Eloi is two months old tomorrow. I continue to be amazed by
how much he sleeps and how calm he is. Which is not to say he doesn’t have his
moments, or that handling two kids has magically become easy (I'm sure I will write soon more about how it is NOT easy). But it certainly
helps. He is now smiling intentionally from time to time, and it’s such a
delight. He has big eyes and cowlicks that meet in the middle and make his
downy blonde hair stand up in a mohawk. I can lay him down in the crib and
he’ll hang out for a while then…just fall asleep. This morning he woke up long
before I was ready to get up, so I kept sleeping and he just laid there and
gurgled for an hour. This kid!
The boys and I have been in Barcelona (well, there and
between my in-laws’ house) for a little over two weeks now. The Mister flew
down with us, stayed for the weekend, and then flew back to Belgium. The
purpose of this temporary separation is for him to get a lot of work done on
his dissertation, while I hang out here and have more of a summer. Couldn’t do
it without my parents-in-law, who have been taking care of Gabriel pretty
exclusively, leaving me free to handle the baby. Gabriel, of course, is
delighted, and is running around king of the castle, his Catalan developing by
leaps and bounds.
But—and I don’t know how to transition to this easily—the
main thing that has been occupying my thoughts and energies these days is sad,
scary news.
My mom has lung cancer.
Even typing that sentence makes me tremble a bit, because I
really don’t want it to be true, and because it sounds so horrible. Something
that happens to other people.
She had been sick with chest colds/pneumonia too many times
over the last months (including while she was in Belgium with us), with a
lingering cough, and the doctors suggested a scan. And the scan showed a mass
in/on her lung, and a series of biopsies and further scans confirmed that it is
small cell lung cancer, which is very bad, and a kind of cancer usually found
in smokers. Only 2% of the people who have it are nonsmokers like her.
This means that treatment possibilities are good, however, and
she’s in overall good health, and there is no metastasis. But my overwhelming
sadness when we got the definitive news had to do with treatment: I don’t want
her to have to go through the pain, the exhaustion, the utter wretchedness of
cancer treatments in their various forms. I couldn’t, can’t, even let myself
think the worst thought, an outcome that doesn’t end in a cure, the one that to
think of even for a second makes my stomach lurch in horror and my eyes well
with tears.
We will be traveling to the US to help in September, when
I’m more needed (mom has actually been feeling really good since she got over
the bout of pneumonia), but it’s hard not to be there right now. My siblings
immediately all came together to help and just to be together, and I wanted to
be with them. It’s hard to rely on the normally sufficient means of
communication like email and skype and phone calls for the information that we
need and the reassurance and togetherness we all crave.
I’m not sure how much I’ll write about it here, because it
feels selfish to write about how I’m feeling sad or down or dealing with it
when SHE’s the one who has to deal with the Big Thing. I also have been
avoiding writing about this because saying makes it feel more true. But then
again, writing is how I process, so maybe it’s a good idea to write about it.
