Dance with the Reaper

Last weekend was my kids’ dance recital. I was excited because it was Georgia’s fifth year dancing at the Janie Christy School of Dance in Dallas, and she got a special mention in the program.

I was also excited because, despite it being the fifth recital, it was the first one I got to appreciate.

The first year, I had a raging case of undiagnosed cancer which, of everything I have endured, is far and away the worst of it.

The second year I had just lost my hair from chemotherapy, and I had had chemotherapy the week before the recital. I could barely walk.

The third year we missed entirely because I was in Houston having surgery.

Last year, I had just had surgery. I went to the recital, but I had surgical drains and I was on mega painkillers so I barely remember it.

This year, I got to go, and I got to appreciate it, and as I watched the recital, I came to appreciate exactly what the Miss Janie and her dance class has meant to my family over the last five years.

We’ve been to the gates of death and back again over the past five years, in our family, and throughout it all, my kids have had the opportunity to dance with Miss Janie every week, week after week. It’s part of their lives. It’s part of their routine, and the realization of what it has meant to them is just now beginning to dawn on me.

Miss Janie doesn’t just teach dance. She teaches children, and used dance to do it.

My children have learned, the hard way, that 90% of life is just showing up, and Miss Janie has let them learn that hard lesson in the easiest possible way.

She’s taught them, by example, what it means to be a Christian. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her mention her faith, but it shines.

Miss Janie, Miss Katie, and Miss Gina, have taught my children that when something is hard to learn, you keep trying. They’ve taught them that when you make an effort, and don’t give up, you can learn things that seem impossible the first time you try.

Miss Janie has taught my children that dancers come in all shapes and all sizes. I love that our dance studio lets fat girls dance in starring roles. I love that my kids get to see that fat girls can dance.

She has taught them to sit still and listen.

She has taught them to be welcoming and compassionate toward people with Down’s Syndrome, and she has taught them that kids with Down’s Syndrome belong on the same stage as all children.

She has taught them to hold themselves to a high standard.

When I look at what works for our family about Dallas, the Janie Christy School of Dance is at the top of the list. I’m so lucky I found my way there, five years ago.

I was initiated into a secret society Wednesday morning. Nothing to do with cancer. Just, as I say, a thing. I’m excited about it. It looks like fun, and I’ve never done anything like it before. But it got me thinking.

Some secrets are good, and some are bad, but most are just secrets.

I’m still fascinated by this week’s NY Times article on the anonymity of Alcoholics Anonymous; I’ve always wanted to go to an AA meeting to see what it’s like, but of course  I haven’t since that particular demon isn’t part of my own personal legion. I once had the following exchange with a good friend, someone whom I can’t even think of outside the context of his addiction and recovery:

Me: “I’m very lucky that alcoholism was never a problem for me. I think I’m too lazy.”

Friend: “Yeah, I can see that. You’d say, “Naw, I don’t wanna get wasted. Too much effort. I’ll just have a glass of wine, or tea.'”

He’s right. I seldom get trashed, and when I do, it’s by mistake.

Besides, I have much more creative weapons of self-destruction in my arsenal, for example, cancer, which comes with the added bonus of removing the burden of agency from my shoulders. Hey, I can kill myself without even trying! It’s a built-in feature of this mortal coil I wear. And unlike alcoholism or depression, cancer comes without the burden of shame.

It wasn’t always like that, and I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think of Betty Ford and thank her for bringing my disease out of the closet of taboo. I don’t ever wear the hats nor t-shirts that say, “Cancer Survivor,” but plenty of people do, and they find strength and comfort and pride in that declaration.

No one wears shirts that say “Depression Survivor,” or “Addiction Survivor,” or “Incest Survivor.”

Cancer is no different except that it’s okay to talk about it, and that does make it easier for me, for which I am thankful.  I don’t have to feel ashamed.

Sometimes, though, I wish no one knew. I wish when people spoke with me, hung out with me, thought of me, looked at me, they didn’t do it through the lens of compassion for what I’ve been through. It’s easy to imbue people who have been through an experience that falls under the category of “worst case scenario” with a romanticized notion of what it takes to survive. People think I’m brave, or wise, or compassionate. I’m not. I’m just lucky.

I can also see why people used to recluse themselves when they had cancer. Part of it is surely is the disgustingness of it all, but a greater part, for me, is that it just takes sooooo looooong to recover, and it’s hard cope with living in the world, but with diminished capacity, and have people constantly expecting me to do more than I can, not realizing the effort it takes me to just do as much as I’m doing.

Everyone is frustrated with me when I’m not at my best. I’m frustrated with myself when I’m not at my best. People think, “Oh, she should be over it by now,” but I’m not, and I had major surgery six weeks ago and I’m doing the best I can, and over and over and over again in so many arenas it’s just not good enough and maybe if people didn’t know I had had cancer, and they didn’t so desperately want me to be “all better” then the pressure I would be under to be better, and do better, would be less because right now, it’s killing me.

Evidently it’s Monty Python Appreciation Day.

“They” say that it takes one month for each hour you were under to recover from general anesthetic.

I believe it.

I was under for four hours this time, and I still feel like I’m moving through life in a fog, that somehow the rpm on the record player of my day is aaa liiitlllle toooo sloooowww.  I’ve been here before. I know the drill.

I can’t write as well as I want to.

I know I’m not as witty nor as shrewd as I want to be.

My clothes are probably funny looking, and at 42 I can’t blame it on my mother.

