Killing Persephone

i haven't yet told Eliot about my mom's diagnosis for two reasons, one altruistic-ish and one completely selfish. A couple years ago Eliot asked my mom how her parents died, and she told him honestly that they died of cancer. This triggered a bout of anxiety in him in which every night at bedtime he obsessed about me and Grammy dying of cancer. Those were long nights. I already know he has close to if not the same anxiety disorder that I have, so I try to do for him what i need done for me to assuage the panic, short of effexor and ativan. And mostly this involves a lot of soothing and not telling him the whole story.

I know that hearing even a toned-down first grade version of my mom's diagnosis is going to devastate him. And considering that I just ripped him up from the only life he'd ever known in Indianola and all his friends and his father & his father's girlfriend's kids, dropping another bomb on him doesn't seem like a great idea right now. When I was 8 or 9 my parents separated. My mom and I moved to Iowa halfway through my fourth grade year. I went to some crazy hippie experiment of a school where grades 1 through 6 were all in the same classroom and there were two classes of this nonsense. It was complete chaos. I literally did nothing but sneak off to the school library where there was a loft to read in. I figured out quickly that if i laid at the back of the loft and piled the pillows in front of me, i couldn't be seen. I would slip out after morning meeting, where I sat between five and six year olds, and read until lunch and recess. After that I wandered back to the library loft and read until it was time to catch the bus. Not once in four months did I get busted. I'm not even sure anyone noticed I was gone. Or it's entirely possible and highly likely that the "teachers" chalked it up to "independent study" and just let me go. I learned nothing that year except how to get out of work, so don't ask me the order of the presidents or state capitals because besides Iowa, New York and Minnesota, I have no idea.

I also began behaving beastly that year. I had always been a good kid, but i was pissed off in Iowa. I wanted to be home in Flushing with the friends I'd had my whole life. I didn't want to live in the top floor of a house my family owned, but the house was intended for some business purpose so my mom and i lived secretly on the second floor with a dorm fridge and a hot plate. At 9, it felt like Anne Frank. I didn't want to share a room with my mom. I didn't want to live across the parking lot from the family bar where my mom worked and spent a lot of her free time. I hated every one of her boyfriends. One night i chewed up dill pickles and spit them into a top-down convertible parked beneath my window, just to be a little shit. My best friend was an insane girl named Polly whose parents were coke dealers and let us ride around Ames on the hood of her their car while they were driving.

At the end of the school year, my mom sent me home to New York, and I was happy. But something in me had changed. My parents' divorce had taken the wind out of my sails, and four months of realizing elementary school was a joke had washed away what little interest in academia i had. I gave up. I didn't give a shit about anything but writing on my antique typewriter anymore. I refused to do homework. At one point Patty, my stepmom, wrote a paper FOR me, so i wouldn't fail. I'm pretty sure she did my math homework for me too. All i know was at the end of the year i won a "Most Improved" medal, and I knew that Patty had actually won it, not me. Because I still didn't give a shit.

Eliot is a genius, plain and true. I'm not bragging when I say this, and I know all parents think their little angels are super stars, but in Eliot's case, at least academically, it's true. He picked up the Baby Sign Language David and I taught him by 5 months. He knew the alphabet before he was one. At two, he was reading easily. He's six now and checking out books on planets and gravity. Not like overly simplified science books, either. These are books where I struggle to read and understand the terminology. And he remembers all the information in them too. The other day he remembered what the two other dwarf planets were by name and explained to my mom what a dwarf planet was and why Pluto was reclassified. Yesterday I taught him what it means to square numbers and how to add two squared numbers together, with parentheses in the equation and everything. I'm basically teaching my first grader algebra.

He and my mother are madly in love with each other. My mom is the love of his life and i believe vice versa. Coupled with his anxiety issues, telling him my mom has cancer without even going into the scary details will devastate him. And that to me is one of the worst things that could happen to him. I'm afraid that news like this could make him give up the way I gave up. And even at 8 I knew my parents' divorce was the best possible thing that could happen. I don't want to knock the wind out of him so early in his life. I don't want it to kill the joy he has in learning and to quell his curiosity. To see him close in on himself the way I did would be one of the worst things in the world.

But not telling him is unfair too. Leaving him out and omitting important information backfires too. It's a tough decision and timing is crucial here, and i'm known for my suckass timing.

