"Mom, Are You Going to Die?" My Kids and Cancer

Facebook Post from September 16, 2010 at 11:58pm
Best part of my day: While in line at IKEA for an ice cream, Norah looks at me, and using her deep voice (think "It's so fluffy" from Despicable Me) and says "I love you so much. I just love you." Not sure if it was ice cream inspired, but I'll take what I can get! Sweetest girl EVER!

The instant I knew I had cancer, my first thought wasn’t about myself, my husband or how we would get through it. My first thoughts were about my kids. How will they react when they find out? Is this experience going to change our family? Will their life be divided into the time before mom had cancer and the time after? Will they look at me differently?

Ryan, then 9, is an extremely observant kid, and he knew something was going on due to the amount of time I had been on the phone, the hushed conversations, the tears and amount of doctor visits I was going to. I am sure the girls (Stella, 6, and Norah 3) felt the tension but they didn’t say anything to me. Even though I was convinced that I had cancer before I was officially diagnosed, I didn’t want to tell the kids until we knew for sure.

I knew the kids had heard me speak about cancer before – my sweet grandma Shirley passed away after battling ovarian cancer in 2008, and my friend Ashley lost her mom Jamie to pancreatic cancer in 2009. They knew both of these strong, wonderful women, and they knew that cancer had cut their lives short. I was afraid of what the word CANCER would mean to them.

After it was official, we decided to tell them. I explained that the doctor found something in my chest that shouldn’t be there, and that in order to make it go away, I would have to take some medicine that will make me sick, and eventually have surgery. Ryan asked “Do you have cancer?” His next question was “Mom, are you going to die?”

I felt incredibly blessed to be able to answer his second question NO. I told him that while I would get sick and lose my hair, and this next year would be difficult for us all, I would be just fine in the end. Once I told them that I would be ok, the rest just didn’t matter to them. That was all they needed to know. Kids are incredibly resilient, and my children amazed me time and time again with their strength, faith and incredible love.

In an effort to help them understand a bit about what was going to happen, I decided to rent a few books at the library about moms who have cancer and how their families cope with it. While I was grateful for the sweet words and well-illustrated books, in the end, reading the books was just too difficult for me. Reading them to myself brought me to tears, how could I ever read these to the kids without becoming a complete mess? I showed them the books, but I didn’t read them aloud and I don’t know if they looked at them or not. I wasn’t ready for that yet.