January 9, Tuesday
Went to Welsh class today, the first time in three weeks. God, no wonder the language almost died out! It’s so difficult! My fluency goal is now three as opposed to two years – if, in fact, that was ever my goal. Two years is laughable. I don’t think I will ever get the hang of it, it’s like learning Chinese. And Welsh speakers go on about how easy it is to speak. Of course it is for them – they were born speaking it! It is a language that is in the breastmilk of Welsh speakers: it has to be, to get your lips around the pronunciation.
Welsh is about these things called ‘treiglads’; essentially, it makes the four die-hards left in our class recoil in horror every time we have to learn a new set of grammar rules – which is every lesson, as it is an intensive course. Treiglads are the Offa’s Dyke of the Welsh language, only invented by Welsh speakers to keep even the keenest of English-speaking monoglots out. There are three different sets of treiglads and fifteen letters in the alphabet are affected by them. I asked Rhodri how many letters were affected by treiglads and he said, ‘I don’t know,’ and that’s even more infuriating as Welsh speakers who have heard the language since they were born didn’t have to learn them and they are as natural as a hill or a stream or a bloody daffodil to them. Anyway it’s very hard and not for the faint-hearted, but I will not be defeated by it, mainly because living in a house full of men speaking a different language to me is a treiglad too far.
Miss Fran, Elis’s music teacher, came this evening and it has only taken two years for him to settle down to it. The thing is, I have slight guilt pangs about him playing the piano as it is something that I have wanted to do all my life. It’s one of those ‘living your unfulfilled desires through your children’, things.
If my children show the slightest bit of interest in anything, I’m there. That is probably because I myself was not wholly encouraged in things I liked – music and drama – so I grew up being shy and lacking confidence in my abilities. Michelle lacks confidence in her own abilities should be my bloody epitaph, it was written on so many school reports.
Elis is actually quite good on the piano. He can pick a tune up immediately by ear, much like I could when I was his age, and it’s got to be in his genes with all Rhodri’s family.
Sioned is a concert harpist, Rhodri has a music degree and lives his life with musical scores, and both he and his aunt agreed the piano was the instrument that Elis should learn, because that gives you a grounding in music for life. The lovely Miss Fran said he was very talented musically, and that you often found musical children were naughty. I didn’t like to tell her it was probably a result of seven years of lackadaisical parenting.
Anyway she has persevered and he does seem to be getting there, also due largely to the fact that Miss Fran found a book called Piano for the Young Football Fanatic – what could be more perfect? I have asked him a few times if he wants to stop, but he doesn’t, so he is getting something out of it. In a while, he will be able to read music; he will have achieved something and he won’t feel, like I did, that he wasn’t given the opportunity.
Practice with him is a little painful but we will persevere, get him through some exams and give him another language – music – that no one will be able to take away from him.
Rhodri came home about eight and we ate together for the first time in ages. I am getting a bit fed of being on my own but hey, surra surra (that can’t be how you spell it, but beth banneg, as I have been saying in Welsh – whatever).
I made fajitas. God, I have put on so much weight over Christmas. I didn’t eat well when the chemo knocked me out, and I just seem to have to put huge amounts of food away ever since. I know steroids do it, but I’m only on them for three days so I don’t know if it works like that.
Also, I can’t stop eating chocolate and there is loads of it in this house, and yet I don’t really like chocolate. Actually, I only crave chocolate when my period is due, and I attribute this to lack of iron. Gill said my red blood count was down, so maybe it’s my body’s way of telling me I need iron – great justification for stuffing yourself with chocolate.
I am now taking a multivitamin with iron which is a bog-standard Tesco thing; in the Velindre booklet it says you can take them. I can’t wait for my last chemo so that I can get on my mega-supplements and try to cleanse my body and build my immunity up again. Will start eating soups tomorrow, manyana manyana.
Rhodri and I watched Bones together. It’s a forensic thing on Sky or, as Elis says when he sees these things on the Sky-plus planner, ‘Mum, why do you always watch things with dead bodies in them?’ Rhodri and I have become slightly addicted to it. I started watching it, now he wants to watch it too – foxy lead characters, eye candy for both of us, bit of sexual tension here and there and a corpse or two. What could be more perfect of an evening? What’s more, husband and wife can immerse themselves in the world of forensic anthropology without ever having to give a thought to their own anthropological angst. Basically it means you can legitimately NOT talk to your partner for an hour and not be accused of not talking to your partner for an hour.