The second and selfish reason is because by him not knowing it forces a normality that i need right now. For a couple hours in the morning and a few in the evening, Mark and I are happily forced to act like there isn't a bad thing in the world. We get to talk to Eliot about his day, and let that be the focus. Eliot gets to pester Mark for extra chores to earn money for the goat his class is going to donate. We get to argue about what to have for dinner and the worst thing in his life right now is that Mark makes Eliot take two more bites before he's allowed to leave the dinner table. And it's a lovely little taste of the normalcy and joy we had for three precious weeks. And I'm not ready to give that little piece of peace up yet, since every other part of my life has been tumbled into unrecognizablity and I know it's only going to get worse.

How fair is it to protect innocence? How much does Eliot need to know about how shockingly different and surreal our lives have become? How do i break the news to him the way other people, not even remotely involved in my or Eliot's life have taken it upon themselves to break the news to me?

here's a poem i wrote about minneapolis over twenty years ago.

mpls

i stand
on the washington
avenue bridge
and smile.
i'm expanding beyond
this falling
in love with
the angled city
skyline.
i lean over
the iron railing watch
water tumble
beneath blurred students
and frayed tires.
i've found that home
no longer concerns
porch lit nights
and garden gates
that the world
is as flat
as they first believed
that beyond the sharp horizon
the river
becomes a waterfall
into nothing.
i wait
for quiet
to pass
allow
my senses
to close
i'm happier
than
i've ever
been.

Yes, it is ironic, Alannis.

My life has been a series of ironies. For example, i spent my whole educational career avoiding school. from kindergarten through grad school. i hated it. and then i became a teacher. I spent three years at the U in Minneapolis, dropped out swearing I'd never return to the twin cities, and here about a month and a half ago my son Eliot and I moved to St Paul. The man I moved in with, Mark, is a guy i met in college when I went back at Iowa State. Every time I thought of him in the years between 23 and 43 I was racked with guilt and forced him out of my head. I had cheated on my boyfriend at the time with Mark, I had begged Mark to get me out of Ames, then when he got a job in Colorado and asked me to move with him, I freaked out and dumped him.

I never said I was a nice person.

Anyway. We reconnected after I'd married, had my son, divorced my narcissistic alcoholic husband and moved to a truly horrible little city south of Des Moines. He'd messaged me on Facebook, we messaged a bit, but he was married and since my husband had just left me for another woman, I wasn't about to do the same to another woman. When my car was set on fire in the parking lot of my apartment building, I was in shock. It was 4 AM by the time the fire department got it put out. My mom was asleep, my ex husband, who had my son that night thank god, was of no help. So i posted on facebook that my car had been set on fire. I didn't know what else to do. Mark, oddly enough, was on too, & messaged me. The rest, shall we say is history. Yes, yes, eventually maybe I'll explain about his divorce, how his mother treated me, the fight to get to St Paul, etc. But not now.

The preceding fifteen years of my life hadn't been particularly bright, but Mark was my "soul mate" for lack of a less cheesy term and after two years of much strife and threats of court with my ex husband, Eliot and I finally moved to St Paul and into Mark's house.

For three week I was deliriously happy. Happier than I knew a body could be. My son loves school, I love St Paul and Mark, and Mark loves us enough to let us into his house.

But something had nagged at me for months. I'm a pessimist, so something is always nagging at me. But on September 18th I posted the following status:

Mark took Eliot to sign up for Cub Scouts, I hung pink bedroom curtains, we eat dinner all together at the table, there's always food in the fridge and clean laundry, the neighborhood is safe and quiet, we drink coffee together on the back steps first thing in the morning, Eliot does homework every night at he kitchen table, no one bangs on the door several times a day, the mailman hasn't intimidated me, i cook dinner and pack lunches, and I have a PTO foe. My life is so freakin' NORMAL now. and it's AWESOME. (knock wood)

Immediately after I posted it I looked at Mark and said, "The other shoe is going to fall." The next day after I dropped Eliot at school, I thought, "This was lovely while it lasted." I don't know why. It just popped into my head. 

After school, i picked up eliot and we drove back to iowa. I had to finish cleaning my apartment in Indianola. I dropped Eliot with his father & went to my mom's. Where I prattled on for three hours about how much i love st paul and how I'm where i'm supposed to be and where should i hang my pictures and what color should the kitchen curtains be and stupid thing after stupid thing. I even chirped, "You're the only person in the world who cares about the little details of my life!" to my mom.

Then she told me she has breast cancer.

A week later she told me she has liver cancer too.

A week after that she told me she has colon cancer.

It's Stage 4. She decided today not to have the chemo port put in, at least for a couple weeks. If she does, she has two months of chemo, then the surgery. She doesn't know if she's going to do it. 

It's horrible for her and it's horrible for me and it will be horrible for Eliot when we tell him. So while Eliot's so happy in school, and I'm with the man of my dreams in the city i barely know but desperately love, my whole world is crashing. Thanks for the irony, Universe.