isn't fair.

On your first Mother's Day with cancer, tears spill out of your eyes after approximately two minutes of hearing your mother labor to speak with you, and you try with all of your might to keep her from hearing them. You use every bit of strength you have to keep your voice steady. When that strength begins to falter, you quickly tell her that she should get some rest and you'll talk to her soon. The heaving sobs come as soon as you push "End". You feel like a woman of despicable priorities for not being there, despite the impending deadlines, despite her telling you not to worry. You are ashamed of yourself. You are six years old and having a nightmare again, only this time it doesn't go away when you wake up. Before you can stop yourself, you wonder how many more Mother's Days you'll get to wish her. And the rest of the day feels impossible as you move your sobs from the bed to the shower. On your first Mother's Day with cancer, you wish you were sick one. You feel like being your mother took everything out of her. You wonder if anything will ever feel right again. 

Save the titties. Get checked regularly. (And fuck Susan G. Komen)

This reminds me that I promised myself I would make a doctor's appointment over break. For something unrelated--what's the recommended age to start getting mammograms (or, I read somewhere that they're doing ultrasounds on breasts now)--but this is reminding me not to keep putting off health-related things, even if they're going to be awkward and uncomfortable.

This is also why the Susan G. Komen for the Cure can go to a Hell I don't believe in for withdrawing funding from Planned Parenthood, which lots of women (and especially lots of women of color, who are more likely to be uninsured) relied on as a step towards breast health as part of their total health. 

A conversation I just couldn't have

I saw S, one of my oldest friends, for the first time since early September last night. We had the obviously necessary catch-up conversation about how school's going, how surprisingly unweird relations with my ex are, and what kinds of jobs I'm applying to and where on my end, and how moving out of his mom's house is going and whether he likes his new job on his end, and Thanksgiving plans and fabulously boring love lives on both of our ends. It was touching to listen to him protest to me applying to jobs in faraway places like Chicago and California, and when we hopped in the car for a late night Wawa run, I realized that there was one other thing that has developed in my life of late that he should know.  

Sitting next to him in the semidarkness of the car, I mulled over how to bring it up. I opened my mouth and closed it again without saying anything. You shouldn't deliver bad news while someone is driving. You also shouldn't do it once they're back in your dining room enjoying a turkey bowl and donuts. You shouldn't do it while you're exploring etsy together, and you shouldn't do it after he yawns and says he should be getting home. Life is full of inopportune moments for this conversation. Is there a right time? How do you say, best friend from childhood, who once made my mother a macaroni necklace for Kwanzaa and whom she often refers to as her favorite son (my little brother's existence notwithstanding), my mom has cancer?

Compounding all of this is the fact that I'm not entirely sure I need to tell him. Does he have to know? (Of course, when something happens with him, I tell my mom and she is genuinely concerned. I know that he would care.) I just...this isn't a topic for casual conversation. I'm not at a point where I can discuss my parents' illnesses in the context of catching up with someone. I wish he read this and just knew; that's how everyone who knows but E, K, and my dad found out. I feel like a hypocrite having shared this with people all over the internet, but some things feel too close to home to be shared with people I distinctly feel as though I'm losing touch with. I don't want this to become one of our regular topics of conversation. I want to stick to safe topics. I want our most complicated things to revolve around our love lives or how this process of trying to grow up is going.

I don't think I'm going to tell him, unless we somehow start talking about my mom and some sort of seamless segue seems possible (which seems highly unlikely). And maybe that signifies all sorts of terrible things about how I'm letting my friends from childhood/adolescence go in favor of my Princeton friends, many of whom I'll probably let go over time in favor of the friends I form in later places and times. Maybe there's a level of emotion that I can't bridge with them anymore; maybe we're just not close enough for them to need to know everything about my life anymore. 

And I don't really think I need to feel bad about this. It seems...like a natural consequence of personal growth and relocation. This post may seem like a counterargument, again, but...I feel like it's different talking about the details of my life with people who haven't known me and my family since elementary school. And if that's unfair...life's tough. Get a helmet. (Boy Meets World ftw.)

The most ominous words your mother can say...

