What day is it? How many bottles of wine have I actually consumed since those gray-haired doctors told me my 33 year old daughter has a chronic Leukemia? A Leukemia for which there is no cure but a bone marrow transplant. Let’s see (counting fingers on one hand) . . . it was April when we returned from the Mayo clinic. Yes, it was April – we flew home the day of my birthday. It was not a celebration – yet somehow, my G (and her best friend, C) kept me in stitches the entire plane ride home. I have always said my daughter has a young, exuberant spirit. I am an old spirit. I rarely laugh.
I had cervical cancer when I was 21 years old. Almost prevented her (my gorgeous, beautiful daughter) from every making her entrance into this world. I fought for her. Yes I did. I fought hard. It was 1977 and I had to find a doctor who was willing to treat the cancer and not automatically yank out my uterus, as they were want to do in those days. I wanted children. I desperately wanted G. Before she was born, I called her my butterfly. Here is where teal and orange blend together. Teal for cervical cancer; orange for Leukemia.
I am now an orange mom. I hate the color orange . . . but I am learning to embrace it.
Like Ginsberg, I am nearly destroyed by madness, and I Howl deeply, privately, over my daughter’s cancer diagnosis. Yet here I am, in the public domain. What in the world has come over me?
Most of the time, I only hear my own echo. Sometimes, I hear the slight whisper of that Greater Being. Sometimes, I actually do feel the presence of the He/She God. But then, those cavernous, cave-dark moments return, and I scrape my knuckles against gravely walls as I blindly try to find my way.
I like to think of God as He/She. My best friend CT, who died this year from brain cancer, thought of God in this way. I like awakening the female in God. It makes Her so much more approachable. A mother’s loving touch. I am a mother, too.
Why in the world am I blogging? There is no audience to hear my pain. But there is the He/She God. Perhaps She receives these bits and bites.
I am living out loud. And I am appalled at myself. Yet, I can't seem to stop what I am doing here in this empty land of cyberspace. A Howl, I suppose.
