Breath taking.

Hi, did you miss me?

I’ve been pondering how to sign back on here and write something meaningful and it always leads to me singing the first verse of Lizzo’s banger The Sign, and thinking about how funny it would be if you could click open this post and have that song playing. You will either get the reference or you won’t. But if by chance you don’t know the song and listen, stop after 0:20 seconds in- the parallels to me and you fall off real quick after that 🤣

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Last month a dear reader emailed me about this here blog. Her daughter is newly diagnosed with cancer and she has questions. She thought I have answers, which is amazing because as any of you who have been here for a while know, I haven’t a literal clue what’s going on.

I do however have a way of speaking about the chaos that seems to be a balm to readers like her.

The new reader wrote to me:

This entire transition has been even harder than I expected. We are feeling absolutely emotionally drained right now. Even though we’re following the plan and making progress, it sometimes feels like the road ahead is endless, and I catch myself feeling like there’s no hope. Our daughter has been struggling too — she’s tired, worried, and just wants her “normal” life back.

The words could have been taken right out of my early diagnosis mouth.

Harder than expected. Drained. Slow progress on an endless path. Feeling like there is no hope. Tired. Worried. Aching for normal.

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Dear Reader, you could spend the next couple weeks scouring my posts, trying to find out when you get back to normal life, but the spoiler is this: your normal life… you never do get it back.

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Beaudin was diagnosed 2,483 days ago and there is not a single day that goes by that I do not think about pediatric leukemia.

That’s not normal.

He was diagnosed 2,483 days ago and there is not a single day that goes by that I am not aware of the fragile dance that is survival. Aware with so much reverence that it takes my breath away.

That’s not normal.

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For a long while I would have given anything to have cancer not be a part of our family. I was so sure that cancer was the problem, the enemy, that to pivot to another stance felt like everything single thing I believed to be true had turned to mush.

I tried for so long to get back to normal, to feel and act and believe the way I did before Beau was diagnosed. And I just simply could not do it. It felt like every part of me, every cell in my body, had been reorganized.

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Have you thought lately about the butterfly?

Did you know that when a caterpillar enters a chrysalis its entire body turns to goo? All of its cells, reorganized, into the body of a butterfly. This is a process of complete metamorphosis.

I remember hearing about this remarkable process- I suppose I heard in sometime prior during elementary school science class- but hearing it as an adult a couple months ago- I could not stop thinking about one question: I wonder why a caterpillar would ever choose that?

Does the caterpillar choose for everything to change?

The complete metamorphosis, it doesn’t happen overnight. Depending on the species it can be weeks or even months. Days on end where if you opened up that chrysalis all you would find is everything turned to mush, to goo. But slowly, surely, those cells reorganize into something more beautiful than a caterpillar ever could have dreamed of being: a butterfly.

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Dear reader, you are still in there- even though everything has turned to mush. But sweetie, you will never go back to what you were before. There is no return to normal.

You are becoming.

How breath taking.