This won’t be the last one, but it’s the first one.
When I was sick, I played Warcraft a lot.
I played a warrior. I chose that class for two reasons. First, because Chris and his best friend from high school Bryan wanted to play human characters and if I played a druid, my first choice, I’d have to start out in another zone. My choices were limited to human classes: paladin, priest, warlock, mage, and warrior. I rolled a warrior because, I thought, “How hard can it be? You whack stuff with a sword.”
How was I to know? For the 99% of people reading this post who don’t play Warcraft, playing a warrior is, or was at that time, hard. Fun, but tricky.
I slowly slipped into obsession. At first, it was because I was dying, and Warcraft offered me that middle ground between what I wanted to do, slipping out into the woods and curling up for the long sleep, and what I had to do: laundry, errands, dinner. Later, when I knew what was wrong, Warcraft gave me an escape, where I could go and not think about cancer, about what I was going through, about the slim chance I would survive, about the greater chance that it would all have been for naught. I had a magic sword, and I stood toe-to-toe with monsters and dragons and, with the help of my friends, killed them.
The great thing about my character, Evita, a warrior, was that I was unkillable. It was my character, the tank, who faced the monster, the Boss in game parlance, and took his beating, and did not die.
That’s what I thought about during everything. “Get your chemo fighters ready,” they told me. “You can beat this thing, but you need your imagination!”
I had more than an imagination. I had a magic sword and shield, and I used them. I used them when I felt the cancer creeping through my body, and I used them when I felt the chemotherapy chasing it into submission, and scorching the earth when it fled. It wasn’t the warmth of Taxol, of FEC, I felt coursing through my veins. It was the healing spells of my friends Kianamoon and Corinn, and most especially Aericora who kept me alive during the hours upon hours of play, when I was too sick, too tired, too miserable to so much as speak to my family or friends, but I could play Warcraft.
Later, after I’d been declared “cancer-free,” the warrior stopped being fun. I’m sure there were many factors, not the least of which was that the toll of my treatment, the surgery, the chemotherapy, and the radiation, slowed my reaction time, and I was not as good at playing as I had been. More, so, I felt that it was no longer time to face down the demons. It was time to heal, in life, and therefore in game.
I finished leveling my second character, Camelia, a druid, and healed. The first thing I learned is that you can’t heal if you are dead, so I learned first and foremost to heal myself, and for the two years of recovery it took for me to get over cancer, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I kept the healing spells going. My imaginary magic fiery sword and shield of survival had been replaced with the sparkly green glow of health. Even now, I am surprised every time I look in the mirror, that I can’t see it.
Beyond the obvious metaphor, however, what I really gained from Warcraft was a community.
I do have a strong cancer support group, full of typical breast cancer survivors, lovely post-menopausal women, grandmother-types. They’re great, and if you need grandmothering, as I do, there is not a better place to be. I tried attending a group of young cancer survivors, but they were all about activism and rallying around the cause, and, while it’s a great cause, and one that I have surely benefitted from, it’s never going to be my cause.
But attending support groups takes time, and I found I would rather just stay home and play Warcraft. The truth is, people do not play Warcraft all the time unless their real lives suck beyond the telling.
For the better part of four years, the World of Warcraft has been where I fit in. We don’t talk much about our problems, but we all have them, and that common bond brings us together as surely as standing together to face down a fire breathing dragon. Addiction? Depression? Obesity? Illness? It doesn’t matter. I’ve had the opportunity to become friends — really, truly friends — with people I would never have been able to get to know in my real life, where almost everyone I know not only went to college, but went to an elite private college and graduate school.
My real life friends. You are awesome, you really are, and I love you, but you could not understand what I was going through. I was going to die and leave my children with nothing but the memory of me dying from cancer and ignoring them to play Warcraft all the time. I know you wanted to be there for me, but you just couldn’t. It was beyond your capacity.
