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.

Paying Attention

This is the first month of my happiness project, and I decided to follow Gretchen Rubin’s lead by choosing energy as a theme, hoping that the results will bleed into the rest of the year.

I already have the exercise aspect handled, so I won’t go into that (though if you are doing this project too and don’t exercise, I would highly recommend tackling that first). I am approaching energy in several ways, including going to bed earlier, cutting out caffeine and alcohol (for the most part – I can’t quite give up that Saturday night glass of wine), drinking more water, going vegetarian, and making my super-green-super-clean-super-healthy smoothies every morning. I must admit I have a bit of an obsession with my green smoothies. While I was going through chemo I never felt like eating breakfast, so I would sip on a smoothie packed with berries, spinach and kale (the berries overwhelm the kale flavour, I swear). Then for a while, out of laziness, I abandoned the smoothies, but I always felt strangely guilty about it. My blender sat empty and accusingly on the counter. I felt as if, somehow, the consumption of blended green goodness was my vanguard against a relapse.

Of course, while I know that green smoothies will likely not be the thing that makes or breaks my health, they do deliver a pretty strong punch of nutrients and healthy energy, and they give me an extra serving of greens that I would otherwise not have (because really, who wants spinach or kale for breakfast?). And a body recovering from chemo needs all the nutrients it can get. So I’m back on the smoothie train.

Another thing I am especially focused on to clear my brain and improve my energy is clutter. I find mess and clutter to be extremely draining, and I cannot relax in a messy house.

The problem with this is that I am terrible about putting things away. I take a week to unpack a suitcase, choosing instead to live out of it until it sort of unpacks itself. I do the same thing with clean laundry. I leave clothes and papers and books lying around everywhere. But I hate it when things are lying around everywhere. Clutter makes me crazy, though I have this irritating tendency to create it. I am certainly not the only one at fault – my children are mess makers, as children usually are, and my husband has a knack for scattering mail and bills and magazines on any available flat surface. But as the adult who spends the most time at home, I am by default the main “house keeper,” and so the clutter control falls to me.

But what to do? I am not by nature a tidy person, but I love it when things are tidy. My solution is usually to cram anything into a drawer, any drawer, so that I at least don’t have to look at it. This results, obviously, in crammed and messy drawers that make me nearly cry with despair every time I open them.

And then, in the shower one morning, I grasped the very obvious solution. Mindfulness. I simply must pay more attention. You see, I am a fairly absent-minded person. In fact, while I was doing my PhD, my husband used to claim that I was the perfect “absent minded professor.” I realize now that I am messy because I ignore things, I don’t pay attention, and I don’t put things where they belong. So, instead of walking past that pile of clothes six times in one day, I shall take the five minutes and put it away. Instead of lamenting that my kids’ gloves and boots are all over the hall, I will quietly (and cheerfully, of course) put them away. Or better yet, I will enlist them in the task. Gretchen Rubin refers to this, in part, as her one-minute rule. If something will take less than one minute to complete, she’ll do it right away. To this I’ve added my two-minute rule. If I have a two-minute pause where I’m doing nothing, I quickly gather up things and put them where they belong. I don’t have big chunks of time throughout the day, but I have certainly have two minute windows. My house is not pristine after these efforts, but I can attest that it is certainly less messy.

I also did a trip to Ikea and stocked up on baskets and various boxes to organize our avalanche of belongings. It is mid-January and I still haven’t actually organized any closets, but it’s coming, I’m sure of it. Maybe I’ll tackle a closet right after I write this. Maybe.

Finally, I’ve taken Rubin’s advice to “act the way I want to feel.” That is, when I’m feeling tired in the early afternoon but still need to entertain my kids, instead of lying amidst the Duplo mumbling “I’m so tired,” I’ll do something especially energetic, like taking them outside or building a fort of blankets. This seems counter-intuitive, but it really does work. The activity requires me to wake up, I have more fun, and in the end I’m less tired than if I had lain on the couch inventing games that don’t require movement.

So, with all of these changes, am I remarkably more energetic? Well, I am doing more, so I’m having more fun, but I am expending more energy. I haven’t quite found the right balance. I was complaining to a friend recently that I had been super tired this week, right after telling her that I had just added two more runs per week and had run 11 kilometres that day. She looked at me quizzically: “You don’t have a very good gauge of when to stop, do you?”

I don’t. I never have. But I’m working on it.