Mom

When I was sixteen, my mother came home one day with a scary announcement: she had cancer. One of her breasts was full of calcifications, a condition called DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ). A surgeon had told her she needed a mastectomy, but she wasn't comfortable with that and was looking for other options.

Her search for other options became a complete lifestyle change. She went from being a fairly normal suburban mother in terms of her eating and living habits to being what I would call a hippie-dippie granola bar. She explored and read and talked to people, and became a born-again health nut. The emotionally-closed mother I had always known suddenly started getting in touch with her feelings and crying at random, and while I certainly couldn't blame her, it made me uncomfortable.

Then she started trying to get me on the bandwagon, and I ran like hell. Good luck telling your teenage daughter, who's full of her own angsty drama, that the way you brought her up was actually all wrong and now it needs to change. It became a point of pride for me that I could hide any and all of my emotions, no matter the situation, that I was as solid as a rock and absolutely unflappable. She alternately told me that she appreciated my cool head, and that I was going to do myself damage bottling all my feelings. I stuck to my guns. I was in a place in my life where I had no close friends, so I had no one to share with anyway. I became the sullen goth girl who floated through the halls at school, talking to no one, sharing nothing, slipping quietly into depression while no one watched.

Mom went to energy healers and naturopaths, who acted like therapists and helped her to see that my dad's addiction was poisonous to all of us. (Duh.) He grew angry with her for listening to "those crazy people" who were blaming him for all her problems. I listened to both sides, refusing to provide opinions or emotions to anyone.

The next time I heard about the cancer was the following year. We were on a family ski trip to Colorado with my then girlfriend, Petunia. My mom had made an appointment with some kind of natural healer out there. I wasn't sure what they were doing, and mom didn't want to talk about it. I could never tell whether she was shy about her treatments or whether she was trying not to burden me with information she felt I didn't need. Either way, I never pushed. And I don't think I ever heard about the cancer again. That was nine years ago.

Two weeks ago, mom called me and said we needed to talk. She had bad news, and wanted to tell me in person. We made plans to meet for dinner the following night, and I spent the next 24 hours freaking out about what could be wrong. All I could imagine was that the cancer was back. That was the only thing I could dig up from the past for use as a clue.

I was right. It turns out that the silence I had taken to mean as respite had actually been ignorance. The cancer is back, bigger and badder and more of a threat. It was never actually gone. She chose not to deal with it, and my faith that she wouldn't have made such a stupid choice simultaneously came to light and was destroyed.

Some test results came in a week later, and there's good news and bad. The good news is that it's not metastasized, which had been a concern due to a swollen lymph gland. The bad news is they are still recommending aggressive chemo as well as a mastectomy. Her next step is getting a second opinion and considering her options, and the way she said those things put me on edge. She is considering whether or not to do the chemo. If she chooses not to, I'm going to have a lot to say about that. She ignored it once, and while it is her body and her choice, I'm not just going to pretend it's fine if she tries to do that again. Look what happened last time.