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?