I’m glad summer is right around the corner. I’m planning on all kinds of fun hijinx, but the kind that takes less, I don’t know, je ne sais quoi.

Ten years ago, in a job interview, someone asked me what my worse qualities were. I gave two answers. I said that I was an obsessive perfectionist, especially with details, and always with a good amount of pad-time before a deadline to fix the things that I knew would go wrong, and it made me hard to work with. I said that I don’t suffer fools. Not gladly. Not at all.

Five years before that, a roommate and friend once looked at me and said, “Beth, I don’t think patience is one of your strong points.”

Then she said, “In fact, with you, I don’t think it’s a point.”

I’ve changed. I’ve changed on all three points. My weaknesses have become my strengths. I feel like a mountain with seabed fossils on the craggy crests.

I don’t know if it’s maturity, or cancer, or a combination, but I have to learn who I am all over again.

Again.

I don’t think I can ever find a video to top this, so I fear it may be the last of the horrible Friday parody blog posts.

Worst. Taste. Ever.

Happy Cinco de Mayo.

It’s a celebration of margaritas and all things Tex-Mex, but it also the celebration of indigenous rule over Colonialism, a thumb in the eye to the French dictators, and a successful collaboration between the United States and our friends and neighbors to the South.

That’s worth raising a glass for.

We have this family joke.

It goes like this, “Mom is in Slytherin.”

It’s true.

Georgia has already self-identified as Ravenclaw, Graham as Gryffindor.

Chris, my husband who is perfect (it’s his flaw) is a Hufflepuff and, I might add, is as good-looking as Cedric Diggory.

That leaves me.

Yeah, that’s right. I don’t even try to deny it. Slytherins aren’t all bad, or else they’d have been driven out ages ago. Horace Slughorn could be exactly played by my older brother, my brother who will now stop speaking to me for a while, or else he will laugh hysterically and agree, especially the part about disguising himself as an armchair.

I’m trying to get my head around how I feel about being in the bad guy house. I have another friend whom I’d put in Slytherin with me — one of my favorite people, and amazingly successful. She, too, is married to a Hufflepuff.

I don’t scheme all the time. In fact, I don’t scheme most of the time. I scheme much less than people think I do. Most of the time, things work out my way even without any scheming. Or any deliberate scheming. I think it’s built into my nature. That, and ambition, which is a good servant but a bad master, and a strong point with me, so I readily admit that the sorting hat would stick me in Slytherin.

What’s with the sorting, anyway?

Chris says this: He says that there are two kinds of people, people who divide people into groups, and people who don’t. He also says there are three kinds of people in the world: people who can count and people who can’t. Actuary humor is a staple of my marriage.

We’re inclined to sort things into four anyway, at least in Western thought: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile. North, South, East, and West. If you look at the world in a Cartesian graph, you get four right angles. Reality divides into four — if you see the world through Western math.

In Chinese philosophy there are five elements: earth, water, metal, wood, and water, and they nourish and support each other; very different from the oppositional forces of the Hippocratic system. Perhaps at the Chinese school of Magic, somewhere in the Harry Potter universe, there are five houses, because four would be unlucky.

We sort things, and people, and we categorize them and taxonomize them because it makes it easier for us to think about them, because the whole mess of reality, of nature, of people, is too complex and just too many to think about without some system.

It’s been a rough one for my kids to get their heads around. They admit I’m a Slytherin, and we laugh about it, especially when I come up with a super-transparently manipulative scheme to get them to behave. But it works, and they DO behave, and in doing so, I teach them not only good behavior, but how to motivate other people to do what you want them to. They know Slytherin is chock full of bad guys, and yet I am patently not a bad guy. They are learning to see gray areas, at ages six and eight.

The family joke is teaching them to look beyond categories.

I’ll go with it.

I got a phone call the other day from my mother-in-law.

I could tell she had something to say. I could tell because I’ve recognized the exact same tone of voice in my daughter, whom I suspect of being a clone of her grandmother. I could have been nice and listened, but I was too clueless, so I filled her in on all the details of our lives: Chris works all the time, Georgia reads all the time, Graham plays with Legos all the time.

I finally gave her a chance to speak. “I cut my hair,” she told me.

“Oh!”

She has long snow-white hair, thick, and just the right amount of wavy. Chris’s mom has what they call “good hair,” and I’m thrilled that my daughter has it too.

“How short?”

“Short. I thought i would grow it long and put it up sometimes, but I hate messing with it.”

“Well, I’m sure it looks good,” I said sincerely. My mother-in-law is beautiful, and not vain, unlike me, who is both vainer and less good looking than she is.

“I gave it to Locks of Love,” she burst out.

Wow.

Someone, somewhere, is going to wear my mother-in-law’s beautiful hair.

A lot of people have done a lot of wonderful things in my honor to help alleviate the misery that is cancer. One friend walked the Susan Komen three day specifically for me. Another friend dedicates her yoga practice to me. At least three friends donated to Susan Komen directly in my name.

No one that I know of gave away their hair until now, and all of a sudden, the grief of having lost my hair, of having been bald for a year, of having endured the awkward stage of growing it back out for another two years is healed.

The smallest things make a difference.

Thank you, Carol.

May the Fourth be with you. Say it out loud.

My six-year-old son loves Star Wars. He has loved it since he was two and pronounced it Thtar Warthz, and I wish I had captured it on video, him saying, “Mommy, I yub Thtar Warthz.” But ask him who loves Star Wars motht in our family and the truth cometh out: “Mommy yubth Thtar Warthz motht in our family.”

Happy Star Wars Day.