Ah-ah-ah! Don't look down. Look right here.

I have a dear, funny, fantastic friend who has just begun her struggle with breast cancer. I cannot sleep tonight thinking about her. She’s married, and she has two young boys. Younger than mine. She came into my life right about the time when we knew the boys’ mom was terminal. She spent almost every day of that journey with me, and she would often tell me how she, as the mother of two boys, would be feeling if she were in Erin’s shoes. She would talk about what she would do, or what she would want, and very often, she would help me see what I should do for Erin and for the boys. And now, after all those conversations we had, I am up at this ungodly hour and I can somehow feel her terror.

My dad has cancer. That’s the second time I’ve said that sentence in a month. It does not roll off the tongue. It’s only going to cost him a kidney. There’s one tumor, malignant but non-invasive, and he is not a candidate for chemo. The option that will lead to the most success is to remove the tumor and everything associated with it, specifically the kidney. It’s a lifestyle change, not only for what it will mean for his bodily function for the rest of his life, but he’s more likely to develop bladder cancer now, so he will have to be screened regularly. We haul off to Houston to bid adieu to the kidney next week.

If there is anything more frustrating than a child’s grades, I can do without that flipping introduction. Landen has a D in English for the first nine weeks, and he’s the child adapting the best to all his forced life changes. Landen reminds me very much of myself. He lives his life by a simple creed: I don’t want to. And he doesn’t give a shit what I want or the teacher wants or his brother wants. If he doesn’t want to, he’s not going to…or being that he’s a minor and our house is not a democracy, he’s not going to easily. He doesn’t do things because other people want him to.

Case in point: we get these English tests back where he’s missed matching every vocabulary word to its definition. We studied this last night and this morning over breakfast. I know that YOU KNOW that a desert is not clothing that protects you. When you force him to read the definition first and pick out the word that matches it, he gets every one of them right. What’s the catch? It would seem that the boy does not want to read. He cannot be bothered to read on the test. If he doesn’t recognize the word upon first sight, he has no desire to sound that bitch out, which he’s perfectly capable of doing. We got through the phase of him putting his head down on his desk and refusing to do his work.

Homework is the bane of my existence. I doubt that fourth graders and second graders need to bring so much f*cking work home. I resent that the time I have with my children between my getting off work and them having an early bedtime must be spent standing over an ADHD kid whose medicine has long since worn off or having a stare-off with my oppositional child over whether he’s going to read what’s on the damn page or not. Impatience really shoots your togetherness to shit for the rest of the evening. This is not the kind of time I want us to have together. And it’s the SECOND and FOURTH grades! Eventually we won’t have to walk them through every item of it, although Corey Daniel Allbritton used to sit unsupervised at a table and goof off before closing his books and declaring his homework completed. But by the time they are old enough to do it themselves, won’t there be so much of it we won’t see them but for dinner?

One of my favorite movies is Parenthood, with Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen. They have a very anxious young son that they struggle with throughout that movie. They lighten it up with humor, but I need some writers to come punch up my material because I have yet to find something to giggle about having a high-anxiety child. Jake’s anxiety – created by a toxic combination of ADHD, unbelievable grief, being without both parents and the shuffles in living arrangements that has created for him this year – causes a lot of aggression and uncontrollable anger. Both boys see a wonderful psychologist and he has a great pediatrician who is really working with us to adjust his medicines to give him some relief of this. But how do you explain to a nine-year-old what I still struggle with as a thirty-year-old – that there’s only so much doctors and medicines can do to help you and eventually you have to make the choice to not feel like shit, that how you feel is not permanent and slowly, slowly, you can be happy again?

All this brings me around to accepting what my own therapist is trying to get me to understand. There is no calm. There will always be sick parents and bad grades and shitty job assignments (not mine!) and poor health and loss and sadness and trials that test our confidence, relationships, resolve and faith. The choice is whether to get bogged down in it or to put one foot in front of the other and march undeterred toward the resolution.

Enter the part where I am doing a simple routine thing – unloading the groceries from the car, driving home, putting the sheets on the bed, packing the lunches for tomorrow – and I am seized with panic that there is no one there. That hole in my heart why that cute drummer lives sends a shock wave through my whole body and I feel the magnitude of this life and this responsibility. It fills me with so much sadness I lose track of time. Who do I look at so that I don’t lose my balance and fall into the deep water with the man-eating reptiles circling beneath me? How can it be so painful to have so much love in my life?

Don’t look down. Look right here, at me, and keep moving. Everything that the boys have been through this year, my message to them has been that. I wish Eminem was appropriate for small children, because the song he came out with earlier this year has a chorus that goes “We'll walk this road together, through the storm / whatever weather, cold or warm / just let you know that, you're not alone.” Nothing feels sane or safe right now. But I’m here, and I’m walking this with you, and one day we’ll find normal. It won’t be the normal we thought it would be, but it will be a new normal, and we’ll be okay. When I look back on this year, arguably the worst year of any of our lives, but for the purposes of this post, mine specifically, I’m going to know that my anxious child and my oppositional child, my wee motherless sons, made a fighter and a mother and a head of household out of me. We wobble and we thrive and we wait.

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