The people who were there for me were the guys, so many of them, living in their mom or dad’s basement, unemployed, too depressed and too uneducated to get a job. The dish washers. The artists and actors who the world sees as waiters. The students, about to fail out of college, about to drop out because their parents need them to work and pay the mortgage. The addict, homeless, playing Warcraft on a laptop in his car off of a jacked wireless connection. The teenage kids, so many of them, fat, bad at sports, acne-riddled, too smart to fit in, some of them terrified to tell their parents they’re gay, but they tell me, because I’m safe, and all I can say is “OMG don’t tell creepy strangers on the internet stuff like that” but what I want to say is that it’s okay, and I do say it. The single mom working as a stripper to pay her kid’s private school tuition. The other cancer patient, the one who died, the one whose son occasionally logs on to her account and breaks my heart every time when I see she’s come online. The veterans, some in wheelchairs, all of them just looking for a place to go, to be with people, when going out in public is nothing but a cruel reminder that they can never look at life the same way again.
People often ask me about the lessons cancer has taught me.
Cancer didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. Cancer taught me to recognize my strengths.
Warcraft has blown apart the bars of the prison I used to live in, a prison of class, of privilege, of education. It’s like the Sermon on the Mount, writ large, with lasers! “But the people who play computer games…” my real life friends have said. “Exactly,” I respond.
Someone said to me the other day, “I understand you are a victim of breast cancer.”
“Not yet,” I replied.
The current literature uses the term “cancer survivor.” That term surely has more truth to it, but I’m also an adolescence survivor, an I-worked-for-a-year-at-the-Association-of-Junior-Leagues survivor, and a pregnancy survivor. Cancer treatment lasted 262 days, AJLI lasted 54 weeks, and pregnancy (twice) dragged on for 18 horrid months, 24 if you count the miscarriage I had before I got pregnant with my daughter. When does adolescence ever really end?
I have a good friend who was raped two years and two months ago. The next day, she got on a plane and flew to Dallas to visit me, still covered with gum from the adhesive tape they put on her at the hospital. Because I am an awesome friend (once in a while) I took her to lunch at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Over lunch, she told me about the novel in six words concept and so we started.
I was raped. Get over it.
Cancer sucks, but there are worse things.
The common thread in our conversation from that point, other than outrageous ribaldry (Novel in six words: Finding a man beats keeping one) was our shared hope was that our experiences would not define us.
A lot of cancer patients use their disease as a launching point for the next stage in their lives. They start organizations like Young Survival Coalition, which sent a volunteer to the hospital to give me a fleece throw, a nifty tote bag, and one of two books on cancer I actually found useful, or the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation which my mother found helpful insofar as it let us know I was not alone in having a strange cancer. And of course there is Susan G. Komen For the Cure which funded the study in which my doctor, George Perkins, found the cure for my disease.
If you need a flight to get treatment for cancer, Angel Flight rallies volunteer pilots to fly you, free, to your appointment. The American Cancer Society will send a volunteer to the airport to pick you up, and if you don’t have insurance, they have a program to help pay for your treatment, although I don’t think they can pay for everyone. If you have cancer, or if you know someone who has cancer, Gilda’s Club will support you in ways you did not even know you needed. These organizations, and thousands more, are funded and run by millions of donors and volunteers who have experienced the horror show that is cancer, either as a patient or caretaker. People who turn victimhood into victory.
I just want to move on.
My mother has been sick for a couple of weeks. No, it’s not cancer, it’s just one of those things that happens.
She’s been in the hospital a couple of times, and of course I am stuck here in Dallas Freaking Out.
About a year ago, my mom got one of those phone calls, “Mom, I am in the hospital, get here on the next plane,” and she did, and after four days of IV antibiotics, I was somewhat better, and having my mom there was great.
Accordingly, I asked my mom if I should come out to see her. “No. NO! I do NOT want you making a big deal out of this!”
I know she’s not taking care of herself in the way I think she should be.
She is furious at missing four days of her life, being sick. “I’m having people over for brunch on Saturday! I can’t be in the hospital!”
“Mom, I missed over a year of my life. You can cancel brunch, or tell people to bring donuts.”
“I don’t WANT to have to cancel brunch. I want to be out of this hospital NOW!”