It’s always slightly disappointing at the end though, because I usually know who has done it within the first ten minutes (I am a forensic/FBI genius and clearly wasted in the media), but it is always the person you do not expect. Although I was slightly flummoxed the other day when the doctor turned out to be the cannibal – hadn’t seen that one coming at all.
Then I was going through the Sky planner and thought I’d watch a Christmas documentary I’d recorded on C.S. Lewis. This is part of a master-plan of trying to watch things slightly more worthy and educational than Bones – although if I did ever find a mummified body in the middle of nowhere, I would certainly know now not to contaminate the crime scene.
So we watched this documentary and I thought it was going to be this gentle romp through Narnia and him at Oxford and his idyllic upper-middle-class childhood, but oh my God I was SO wrong. At one point I was crying so much I was shaking, and I actually sobbed out loud. First his beloved mother, who was the centre of his universe, died of cancer leaving his bereft father unable to connect emotionally with his two small grieving children; he sent them away to boarding school.
Then C.S. Lewis’s wife got cancer and died leaving him with two small step-children who had lost their mummy – the centre of their universe. He too was bereft and unable to connect with the grieving children, until the youngest boy hugged him and said ‘What are we going to do now?’
It was heartbreaking – truly heartbreaking. I wanted to give all those little boys their mummies back to love them with all their hearts as it should have been.
When it ended, the actor playing C.S. Lewis turned to the viewer, reflecting upon the tragedies of his life, and said he likened his journey to that of the great lion Aslan in Narnia. They cut off Aslan’s beautiful mane and sacrificed him, but the reality was that he came back stronger; that is what tragedy does to you, but if you look closely enough you just might see the scars. And I thought, What an amazingly powerful metaphor that was for someone who was battling, and winning their fight with cancer, as I hope I am.
For that is what it is, a battle, just like they faced in Narnia. Your mane is cut off, literally in the case of someone having chemotherapy when your hair goes, and with it some of your dignity is lost; you sacrifice some of yourself when you are weak but the sacrifice and the battle means that you come back stronger, like Aslan. I will try to remember to hold on to that.
January 10, Wednesday
Hurrah hurrah hurrah. I have booked a two-week holiday for the four of us in Menorca in May – sun, sand and kid’s club, and, with a bit of luck, if I’m feeling up for it, sex and Sangria. It is half-board in a hotel, something we have never done before as we are normally ‘independent travellers’ which is short-hand for finding your own way from the airport, never being sure what standard your accommodation is, and not really having anyone to complain to when you get there if you nee
d to.
It also means having to cook your own food and wash your own dishes (by hand) for two weeks because rustic cottages don’t have dishwashers. You have to do this constantly because no sooner is one meal finished and cleaned away, you are washing dishes from the next one. So even though Rhodri was being VERY snobby about it, I have insisted we go in a hotel so that someone else is cleaning it for us, and half-board so I don’t have to go anywhere near a sink OR spend my entire life looking for a restaurant that will cater for my finikity children’s taste.
Usually this means spending twenty pounds on a meal for them they will not eat, because the pasta is not like the pasta they have at home, or the chips are the wrong shape or it has an onion in it or it is just plain ‘yucky’, as Osh likes to say. So someone else will provide the food and they must surely be well versed in catering for children. The children will have something to eat and, if we don’t like it, which is unlikely in my case as I really will eat anything, we can go to a restaurant later in the evening after they have eaten.
I have a spring in my step today, something to look forward to after my treatment. Elis will have to come out of school for a week and I haven’t asked them yet, but I’m sure I can fulfil their teaching objectives for the week – I never know exactly what he does there, so that might be quite illuminating in itself. When you are ill you can’t imagine what it is like being well, and when you have spent an entire winter with torrential rain you cannot imagine what sunshine is like.
I am looking in the Next catalogue at chocolate-coloured kaftans and chocolate leather mules. I will be a vision in chocolate – let’s hope I don’t melt!
