My mom has been fighting cancer of the pancreas for 15 months now. This is quite the rarity. She’s an extraordinary and shockingly strong woman.

She is doing the whole experience on her own terms. She does not want anyone sitting around crying over her. She does not want her children involved in her care. She wants to live in her own home and do as she pleases. Which sounds great, right?

Well, she’s slimmed down, to say the least. She’s not willing (or able?) to eat much. Her muscles are gone. Between the muscles fleeing the scene and the powerful pain pills, and goodness knows what else, she’s been falling down. When? Why? Good questions. We don’t know. She hides it. From her brother who lives next door and helps her out all h can. From her sister, a retired nurse, who does all she can. From her children most especially.

So she fell (again) or passed out, or something of the kind and spiked a fever and was not responsive on Saturday evening and got herself a trip in an ambulance to the ER. Followed by a nice, strictly enforced, rest in the PCU for a couple days. I say strictly enforced because she was literally tagged with multiple day-glow wristbands that proclaimed SEVERE FALL RISK, and a bed alarm that would sound if she so much as picked her behind up off the bed.

The social worker came to talk to us. First, can I just say, if you are going to be a social worker in a hospital, particularly on the PCU floor, get the damn flu vaccine and stop wearing a mask. It does not help you evoke trust or transmit caring to the people around you. It says you’d rather be elsewhere and you don’t give a fig about the people in front of you, but the hospital requires you to wear a mask.

OK. Moving on. She said that mom would be evaluated by Physical Therapy, to see if she needed Rehab to go home. She asked Mom some questions. Thankfully Tammie told her straight away, “She can hear you just fine.” So she stopped yell-talking. She asked mom if she’d been able to bathe and dress herself before coming to the hospital. Mom said, “Yes.” And we all stood there, as she lied. We, as her children, had been added to her chart for the cancer ward, but not the PCU, so our input was neither desired nor required.

We all told her that she should go to rehab. Maybe they’d be able to get some protein in her and get some muscle tone back, so she wouldn’t fall so much. Maybe. I mean, honestly, there’s a tiny shocked part of me that thinks that even though she’s been told that surgery is out of the question, that she’s been at this for 15 months, maybe she could actually recover?

So she managed to snow the Physical Therapist and maybe even the social worker, and has been sent home, alone, today. To do what she does. To do what she can.

Who fights cancer with chemo for 15 months straight? Who keeps on fighting if their quality of life is sitting in a recliner in front of a TV most of the time, only consuming milk and melons, and falling down on a regular basis? Who won’t accept help unless it is exactly on her terms? Who? Who does these things?

My mom. Does all this and more. Exactly on her own terms. It isn’t what she wished for herself. She’s mad as hell. You can see it in her clear blue eyes. You can see it in her rosy smooth cheeks and the set of her jaw. She didn’t see this coming, didn’t want cancer, didn’t want to be a victim.

Go ahead and save your tears. She doesn’t want them. Don’t tell her what she does and doesn’t need. Don’t tell her that you just want her to be safe. She sure as hell didn’t choose to get sick, but pretty much everything since that day has been on her own terms. You may not like it, but you have to respect her for it.

So very much about the whole situation sucks on a level that I can not even begin to articulate and you know what? I don’t know the half of it. She keeps me in the dark as much as she is able. You think I’m kidding? I still don’t know what STAGE of cancer she was diagnosed with 15 months ago. How’s that for in the dark?

As I said earlier today, I am sad and frustrated because I just want to make it all better. And I know that I can’t make anything better for her and that is just kicking my butt today. So I’ll put on the “Rehab” song and at least laugh at the irony of her strength of will… Stand humbled by her dignity. Know that as long as she is fighting and doing everything on her own terms, that she is still the woman that raised me.

The harder she is to deal with, the more she is just herself. My mom.

Love you, mom.

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Turns out there was a rather large spider hanging out on the floor. “Good thing I have high arches.” Can’t imagine squishing a big spider under my bare foot first thing in the morning. Yuck. But I did take care of it.

It’s a good thing I am not totally squeamish about bugs, because I think that one deserved a good squeak, if not a little scream.

Being an account manager at a trade show company in California during the height of the dotcom boom, was a little like being a show hall girl during the gold rush.

No, really. Money flowed, dreams were made real and every day was a new party! The hours and pressure to please were excruciating, clients were often surly, overbearing, cheap, and ungrateful. We just had to paste on our smiles, serve up something good, and carry on.

During one particularly difficult day, a asked a brilliant coworker how she managed to keep so calm in the face of deadlines, money issues, and surly clients. She told me this, “I just imagine them all, as they are ranting and raving and carrying on, as tiny little new born chicks. So new and helpless. They’re really just asking for our help, in the only way they are able.”

Well, I was never quite able to achieve her level of equanimity and zen on the job. That perspective has helped me to learn to handle criticism and feedback better, it may even have helped me to stay calm with a screaming infant in my arms. Most of all it has helped me to overlook squawking and complaining, general harshness and ugliness, that once I would have reacted negatively to, to realize that people just need help.