A few days later, it went like this, over the phone.
“Mom, you are doing too much. Your body needs to rest and recover!”
“I AM resting. I’m only doing half as much as I would be doing.”
When I was a little kid, my parents took us camping every summer. Who goes camping, backpacking, in a tent, with babies in diapers? My parents, that’s who. I asked them about it and my father said, “Well, we wanted to go camping.” It was that simple.
I remember when my mother was pregnant with my little brother, she taught in the Catholic girl’s high school where she worked until the nuns would not let her, because they were afraid she would have her baby in the teacher’s lounge. I think she gave birth three days after she went on maternity leave.
I remember when I was pregnant, and so, so sick, the first time, how frustrated my mother was that I was too sick to do anything more than sit on the couch watching reruns of Charmed in a darkened room. I remember when I was pregnant the second time, in Tokyo, and my mom came out for ten weeks to take care of my daughter, when she finally “got it” when she saw me spontaneously projectile vomit, from the effort it took me to answer the door to get a delivery (it was a rush shipment of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).
“It’s not normal to be that sick with pregnancy.”
” . . . ” My mother says that I sneer a lot, and I am sure she is right, but sometimes what she sees as a sneer is me trying not to vomit.
“You might feel better if you went for a walk.”
“No, I might feel better if I go back to bed and read Harry Potter.”
During the year my mother lived in Dallas, the year I had cancer, the year she put her entire life on hold to come pick up the pieces of my life, she discovered everything there is to know about this city. She discovered every park, every museum, every fun place to take toddlers. Me? I stayed in bed reading Harry Potter and playing Warcraft. For a year.
“If you would just try,” she said. “You haven’t spoken to your children in two days,” she would say.
The combination sneer and I am trying not to vomit expression would settle on my face, and she would walk away without saying a word.
She was right, of course, but what she did not understand was the sheer effort of not dying.
She wanted me to get up, to come to the park, to go see Don McLean in concert, to go to the art museum. She wanted me to be well enough to do those things, and she was terrified I would die, and miss out on my last opportunity to enjoy life with her and with my children.
Now that she has been sick, I want her to rest. I want her to lie in bed reading Harry Potter, so she can heal.
She won’t do that. She CAN’T do that.
I was grousing about it with my friend Peter, who is wise.
“Staying home resting would be a huge effort for your mother. It would be almost impossible. She doesn’t have the strength to rest.”
I know we all have to heal in our own way. I know I can’t tell my mom how to live her life. I should be glad that she is not so sick that her illness won’t let her do anything except lie around.
But I am very worried. It’s part of loving someone.
According to news reports, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, left a voice mail for Anita Hill this morning asking her to apologize for her allegations in 1991. In interviews today, Mrs. Thomas said she viewed the gesture as offering an olive branch.
My take on the story in 1991 was that Clarence Thomas had a great sense of humor and a terrible sense of when it is appropriate, and that Anita Hill had no sense of humor at all.
I haven’t seen much evidence of a sense of humor coming out of Justice Thomas’s chambers in the past 19 years, but given how it backfired on him so spectacularly last time, he either has learned to keep it in check, or else only hired people who can laugh at the Rabelesque.
I still don’t think Anita Hill, who appears to have many excellent qualities, has a sense of humor, or else she would have put the phone call on YouTube for people to remix.
My dog has a shoe fetish. She will sneak into closets and under my desk and into the laundry room, full of muddy sneakers, and steal one shoe. She puts them in a pile in front of her crate and sniffs them.
I’m not sure why I find this uproariously funny. Perhaps it is the way she sneaks around when she has a shoe in her mouth.
A good friend asked me for advice this morning.
She’s developed a friendship with a guy she met through work. Evidently, there’s a lot of chemistry, and by “a lot” I mean when she mentions him her face lights up so that she looks like she has a halo on. His colleagues have also commented on it, and commented to her that their friend feels much the same about her. I get the feeling that a lot of people who know both of them are sitting around watching the sparks, waiting for ignition.