...change as we get older. When we are children, "No" is the most ominous word that can come out of your mother's mouth. As we get slightly older, "We'll see," takes on that connotation (because it means your-ass-knows-the-answer-is-no-and-now-I'm-annoyed-that-you-put-me-in-this-situation-where-I-can't-tell-you-no-publicly-because-of-the-company-we're-in). Then comes "I need you to...", which is quickly followed by "How much money do you have?" 

I thought I was going to stay somewhat begrudgingly in that last stage for a good long while. I was wrong. All of a sudden, I have entered the worst of stages, that I wasn't expecting to hit for years and years, given the fact that my mother is 10 days shy of her 42nd birthday. If The Most Ominous Words Your Mother Can Say was a video game, this would be the final boss battle.


To the best of my memory, today was only the third time I have ever seen my mother cry outside of the context of a sad movie. It is the second time I can remember her voice cracking while she was speaking to me because of the overwhelming emotion. It is the only time I can remember her admitting she is afraid. It is the only time since I was small enough to need to hold someone's hand when crossing the street that she has allowed me to touch her and hold on. 

This conversation began with her asking me to get in the car. I could tell something was up by the tone of her voice, so as I was opening the car door, I started asking what was wrong. When she says the next thing she says, you think the most ominous words your mother can say are, "I'm sick." Then she gets more specific, and you learn you are wrong again.

The not talking may drive me crazy, but she didn't need to ask me to not speak of this for me to know I can't. I can't tell my best friends. I can't even tell my dad. She has asked me not to spend more time at home than I was planning to. She has asked me not to call her everyday or do anything out of the ordinary. She considered not even telling me because she didn't want to taint my senior year, and has asked me to party tonight and carve pumpkins tomorrow and live my life without being constantly overwhelmed by fear and worry. This is a tall order. I am more afraid than I have ever been of anything in the entirety of my life.


After she left, she texted me with one simple word. Smile.


And so I'm going to try to, because my mother told me to. I'm going to try to smile as much as when I first started dating my ex and everyone told me how happy I looked. I'm going to test the black-don't-crack theory with the potential for laugh lines I'm going to create. People are going to think I'm on some shit when thesis gets real and I'm just beaming away.

But don't hold your breath waiting for me to say I'm surviving without any tears.

Something Incredible Happened Saturday Night...

Nearly 8 years ago, my mother and stepfather got divorced. [Insert chorus of HALLELUJAHS! here] Lots of wonderful things resulted from this, along with something terrible. As soon as the divorce was final, my stepbrother's mother decided that he was no longer to have any contact with his "other family". She wouldn't let him talk when we called, and when we kept calling, she changed their phone number. My brother, the one who is the same age as me, with whom I bathed and slept and played and grew and loved during all the earliest years of my life, was suddenly gone forevermore. 


I've missed him to varying degrees throughout the rest of my life, more and more since Greg reminded me what family is supposed to feel like. I don't really give a shit that we're not technically related anymore; that is my brother and I won't really tolerate anyone saying anything different. When he turned 18, my mom and I really started trying to get back in touch with him, because his mom couldn't stop us anymore. First we called his father, but [don't get me started on] that man hadn't spoken to his firstborn son in years and was disturbingly disinterested in our desire for reconnection. Fuck him. So then I started periodically searching Facebook in an attempt to find him, but he has both and very common first name and a very common last name, and I didn't know where he lived or where he was going to school or anything that could help me narrow the search. I have two friends at school who live in the area he lived in when were growing up, and I asked them if they knew someone by his name, and one of them did! But it wasn't him. 


To make a long story short, we were very discouraged. Short of hiring a private detective, there seemed to be no way to put our little family back together, and that fact was generally a small piece of sadness inside me all the time. (I am so sick and tired of people ruining MY family with THEIR issues. You no longer wanting to call someone "boyfriend," "husband," or even "son," does NOT automatically entail that I no longer want to call him "mine" in some form. There are some bonds I can never imagine breaking, no matter how hard they are strained.)


