Hair We Go

I'm still giggling from my daughter Chelsea's comment during a phonecall yesterday: Mom, I had to find out you shaved your head from the BALD-O-Matic!!

My son Geoffrey and I tackled my hair with electric clippers and he did a great job trimming my hair as close as it would go. What 13-year-old boy wouldn't love to shave his mom's head? How cool it that! We made it fun and I was glad to be able to include him in the experience. This week Geoffrey will get his buzz-cut in return for the favor. The next day I took a razor blade to my stubble, and am still trying to get it to baby's bottom smoothness. It feels so much better now that my follicles aren't being bent and hurt by the hundreds.

I listened to my own advice and your encouragement and today let go of the newsletter obligation until I am stronger. I had previously arranged for someone to replace me in the interim, but still felt like I needed to take it off her hands if at all possible. This is the kind of thing I'm learning to let go of now.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that certainty and all its comforts flew out the window forever, the moment I was diagnosed. Breast cancer is a nasty one, unlike some other cancers, because there is no generally accepted cure date. The same cancer can return even 15 or 20 years later, and if it does it's much more menacing. That means that there is never really a point when I will be able to say I'm cured, or it's over, because the possibility is always there. It's not enough to shake hands with Uncertainty and form a temporary truce with it during treatment; I need to make friends with it and make a comfortable place for it in my life.

How is this any different for anyone else, really? Uncertainty is a constant in all our lives. Do any of us have any true certainty? Either in denial or in recognition, we buckle our seatbelts, lose weight and exercise, and trust that our lives will be long and lived well. That's my strategy too. Yes, my self-improvement list is a little different because it includes surgery and chemo and radiation and hormone treatment, but the decision to acknowledge and even submit to Uncertainty is still mine to make, the willingness to trust is my own active choice, and forward is the only direction I know. With this I can live.