So, why advice? She’s single, divorced, dating casually, but not in a committed relationship. He’s divorced, stable, with a great job and a great personality. No one has any red flags that scream, “Woah! Wait! What are you getting yourself into?”
She is Polish-Czech-Italian American, and he is African-American. Black and white.
While I do not have any friends who are haters, my friends span the spectrum of people who use the N-word, who disapprove of interracial relationships, and who honestly do think “American” implies “white,” to people who are nationally and internationally renowned advocates for social justice. The friend who asked my advice falls much closer to the N-word-using end of the spectrum. She has told me she was brought up in a family where interracial dating was seen as the worst possible betrayal of all her family stood for. She was brought up to hate.
One of the many reasons I’m so fond of my friend is that she’s overcome so much, and in doing so, gained wisdom and compassion in a measure that far outweighs her suffering. A public blog isn’t the place to air grievances against her parents, so you can use your imagination, and I assure you, it isn’t far off. She’s been one of my best friends for the greater part of a decade, and the stories just keep coming. I heard a lot of her history during the nadir of my illness because my friend is the type of person who understands the purpose of the “it could always be worse” anecdote. Not schadenfreude but solidarity.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?” I demanded of her. “Of your step-father?”
“Like he’s going to get in his car and drive two thousand miles to beat me up for dating a black guy?”
She was quiet.
“He would. He would. But I’m a grown woman, and I would press charges. No, I’m not afraid of him any more.”
She was quiet, and so was I, except for the clatter of the dishes I was loading into the dish washer while she sat at my kitchen table drinking Cuban café con leche.
“I’m afraid of people staring at me.”
“What if it went really well and we got married. Our kids would be bi-racial.”
I brought up my friends and neighbors who are in a mixed race marriage, and whose children are so wonderful, and so smart, and so beautiful that I would switch them for my own if I could get away with it.
“Yeah we might have kids like that.” She smiled.
She drank her coffee and I sprayed down the counters.
“What would Chris say if I brought over a black guy?”
“He’d say, ‘Have a beer. Have a seat. How are things going?'”
“You grew up in an interracial family,” my friend said to me. “Was it weird?”
Well, it was weird, but only because my family is all people with strong personalities, and I did not think it was the time nor place to discuss what is meant by multicultural versus interracial. I’m also quite certain that my friend’s mother and step-father would not differentiate between the two, but would merely categorize me as a Spick.
“My parents got married in the sixties. I think maybe some people raised eyebrows because my mom was from Cuba and my dad was from New York but it wasn’t ever a big deal. One year, Chris’s mom was surprised when I made Cuban food for Easter, but then she laughed and said ‘Of course.’ That’s about it as far as anything,” I said.
“I think you should let him take you out and see where it goes,” I said. “What is there to lose?”
“I’m afraid.”
My drop-dead gorgeous friend is afraid, because when she was growing up, her mother stood by and watched while her stepfather degraded her by telling her that her curly (blonde) hair and her full lips and curvy backside made her look like a black person, only that was not the word he used.
My friend knows that melt-your-butter-make-you-giddy attraction to someone does not respect racial boundaries. She knows, better than anyone, what kind of a person would intentionally bring up a child to be a racist, a hater, and her repudiation of that twisted value system is just one part of the healing journey she has taken to overcome her upbringing.
My friend also knows, in a way I, who grew up in a family with two generations of multicultural marriage, can never truly understand, the extent of social pressure against interracial dating.
This morning, was she asking my advice or my permission?
I think she is going to let him know that she currently has no plans on Saturday night.
I can never understand the courage it’s going to take her, and I love her all the more for it.
Finally.
I have a bead on “best eyebrows in town, threading or waxing.” I’m gonna try them out, probably tomorrow, since my eyebrows are beginning to look like giant hamsters marching across my face.
Check out my friend’s blog, http://hip2b5.blogspot.com/2010/10/cute-halloween-pedicure-idea.html where I got the info.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I had no eyebrows. I’m not taking anything for granted here.
