Bitterness and Blessings

This week Cooper lost his hair. As I scraped it up by the handfuls off of his pillow, I couldn’t help but think that this is not what parenthood was supposed to be like. This isn’t what we signed up for. There is so much about this that makes me bitter. While I do think that bitterness just embodies my current state, it is my daily prayer that I will not remain bitter from this situation but will be compassionate and changed forever by what this situation has taught me. For the first time Cooper’s spirit has been broken. It is heart wrenching to see and know that there is nothing you can do to fix it, and it indeed will get worse. While I have tried very hard to not say “why me?” it isn’t fair and it is horrible to see all that he has lost. 

There are so many reasons as to why this is hard and often faith, perspective and brutal honesty is your best weapon to get you through. When you navigate a journey like this everyone is so positive. Do we need to be positive? Absolutely. If we didn’t seek out the positive in the situation to have something to cling to, we would most likely be rocking back and forth in the corner of an insane asylum somewhere. BUT sometimes the positivity is hard to process. At the end of the day, we as the parents aren’t some super hero with this innate ability to be strong and courageous. That being said, we have actually become puke catching ninjas, which is not something I aspired to be growing up. We are parents. Period. We are doing whatever we can to protect our kids. The only difference is that we have faced a situation where we can’t protect our child so we have no choice but to be “strong” and watch it unravel. So sometimes we have to live in the yuck, wallow in our pain, because that’s part of the process. Sometimes the advice and the positivity hurts. Because while everyone else tells you that it could be worse, you can’t help but think that it could be better. As cancer parents we KNOW it can be worse. We know that better than anyone. We get reminded of that every day because we SEE it. However, knowing that it could be worse, doesn’t make it easier to navigate, sometimes it just reminds us that the playing field could be a bit better too. 

We are also often reminded to focus on our blessings or to “be blessed” that we aren’t in someone else’s shoes who may have it worse. This is a tough one for me right now. This is not to say that I am not appreciative of the blessings that I have, and yes, it can always be worse. However, I refuse to believe that God “blesses us “ conditionally. I don’t believe that we are “blessed” that we are going home from the hospital after clinic, while someone else who is staying inpatient is less blessed than we are. I refuse to believe that there is a hierarchy of blessings bestowed upon us and that when we are  more “comfortable” we are more blessed. A very wise friend told me this week, “our blessings don’t change our difficulties.” No…they don’t. BUT your perspective can change how you navigate your struggle. There’s a big difference. That same friend also told me that “sometimes you need to lament. We need to acknowledge the hard and the painful and face it head on. But not everyone gets that, and not everyone is comfortable with that.” I don’t believe that God is here to make us comfortable. After all, as parents, is our primary job to make our children “comfortable”? No. Our job is to help our children through the learning experiences in their lives, and sometimes those experiences are hard and just plain awful. Isn’t that what God does? The meaning of life, isn’t for us to get through with no bumps and bruises along the way. With that, there would be no growth, no learning, no faith, but rather for us to have experiences that, help us grow, that change us forever. And  unfortunately, for some of those experiences, it may take decades for us to finally see the positive within the ruin. 

Through this, we have realized that there is a lot we have to work on. The attempts we have made to try to see this a “learning experience” just plain sucks. There’s no way around it. Like I said, sometimes you have to live in the yuck…work through your pain, and often it takes a good friend, the BEST kind of friend, who is willing to say to you, “I’m sorry, this sucks,” and nothing more. No advice, not what you should do, not “hey look at the bright side”. My best friend told me something like that years ago when she was battling something big, and I didn’t get it. Now I do, and I hate that maybe I didn’t do that enough for her. 

We have also learned that everyone has their zenith, which is the toughest thing each person has been through. So we have tried to learn not to discount people’s struggle just because it is different, better, or worse than our own. Each person’s “trauma” so to speak is different, thus why we react differently, why our perspectives are different. I remember wanting to scream at someone in the grocery store when this all started because they were yelling at their children telling them that they should have left their kids at home. I wanted to cry because I wanted mine there, even if he was laying on the floor throwing a tantrum over Lucky Charms. Everyone’s fighting something and whether it is big or small, the world needs a little bit of grace. GRACE. That person who just cut you off in their car, may be distracted because they just got the worst news of their life. The person in the grocery store trying to calm their child, may have a child with high functioning autism. The bottom line is everyone is fighting something, and what everyone deserves is a little kindness and and a whole lot of grace. 

 xoxo

The Truebloods