Hang in There

I’m in new territory here. The only thing I’m doing these days is giving myself permission to just hang in there, hang on, and get through this cancer mess. For the first time in my life, I’m not accomplishing anything, I’m not pushing, and I’m not moving forward. It feels weird and strange and quite unlike myself, as if the chemo weren’t doing that already.

When I was nine years old, I distinctly remember vowing that I would not live my life the way my parents were living their life. It was moving day again and my family was piling into yet another rental I was wondering if we’d be able to afford because we’d been evicted from the previous one since my parents couldn’t pay the rent. This was the seventh place we’d lived in in my short nine years and I’d had it with the evictions.

I was standing outside with my father while he took a cigarette break and I asked him, “Daddy, can we stay here? I like this place.”

“We’ll see,” he said as he flicked his cig on the ground and stubbed it out with his foot, “We’ll see.”

I remember thinking to myself, why can’t he be definite about this? I’m not going to live like this.

Since that time I’ve pushed full steam ahead to live the life I wanted to create, not the life someone else destined me to live.  I’ve pushed and pushed and pushed–myself, Libby and everyone else around me to be as good as we can be, to go further, dig deeper and make the life of our dreams become a reality. Some people get it, some people don’t. It’s who I am and what I do, or rather, what I did.

Out with the olds and in with the news, though.  It’s a whole new world I’m adjusting to, new terrain I’m adapting to, and a new set of standards for my days. It hasn’t been easy to accept that hanging in there is the new bar that I can’t raise any higher right now, but it’s necessary.  Just let me hang in there and hang on so I can get back to the life I’ve always lived.

Thanks for reading.  As always, it helps.