Days like today are the ones that suck the most.
When there is no end in sight to all this hardship and suffering that life keeps giving my family and I really do feel like giving up.
These are the days when even the small things feel like huge mountains I have to climb.
I accidentally spilled some of my coffee this morning and it’s still laying splattered on the ground in the hallway. It’s not that I don’t have time to clean it up, I have nowhere to be today, I just keep walking past it and staring at the mess but not doing anything to fix it.
This is when the helplessness in my mind is loudest and says things like, “What’s the point anyway? What does it even matter if it stays there all day? Nothing really matters.”
The hardest part about this recent cancer diagnosis is the timing of it, because it has ripped away our plans of living abroad this next school year.
Instead of researching all the places we wanted to take our kids in Europe and getting our house ready to rent out, we are instead researching information about colon cancer that spreads to the liver and getting the kids mentally ready to begin another school year here at home.
Our dreams were crushed and we are currently grieving them.
After years of battling both COVID and cancer (simultaneously!) we were in desperate need of breaking the chains of our life that often felt more like a death march than a quality life.
Even before cancer hit our family, we were already very much underwater and we have yet to come up for air. I had just given birth to our fourth baby about six months before the world shutdown from something they were calling Coronavirus so we were scrambling to figure out how to teach our kids from home while keeping our jobs somewhat stable through something called Zoom.
Oh, and did I mention we had a baby who wasn’t sleeping through the night yet? It was a hard time for every person we knew so we tried not to complain and kept counting our blessings instead.
We didn't have time to dwell on our situation anyway so we fought to keep our family somewhat stable even though we were facing impossible tasks!
So, in the midst of COVID hell is also when we got the devastating phone call that Ty had a 5 cm cancerous tumor in his lower colon.
It would take an entire book to write down how we survived those next two years, but in essence, our life was a mix of waking up each morning and forcing ourselves to dive right back into the craziness that was our life and trying daily not to drown because we knew we did not have the energy to swim upwards if we sunk too far down into the darkness that was pulling at us.
Just the simple act of putting two feet in front of the other was nearly impossible some days. We had not choice but to force ourselves to do it because we had four young children and zero help since it was COVID times and no one was allowed to interact with each other back then.
We felt very much alone, even though we had the most amazing community who rallied and supported us in every way they could.
Ty had been cancer free for barely a year so we still had not healed emotionally or psychologically from that trauma before we were crushed once again with the news that we would have to walk through Cancer hell once again.
So, today, when I forced my head off my pillow because I was already running late after pressing snooze a few times, all the dreadful feelings from the last bout with Cancer came flooding back.
Even though I didn’t feel like it, I made lunches for my daughters so they’d have something to eat at preschool and summer camp.
Even though I didn’t feel like it, I faked a smile for my kids as I dropped them off at school and breathed in hard to hold back the tears as I walked back to my car.
When I got back home, I forced myself to get out my computer and start typing because if I don’t get this all out of my head then I know it will wreak havoc in my body today.
Writing has always been my best form of therapy so I have chosen this blog to be my outlet.
For whatever reason, that splatter of coffee I walked past all morning was the trigger for spiraling me into despair. I feel like I can’t possibly go through this cancer hell again!
I can’t imagine having another school year of rushed mornings scrambling to get my kids to school when we thought we’d have slow luxurious mornings somewhere in Spain, walking to the bakery for cafe con leche y pan dulches.
Today I feel like I’m stuck in purgatory where I’m being forced to go back to the life that nearly killed us in both body and spirit and we were soooooo close to breaking free from those chains!
I know this sounds dramatic, but to me, it feels very much true.
To be clear, there are so many aspects of our life that are beautiful and wonderful. We are extremely blessed and privileged in countless ways.
But have you ever felt like you just want to break free from the life you have to live the life of your hearts desire?
It was our hearts desire to build our careers and our home to the point where we could pick up our children and leave it all behind for a year.
We wanted space to breathe, space to tap into our true selves again, and time to soak in our children before they are grown and flown.
God willing, all of this will still happen, but today I feel angry that it’s not happening yet.
So, on that note, I need to finally mop that coffee stain off the floor.
There is a time to grieve the life you thought you’d have and then there is a time when you have to force yourself to accept the life you actually have.
By allowing myself to both grieve and accept, I will eventually reach a place of peace.
But today, I am allowing myself to just feel how I feel and not feel an ounce of guilt about it.
Comments