OK, that advice and a regular yoga and meditation practice.

While on vacation in Mexico, I had no children with me. I used no alarm. I awoke spontaneously between 7 a.m. and 7:30 a.m.

Back to the daily school grind, and I’ve got an alarm that goes off at 7 a.m. to make sure Bel gets in the shower on time.

The first Saturday of the new school year, and I am sweetly woken by Redding calling me from his bed. When I get up to find him, Annabella is in the hall and informs me she wants some computer time. Then I get to Red’s bedroom and he tells me he needs more time to snuggle with baby bear and with me.

These days are numbered. But they make me feel like a million bucks.

Why? Well, it’s like this:

I studied Spanish for 5 years in junior high and high school. Although I never intended to travel abroad or to use it in a career, or maybe because of that, it was one of my favorite classes.

Over the years I had some pretty amazing profesoras, and one really patient Castillian TA. There was one Spanish teacher who touched my heart. She seemed to recognize what was going on in my life. She engaged students on a level that has nothing to do with Spanish class, in a really positive way. Oh, and she managed to teach us, too.

Senora Bryant had more than a little to do with me getting my act together and applying to college, overcoming the fact that I had no idea how to pay for it. She even had input on which college I chose.

The poem I got published in the Art and Lit review? It was about her.

When I went off to college, I was really ridiculously glad to be away from my home. So much so, that I had a really hard time visiting and an even harder time maintaining contact with people still at the high school. It had nothing to do with the people, still I couldn’t do it.

Shortly after I returned to college from the holiday break, I found out that Senora Bryant had had cancer, and had passed away. Hers was the first funeral I’d ever been to, it was the only contact with my friends from high school, and it pretty much broke me.

So, sitting at a table overlooking ruins and shacks and the beautiful Pacific Ocean in Puerto Nuevo, when the Mariachi approached and asked if we wanted to hear “Tequila” or “Margaritaville”, I said, “No, Cielito LIndo?” And I smiled and cried a little.

Ay Ay Ay Ay. I sing and you don’t cry.

Vacation! Take me away!

While I often see the worst case scenario, the intent behind the perfectly normal conversation, and am highly suspicious of whether the true nature of a human being is good or evil… I still do try to see the bright side. I look for the silver lining. Sometimes I can find the silver lining before most people in the vicinity have even seen the storm cloud.

Today is an excellent example of that. While I morosely wallow in thoughts of my mom, her pain, and her cancer — on her birthday today — I am also pleased to note that it makes my very first root canal scheduled for Monday seem rather unimportant. Certainly I’m not worrying about it. Crazy.

Long before texting, there was Sinead O’Rebellion. Killing it, with her ahead-of-her-time short code.

OK, I really do like Sinead O’Connor. I have always, since I first danced to “Mandinka” at First Avenue. Loved all of her music until one day during my freshman year in college.

I had left my boyfriend and my roommate studying Chemistry together in our dorm room, to run through an early Spring rain storm to my work-study job. Two short hours later, I was gleefully returning to tell my boyfriend that the rain had let up, that the sun was coming out, that he should stop his homework immediately and go for a long walk with me.

As I burst through the door, I found my roommate in exactly the same position at her desk. She looked up, with an expression like, “Um, I’m sorry?” I turned to see my boyfriend was sitting on the floor, talking on our phone, and crying.

In the background, I noticed “Nothing Compares 2 U” was playing as my roommate said, “I don’t know, the song came on and he went to the phone without a word to me…”

I hung up the phone, at the wall. Told him to get up and get out.

You see, I knew already.

He was on the phone to his (supposed ex) girlfriend in Chicago. Because apparently nothing compared to HER.

And I still don’t like that song, not even a little. It makes me want to punch something, but I never do. Now to make sure Pandora never, ever plays it again.

Because yoga touches lives on so many levels, it is impossible to be everything that a student may seek. One student will want to talk about their shoulder pain, another their headaches, one will seek guidance in meditation, and others even more disparate and complicated input.

I’ve come across many a life coach and viewed them with a mixture of awe and cynicism. How do they presume to know and what snake oil are they really peddling?

Now I find myself put on a pedestal by virtual strangers. It is bizarre. I wonder, do you go ask your Zumba teacher for help with your taxes?

I mean, OK, yes, if you have low back pain, I can tell you which poses you should modify and how. Sure. If I don’t know off the top of my head, I can look it up and talk it over with you. But I can’t diagnose you or fix you. I’m sorry.

I can tell you that practicing yoga is likely to make you feel better on a whole host of levels. I am not, however, qualified to tell you if it is an adequate substitute for psychotherapy.

Just want to give the whole bunch of them a big hug, tell them to listen to their own wisdom, and barring that find someone qualified to speak to.

I’m not a doctor, but I do wish to ‘do no harm.’