Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go

On Friday the weather was totally gorgeous here, and I sat out in the backyard and read my Country Living while Laura worked on her clubhouse. The clubhouse is slowly being painted with craft paint, and is having inspirational slogans Sharpie'd on its walls. Slogans like, "Save the pandas!" It also has a chandelier made of camellia branches.

So I hadn't yet told Laura about all this breast cancer stuff, but I thought it was time to fill her in. I have a surgery date now (March 30) and I hadn't wanted to bring it up before there was a definite plan to tell her. I had seen a book at the bookstore on "how to talk to your kids about your illness," but I thought, "I don't have time to read a book about this. I know this girl and I'm going to wing it." Which is pretty much what I've been doing all nine years of her life.

I knew that I didn't want to do it as a big family meeting scene. I wanted it to be more casual, just a normal, low-key mother-daughter thing. So I called her over from her clubhouse and she sat on my lap. Which is funny because she is huge.

I told her that I'd been to the doctor a couple of times lately and that I had a tumor in my breast that had to be taken out. I didn't use the 'c' word, she has no experience with that term. I told her that if it weren't taken out, it would just keep growing and make me sick. She said, "Is that serious or is it just a normal thing?" I told her that it definitely wasn't normal and that it had to be fixed. Then I told her pretty much exactly what the surgery was and the reconstruction and everything. She said that it was like when you have your leg amputated and get an artificial leg, and I said yes.

It was hard to steer a course between not scaring her and misleading her into thinking it was trivial. I told her that I hoped the surgery would completely fix the problem and that I wouldn't have to do anything else afterwards, like get more medicine, but that I didn't know, and sometimes people had to do that.

Her only frame of reference for surgery is an emergency bowel resection her grandma had, so she said, "Remember Grandma's surgery, that was way more serious, right?" I said yes, in a way, because that had been an emergency and Grandma had been in the hospital for a week, and that operation was much harder to recover from than this one would be. I didn't know how to go into Grandma's surgery being a total fix, versus the uncertainty of my situation, so I just left it where it was.

I told her that the hardest part for her and Hank might be when I was home and not feeling good after the operation, but I laid it on thick with reassurances that lots of people would be around helping us with everything. She did not seem overly troubled or upset.

She asked me, "Are you going to tell Hank about this?" I said, "What do you think I should tell him?" She said that telling him about it would "make him freak out" and that I shouldn't tell him about it until I was home and the surgery was over. I said I didn't think that would work, but that I would wait until the night before and then tell him I'd be at the doctor's the next day, and that Grandma and Papa would take care of him until I got back. We agreed that three year-olds don't have enough grasp of time for me to bring it up way in advance.

Then Matt stepped out on the back porch and Laura said to him, "I know." So she did get that what I was telling her was important, and I think she even felt privileged to be in on the information. I think the whole talk went great, and she hasn't seemed at all worried since then.

Other stuff about this weekend: shortly after that scene in the backyard, I got a text from Normal Neighbor that said, "I'm having drinks on my back deck with Kathy and Cathy, do you want to come over?" I was like, oh honey I am so on my way. It was just such a mild, sunny day that everyone wanted to be outside. I walked around the corner carrying my phone and four Corona lights in my hands. It was a parade of class. Then I just walked around her house and went up to the back. Back door friends are special and all. Kathy and Cathy are two other neighbors I know slightly. After they got filled in on my boob situation, the K(C)athies dished up some tennis league gossip, including stories of all the girls they knew who had left their husbands for other women. Good happy hour.

Yesterday, Matt and I took the kids up to the tennis courts and hit balls for an hour or so. Then I took Laura to see Alice in Wonderland, which I thought was just okay. I don't know if it was boring or if I was just really tired, but I fell asleep for part of it. Definitely the only time in my life I've fallen asleep while wearing 3D glasses.

Today it is raining, and Matt cleaned out the fridge and washed all the shelves. He is my white knight. I swept and mopped the wood floors, because Fabienne just does this "squirt Murphy's Oil soap and then damp mop" thing and my needs for shiny floors are not being met. I mean, that's fine for a routine mopping, but at a certain point, there is dirt on the floor that is just being pushed around by that half-assery. Something needs to be done to transfer the dirt from the floor to another receptacle. Something involving a real mop and a bucket of hot water.

My mom and dad are arriving tonight to help with the kids tomorrow, and I have a meeting with a plastic surgeon. Matt has met all of my tentative murmurings about also having a chin tuck or other cosmetic improvements with stony silence. Men.