When I say I have the best friends in the world, and that I don’t deserve my friends, I am telling the truth.
Today I was palling around with a buddy working on some PTL stuff and she mentioned lentils.
I forgot about lentils. Seriously.
Forgot. About. Lentils.
It’s fall. The light has turned golden. There is a chill in the air if I imagine as hard as I can — certainly it’s not 100 degrees out. The pumpkins are out in force. The stores have started decorating for Christmas. I love fall.
I stopped off by Albertson’s today and picked up a bag of lentils, some onions, carrots, celery, cilantro, and a couple of potatoes.
Reminding me about lentils and not laughing at me for forgetting about them. That’s how to be a good cancer friend.
I feel blessed, because I am.
My daughter is nice. Much nicer, in fact, than her mother. Yeah, she talks too much, she’s messy, she forgets to do things, she is disobedient when I tell her to do something she does not want to do, and she will pitch a fit like no one I have ever seen except YOUR daughter, and you know who you are. But she is nice, and she is kind, and she is fair, and she is honest, and she is truthful, and the other morning, she pitched a giant fit because the only clean uniform she had was shorts, and she did not want to wear shorts to school.
What in the world? She’s not prone to pitching fits about uniforms. She’s great about following rules. We’ve had zero uniform issues in three years.
It turns out that one of the little girls in her class, New Girl, called her a tomboy for wearing shorts.
It’s not the first run in we’ve had with this little girl. The first inkling I got of something funky in the second grade was several weeks ago, when she got into the car and crumpled into tears, “Best Friend is not my friend any more. She said so. She SAID so!”
“That’s ridiculous. You have been best friends with Best Friend since kindergarten. She loves you. Her mom is awesome,” I thought.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“New Girl told Best Friend she wouldn’t be her friend if she was MY friend so Best Friend said she’s not my friend any more! She SAID so!” More tears.
I was driving.
“Sweetie, I can’t hug you because I’ll crash the car, but wait five minutes until we get home and I will hug you as much as I can. This is your first encounter with Friend Trouble. It probably won’t be your last, but it does get easier as you get older.”
“Like how you are not friends any more with ********,” she said, referring to my ex-best friend who dramatically uninvited me to her wedding a couple of years ago because she didn’t want to have a friend who was as fragile as I was immediately following cancer treatment. “Your issues and my anxiety make for an uneasy friendship,” she wrote in the email in which she ditched me.
“Exactly. It hurt my feelings and I was very mad, but then I stopped thinking about it, except when something reminds me. I’ve learned how to handle things like this, and tonight Daddy and I will work together to give you some tools to manage this situation.”
In our wisdom, we suggested to our daughter that she continue her friendship with Best Friend as if nothing had happened, and we taught her exactly how to ignore New Girl. On the one hand, we were right about Best Friend. The friendship resumed, unbroken, as if nothing had happened. On the other hand, our brilliant daughter is spectacularly good at proving her point, and the line in the sand, already drawn, was trenched and mined by my daughter’s silent treatment of New Girl on the day following the Best Friend episode.
Over the next few days stories of juvenile antics trickled in, and my concern grew. The tomboy episode. Sides being chosen on the playground. New Girl telling my daughter “You’re just a mean little girl.”
I wrote an email to the teacher, a wiser woman than I will ever be, asking her please to look into the conflict and resolve it. My daughter tells me that this is exactly what happened, that the original episode was triggered when she was rough-housing and knocked into New Girl in line, and New Girl thought she did it on purpose. Everyone apologized, and they’re all friends now. Really friends. New Girl helped my daughter with her backpack today, really friends. I’ve met New Girl. She is cute, funny, smart as a whip, articulate — in short, a perfectly appropriate friend for my daughter. I could not be more pleased with the way things have worked out.
In theory, I should invite New Girl over for a playdate or even just a “let’s have ice cream after school.” But I just can’t bring myself to set that up.
Here’s why.
