Where's My Pony?

I have learned a few things in these first few weeks of my happiness project. One, it is hard to be happy when your kids consistently wake you up at 5am. Two, I need goals in order to be happy. Three, nobody buys you a pony just because you had cancer.

Being a full-time mom is rewarding and productive, of course, and I don’t mean to take away from that. But it is also repetitive and crazy-making (all you loopy moms know what I mean). I need something outside of motherhood, something that is just mine, something to work towards that makes me feel like a productive member of society, rather than just a sick person cashing disability cheques.

In my experience, not many people talk about the aftermath of cancer. Six or seven months after treatment, if all is going well, most people outside your closest circle will sort of forget that you almost died. People treat you normally again, you have to get up in the middle of the night for your kids again, you can’t sleep in anymore, and no one cooks you dinner. You are “better.” You keep waiting for that cancer card to pay you back big time (it must be good for something, right?). But there’s no pony, there’s no kitten, there’s no all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii. There’s just regular life. You are surviving, living life, taking your medicine. And then, one day, you realize that you almost died.

Our society is mired in what an acquaintance of mine called the “tyranny of positivity.” We are entrenched in this mindset that if we allow negative thoughts to occur, we are inviting calamity, as if we have that much power. So we push sad and angry and scary thoughts to the side, convinced that by staying positive we can cure ourselves. Then, when the immediate crisis is over, when life gets back to normal and we no longer look like aliens, and people start treating us like regular human beings, everything that we’ve pushed aside and refused to think about comes crashing down.

The aftermath.

I almost ceased existing. I almost left my children motherless. I almost became ashes in the ground. But I didn’t. And so I should be happy, right? I should be immensely grateful and I should be full of bliss that I can spend every day with my kids. Knowing that stress fuels disease, I should be totally Zen, full of calm and peaceful energy. Right?

But surviving cancer doesn’t automatically turn you into a better, more enlightened person (I really hoped it would). I am besieged by flashbacks. I am on edge a lot. I get frustrated with my kids. I can’t watch hospital shows. I feel sick when a child loses a parent in a movie. I cry. I thought that I had weathered my cancer journey quite handily, so I am a little unnerved to have it come back with such a vengeance. This does not fit in with my happiness project at all.

So I have to ask, where’s my pony? What do I get for all of this suffering?

Well, I guess I get another chance to get it right. I am not automatically more Zen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t strive to be. I didn’t die of a sudden aneurysm or a car crash – I kissed death and lived to tell the tale. So I get to try again. Some people say that cancer’s a gift, and just so we’re clear, I want to punch those people in the throat. But if you survive cancer, it does give you a second chance, a chance to start over, correct mistakes, and to be better.

But to be perfectly honest, on some days I’d rather just have the pony.