I can't really even express in words, then, how I felt when I checked my phone after watching a movie and saw that I'd missed a bunch of texts, two of which were as follows: One from my little sister saying B**** had friended her on Facebook, and one from Facebook saying those impossible little words: B**** J****** has requested to add you as a friend on Facebook. I was just talking the other day about how fragile life is, how it can just turn upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye. Sometimes upside down is a wonderful wonderful way to be. Life has this funny way of scaring and blessing you at the same time. My dad is so sick, just laying in bed because sitting down hurts, waiting for a call that he can come back to the hospital, and I am so worried about him. But my long-lost brother just walked back into my life and has missed me as much as I have missed him. He wants to see me as soon as possible and I just want to hold him for hours. I just want to look at him so I remember his face again. I have his number and I can't wait to hear his voice.

Confession: Everything I ever say about family and how mine isn't that big a deal to me is total and complete BULLSHIT. I think I just tell myself that to avoid remembering how much it hurts to have lost such important parts of it. But I don't have a word for how deliriously ecstatic Facebook-chatting with my brother the night before last made me feel, or for how terrified I am about my dad's health right now. My friends are my family, but my family is my family too, and my heart is feeling so much at one time right now. Daddy, I love you. BJ, I love you too. There are some bonds that can never be broken.

This post is not meant to be a Debbie Downer...

 

I usually have something witty and cute to say about life in general, or my life specifically, like how they say change is the only constant in life, but today I want to take a moment to recognize that that volatility makes life really really fragile. Not only in the oft-talked-about highs-and-lows/rollercoastery ways, but just in the ideas that it can change irrevocably in the blink of an eye, and it can be over just as fast.

"When a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations, to try to impose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless." -- Barack Obama

 National tragedy this week in Arizona: Six regular people living their regular lives decided to go out and participate in democracy--crazy idea--and it cost them their lives, some of which were long and full, but others of which were truly just beginning. 14 more people were injured, with various degrees of severity; their lives have been changed forevermore.

Princeton tragedy: We lost a Tiger this week. A freshman girl from Virginia, who lived in Forbes and played on the softball team. Two of my friends knew her well, and I can't begin to imagine what they're going through because I have never lost a good friend. Her death was ruled "natural causes"; she had evidently been having medically unexplained seizures since May, but had decided to come to Princeton instead of deferring a year to try to figure out what was wrong. I've heard a lot of people commenting that they didn't understand why she would do this, but reading the articles on the homepage about how her friends are mourning her, she wanted to sleep in her uniform, and even her parents called us Tigers her family, it makes sense to me. This place has given me the best years of my entire life thus far, years I sometimes doubt will ever be matched, and from what I can gather, it gave her the best 5 months of hers. And that makes me glad. I just...she was (relatively) fine at dinner the night before, and they found her dead in the morning. Just like that.

Something that has the potential to become a personal tragedy: Okay, I'm being melodramatic. But I'm worried. So I've been pretty quiet about this because I don't know what to think, but things have escalated to the point that it must be shared: my father has been in and out of the hospital for the past week-and-a-half or so. This may be more information than you need to know, but he woke up last Thursday morning with a full bladder and couldn't go. The pressure just kept increasing and increasing so he went to the hospital and had to get a catheter put in. That was in for a week--and he missed work for a week--and when they took it out this Wednesday, he still couldn't go. Now they're saying he has to have surgery next week, and they're going to run tests on samples from his prostate, which means prostate cancer is a feasible explanation for what's going on right now. How do you go to bed one night feeling relatively alright (my dad has high blood pressure and diabetes) and wake up the next morning showing potential signs of having CANCER?! He gets regular checkups and everything! My mom says I'm worried about nothing right now, but I can't help it; I'm freaking the fuck out. 

Too much has happened this week. The world is a crazy place, and our time in it could very well be shorter than any of us imagine. So LIVE your life, okay? Drake has some new song out with Nicki Minaj (said in a disgusted tone, but the reason behind it is another story for another time) in which he says, Every one dies but not everybody lives, and he's entirely right about that. I'm NOT going to say to live each day like it's your last, because let's be real: you'd probably end up in jail or in the hospital or do something to directly cause it to be your last.

I will say this though: I was doing this self-affirmation exercise for a while last year but I stopped: at the end of the night before I went to sleep I would think about one positive thing that happened that day, one thing that made that day worthwhile. It sometimes meant actively taking steps to make something worthy of this title happen each day, and that's something I want to start doing again. It's something EVERYONE should do, because whether we like to think about this or not, your whole world could turn upside down, inside out, or just plain dark overnight.