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“Mommy? Did your Mommy have loo-kia-meee-ah?”
My back was turned at the sink when my 6 year old daughter asked me this direct question with only 10 minutes left in our morning routine to get out the door. Instantly, I felt like a Mack truck had slammed into my gut. I braced myself with the counter and tried to turn to face her sweet face. She was chewing her frosted mini-wheats and her spoon still dangled in the air. I met her eyes and started to answer but the words did not come. Instead, my eyes welled and the tears fell.
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I had never cried before in front of my daughter.
I have never used the words, “breast cancer” or “leukemia” to describe my mother’s health battles so I was shocked by her question. To date, I had only shared that Mommy’s Mommy was now in heaven and that she had gotten very sick and that God needed her to do angels’ work. This explanation had seemed to suffice – until now… when the questions came at me, like a tsunami.
“Honey, where did you hear about leukemia?”
“We are doing Pennies for Patients at school. It’s for loo-kia-meee-ah.”
“Leukemia.”
“Yes. There’s a Kinderfriend that has leukemia and we raising money to help them.”
“That’s wonderful honey.”
“So did your Mommy have it? What is it?”
“Well… “
And here’s where I’d love to say I handled this parenting challenge beautifully and gave her the most age-appropriate explanation of what ‘cancer’ is and why some people get it and some people don’t. And how I comforted her fears about what this scary disease was and how, yes, even sometimes children get it.
But I didn’t .
Instead I blubbered my way through an extremely lame metaphor of how cancer cells were like bad Lego blocks in your body that stop doing their intended job. I’m pretty sure I confused her the minute I said Legos. Heck, I don’t even know what I was talking about… I said something about needing medicine that works really really hard to ‘poison the bad cells’ so they go away. To this she asked:
“Mommy why does the medicine make your hair fall out?” Clearly, she had more information than she was letting on.
A second Mack truck slammed into my heart. The tears came and the words got stuck in the back of my throat like a hard lump. I wasn’t ready for this.
“Mommy, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Oh jeez, please make it stop.
“No honey, I’m ok. I’m just sad.” *tears. gasp. sob*. ” It just makes me sad to think about when my Mommy was sick.”
Again, I made a dismal attempt at a mini-Biology and Chemistry lesson that was appropriate for a 1st grader. I told her the medicine or “chemotherapy” was supposed to target the bad cells but didn’t always know the difference between the bad Lego blocks and the good ones so sometimes it had to attack the cells that make your hair. She seemed satisfied with the answer and went back to eating her mini-wheats.
“But Mommy, why doesn’t the medicine always work?”
And then I was at a loss. It was a great question. Why can’t we fix this? Why can’t we have a cure for cancer?
“I don’t know honey.”
Luckily my husband was still at home and when I closed the bathroom door sobbing, he was able to run interference. I told him about the brief conversation over mini-wheats and how worried I was that I’d freaked our daughter out by crying in front of her. Through my tears, I tried to tell him how worried I was that she would think she made me sad by asking about my Mom, which is the last thing on earth I’d want her to feel and how I’d done a horrendous job explaining what cancer was. So he called her in and between the 3 of us sitting on the toilet seat and the edge of the tub we had one of the most meaningful family chats to date. With his help, we reassured her of why Mommy was really crying and how it was ok for me to cry and how it was ok for her to ask questions. Together we tried to explain ‘cancer’ and what it was. We didn’t dwell on it but made sure she was ok with it all.
Thank goodness he had been home.
For the rest of the day, all I could think of was how badly I wished I would never have to explain ‘cancer’ to my kids. But it was too late, the reality of this sometimes unfair world was here and my kids were now privy to this vocabulary: cancer, leukemia. It didn’t seem fair.
That following Saturday, Anna and Jack organized a lemonade stand to help fill her box for Pennies for Patients and Alex sat with them on the curb. I smiled with pride as I watched my kids continue to help find a cure for cancer. I hope that one day, in their lifetime, they will be able to tell their kids: “Cancer WAS this horrible disease that took your great-grandmother, but we helped cure it.”
Wouldn’t that be great?
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Pennies for Patients
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