12/8/08

As "normal life" descends back upon me - cancer treatments are sliding into memory, and even the reconstruction is close to wrapping up - I'm surprised at how easily one can forget the great lessons that cancer teaches. It's the beautiful, inspiring holiday season, and despite the fact that most of my year has been taken up with cancer and I SHOULD KNOW BETTER, I still find room within me to get stressed.

SO, SO, SO, DUMB.

I'm trying to resolve myself to take things a little easier - who cares if the house doesn't have lights yet? Who cares if all the cards haven't been written and I can't foresee enough time to get them written? Do we need to have our tree yet? Will the world fall apart for my kids if they don't have that special "Christmas morning feeling" preceded by hours upon hours of preparations by their mother? But it's not working. I'm still yelling at my husband for not helping me write out Christmas cards, and making snarky comments like, "Are we going to have Christmas lights this year?" and "These things don't happen by magic, you know."

What a total snot. I wish I could slap myself. I guess I could enlist Nathan. The other night while we were wrestling he hauled off and slapped me so hard I made a decision that I needed to either stop wrestling, or do some sort of quickness and agility training so I can deflect the blows. (I think I'll go with the latter. I know Bill hates it when I rile the kids up and we act all demented and do dangerous things, but it is so FUN. A girl needs to get her cheap thrills somewhere, and I get mine from being terrorized by my children.)

Anyway, I wrote a reflective post on Trusera (like I probably should be doing here, this is the internet and how much should I be revealing? I've been worried about that lately), but here I would rather just blather on and tell the truth. The holidays are killing me and I need them to stop. But I don't want them to stop! I want to see my whole family! I want to give them presents! I want to thank everyone for the help they've given us this year! I want my kids to have a special Christmas morning, where we celebrate God's love and our love for each other!

On top of that, I want a clean house, I want to exercise daily and eat healthy things, and have time to read and to write, and to communicate with friends and family, and to teach my puppy how to not bite the kids, and to spend time with the old pets, and to learn new things and conquer new frontiers...and whatever else there is to want, I probably want that too. I'm just in that mode.

Unless I get my own little collection of elves, though, I can't see it all getting done.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

jeez...my exact feelings. literally...exact! i feel overwhelmed by all of the above feelings you just so eloquently stated. and i also know the world wont end if my kitchen isnt organized properly, or i finish one of the million projects i have going. but actually...this is whats sposed to happen. we forget about life as a cancer patient and start returning to our old ways. its actually a good thing...as long as we remember what weve learned from our experiences. and dont take the things that really matter for granted! :)