I love birthdays. I love celebrating other people’s birthdays, and I love celebrating my own. I always have. There is something kind of incredible about having one day every year that celebrates the blessing this world received when you arrived in it. Not because every person needs to do something huge or extraordinary with their…
Today is egg retrieval day. And I have so many emotions about those words. Infertility is hard. IVF is hard. But doing IVF because chemotherapy is about to start is hard in a completely different way. This cycle wasn’t planned. The timing was forced. Nothing about it happened according to the ideal timing or necessarily…
I keep saying that Brian was supposed to be the one fighting a war this year, not me. Except that isn’t really how this story started. This was supposed to be a relatively easy deployment. Then, the night before he left, war broke out. I remember sitting across from him at dinner as we watched…
I woke up angry this week. Not sad. Not numb. Not even particularly scared in that moment. Just angry. The last two weeks have felt like a roller coaster, and I’m never sure which emotion is going to show up next. The first week, I was devastated. Shocked. Angry at times, but mostly just trying…
There are some places you never expect to return to. Twenty-five years ago, I worked a cancer center in high school for class credits. It was my first real job. I spent my afternoons cutting the lead molds used for radiation treatments. At seventeen, I didn’t think much about what happened beyond those walls. It…
There are moments in this journey that feel impossibly heavy. Today was one of them. Today was my CT scan. I’ve learned more about colorectal cancer in the last week than I ever wanted to know. A friend who works in oncology gently prepared me for what today’s scan was looking for. She explained that…
There is something surreal about living in this space. Some days I feel like I’m watching someone else’s life unfold instead of my own. I move through the motions, answer questions, make plans, laugh at jokes, pack diaper bags, and somehow it all feels slightly out of focus. Like I’m walking through a world that…
I’m an Enneagram 1. I like plans. I like order. I like knowing what’s coming next. When Brian deployed, I had a picture in my mind of what this year would look like. It wasn’t the year I wanted for our family, but I had made peace with it. I would spend my days with…