“You’re just a mean little girl.” I know momspeak when I hear it, and if that is New Girl’s Mom’s best effort at resolving conflict, I don’t see a mom-to-mom friendship blossoming. I know it’s hard to be new. Goodness knows, as much as I’ve moved in my peripatetic adulthood, I know what it like to be the new kid in town. Perhaps — definitely — I’m being judgmental but if there is one thing cancer has taught me, it is to be a wise steward of my own time and energy, and my existing friends already deserve more of my time and energy than I give them.
This evening, a friend sent me a link to an essay by Martha Brockenbrough who wrote about her own second grade daughter’s experience with a playground bully. It’s a great essay: precise, insightful, poignant. I urge you to read it. I posted it on my facebook page and immediately it generated a great deal of interest, all positive, from my friends who agree with her premise: that if parents want bullying to stop on the playground then we need to set the example for our children of how to overcome our dislike for someone.
What I wonder, though, is this. What does the mom of the bully in Brockenbrough’s story think of the article? Brokenbrough writes about how she attempted to heal the wounds inflicted on the playground by inviting the bully over for a playdate, and the mom of the bully refused. “It’s complicated,” she said. And now her role as a complicit enabler of her daughter’s cruelty has gone viral.
“No, you are not a mean little girl,” I assured my tearful daughter. “You are a kind and wonderful little girl whose mother taught you how to deal with a bully.” If I mean what I say, then I need to send an email to New Girl’s mom suggesting an after-school playdate.
I wrote this post a while ago, when my son was three and my daughter was five. Now my son is five and he learned the letter “A” in school today. We were going around the table during dinner thinking of “A” words when Chris asked who was going to say the funny one, so of course, I said “asshole.”
The kids cracked up.
Then, Graham said “apeshit” and we all cracked up. It turns out he also said “apeshit” in Kindergarden today. Mrs. B, his teacher, gently corrected it to “Apepoop” which reminded me of this old post, so I dug it out of mothballs.
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June 1, 2009
I curse freely in front of my kids. We talk about it, how some words are rude, and when, and when not, to use those words.
They do not curse.
Instead, they have seized on the words their friends use at school to be offensive. “Boody. “Toot.” “Poop.” You know, the ones other moms use with a little “tee hee” titillating taboo. It makes the other kids laugh, and it gets a rise out of their teachers evidently because Mrs W. asked me to speak with Graham about using potty words — specifically words he would never hear at home. The cute euphemisms.
What really gets a rise out of their teachers, though, is when one of the other kids curses. Georgia came home one day and reported that <unnamed boy> had said “shit” and been sent to the principal.
“Was he talking about his own poop, or was he using it as an expletive?”
“His own poop.”
“Wow. I wonder why he did that — it’s really inappropriate. Especially at school.”
“Mom, you say shit.”
“Well, yes. But only when it is appropriate.”
“Like when?”
“Mostly when I make a mistake or forget something important, and I am mad and want to express how mad I am. That is what an expletive is for.”
“Thats when you usually say ‘aaaargh’ or ‘rats.'”
“Well, yes, because saying shit is rude and I like to be polite.”
“When else would you say shit.”
“When there are toys everywhere and I tell you to clean up the shit off the floor before I throw it away. But it would be rude to call your toys shit.”
“You say to clean the crap off the floor or else you will throw it away.”
“Well, crap is not as rude a word as shit.”
<light bulb goes off>
“You know the one time I really do say shit? It’s like this. You know about monkeys, right? Well, monkeys do this thing where they throw their poop around, at other monkeys and at people. They do it in nature to make other monkeys go away, and not eat their food or get in their space, and they do it in zoos or cages because they are mad at being in captivity. That’s why you only see a few species of monkeys in zoos, because most kinds of monkeys throw their poop around, and that does not work in zoos. Can you imagine? And so, when someone pitches a big giant fit ….. <Mom stares at Georgia> it’s called going apeshit because someone is acting like a monkey, yelling and throwing poop around. Only not throwing poop. People don’t do that.
“In fact, I have a brilliant idea. The next time you pitch a big fit, I’m going to call it going apepoop.”
And I did.
And that was the end of the temper tantrums.
Dance with the Reaper 