Part 2: The Hope That Follows Slowly
This is Part Two of a two-part letter.
If you haven’t read Part One, you can begin there: The Hard That Comes First.
After the hard comes its own kind of softness.
There will be moments…
Sweet moments when you find yourself smiling at a little thing you used to take for granted—like the hug a classmate gives when they see your son for the first time post-diagnosis. Moments when you realize it could have been so much worse, and that this hug is possible only because one single scan finally named what was silently taking him.
Little moments where you wonder if your life before cancer could ever have been as intentional as your life is now. And you’ll find yourself sick to death over where you are, and yet thankful for it—and you’ll wonder if the reason you actually feel sick is because you were even one single drop thankful for this cosmically crappy hand.
“How can I be thankful for this?” you’ll wonder to yourself. Always to yourself, because if you ever said it out loud, someone would immediately hit you with a “God’s got this,” and you’d have to fight the urge to punch them in the throat. You will toggle between feeling genuinely grateful and absolutely not wanting anyone who isn’t in the trenches to force that gratitude on you from their on-high perch. But despite this toggle of throat-punching and gratitude, you will start to feel thankful. Thankful in a way that’s almost impossible to explain. In the way your heart feels swollen—like it hurts, but it hurts so good.
And you’ll spend a lot of time wondering if the heart-swelling is good or bad. And likely, you’ll land on this: it’s both.
It’s always both. It always has been.
With or without cancer, your kid has always had a way of making time do that strange thing where pride and sadness hit you at the exact same moment, and you can’t quite trace the origin of your tears. Where you look at your child and wonder, “Just yesterday you were little—how did we get here?” And that makes any mama’s heart ache. But before, it was the tender passing of time; now it will be the desperate clinging to hope that more time passes.
And eventually, you will notice something you never expected: you don’t want to go back to the before times. Though you may ache for them, and sometimes long for when things felt “easier,” if given the explicit choice, you would choose to stay right here. You will be so filled by the fragile, holy ache of every moment with your child that you wouldn’t trade this new way of seeing.
Slowly, almost without your consent, you will become someone who can say, for a season such as this—not because you chose it, but because you were changed by it.
I wrote this a year after Beaudin’s diagnosis, and it’s often shared with newly diagnosed families. Unfortunately, they sometimes poke around this blog and discover that Beaudin later relapsed, and that things got much harder before they ever got better.
I’ve never been one for silver linings or the “everything happens for a reason” mentality. Pediatric cancer cured me of that.
But we are one of the lucky ones who—at least today—survived to tell about it.
You can read more of our story here.
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