Went to see Rosie today and told her I was unwell after the last chemo. I asked if I could do a bit of an experiment and do three sessions before my next chemo instead of two. I want to see if this makes any difference because, if it does, it will at least stop me being in bed for four days. It’s not just the being in bed, because it takes about a week to recover from being ill, as you’re just not quite yourself. So I am having one next week and one the Monday before my next chemo. Fingers crossed it will work.
January 11, Thursday
Christine, Elis’s childminder, has said she can’t pick Elis up on Monday as she has to go to the hospital. She has had ovarian cancer and has had chemotherapy TWICE. She has been a great help to me as she knows what I am going through. She has had some problems and is getting it checked out. I have been thinking about her a lot recently. I am worried about how I will learn to live with having had cancer, and what would happen if it comes back. But these are a lot of ifs and buts and may never happen.
Gill says my chances of the cancer coming back would be about one in eight, as opposed to the rest of the female population, which is one in nine, and I think they are very good odds, thank you very much. I will not be Googling anything that might tell me different.
For Christine, she has to live with the possibility of her cancer returning, and I have no idea how she does that. She is a great role model as she had cancer for a year and I didn’t know about it until her hair fell out. She looks after Elis and the other children she picks up, with her husband’s help, and always seems to have loads of energy. I am saying a little prayer for her that it is a blip and that everything will be OK.
January 12, Friday
Christine’s daughter has had a baby boy: Oliver Samuel. I am so pleased Christine has something to take her mind off her troubles and that there is a new baby in the world. I have bought him a Noukie Paco. Osh has one of these permanently in his hand. It is a donkey’s head on a little blanket (not the Godfather-type horse’s head thing, something much softer and cuter). Joanne bought it for Osh when he was born and he took to it straight away. The only problem is, since Noukie version one I have spent over one hundred and fifty pounds on Noukies (all the same ones) as he has lost so many of them and he simply cannot live without it. It is a relationship I have only ever come across in Philip Pullman’s book – Noukie is Osh’s Daemon. They are as one. Except he’s not the same one but Osh doesn’t care or know this, apart from one Noukie which, out of all the many Noukies I have bought, he rejected and would have nothing to do with. All very weird. When Osh is parted from Noukie for a little while he is very twitchy about the whole business.
At one point he was losing one a week, usually in Tesco. They NEVER had any of them handed in, which was a bit strange. I think there might have been a Noukie kidnapper in the store. I have several in the house at any given time in use and new ones in packets waiting to be used should any of those go AWOL. If Noukie gets lost, Osh will not go to sleep and whinges incessantly until he has him again. My mother lost one once when she was looking after him (he had actually put it in a vase and forgotten where it was) and she had to bring him back because he was crying so much. She also has a spare one up there permanently now.
Nigel has finished the shelves and the door and they look really lovely; they all need painting now. At the beginning of the week Rhodri said he would do them as I thought I wouldn’t have the energy to do them myself, but now I feel as if I could do anything so have started undercoating the shelves so I can gloss tomorrow. House is in total chaos, need to restore order.
Elis had Ben around after school. I like him to have children around the house so that he can develop his social skills and basically leave me alone for a few hours on a Friday afternoon while I read the paper. Osh usually won’t leave them alone, he’s in the bedroom with them. In the winter they play FIFA 07 on the Playstation and in the summer they play football in the garden; either way it reinforces their male obsessive behaviour around sport which will no doubt stay with them for the rest of their lives, and all because I wanted five minutes’ peace on a Friday. What am I doing for their future spouses?
Elis is going on a sleepover tomorrow at Jonah’s house for Jonah’s birthday. Nerys, Jonah’s mother, has Jonah, Jay and Elis sleeping over, and Jonah’s sister has her friend. I wish her good luck, that’s all I can say. Having more than two of them in the house for small periods of time can be quite stressful and you find yourself arbitrating constantly. So, in light of the fact that Rhodri and I only have one wee small child left with us, who is very portable, I’ve invited ourselves over to Ian J’s for a sleepover which he is all for – someone to cook for us, no babysitting fees and, more importantly, a few glasses of wine which I am really up for now.
January 13, Saturday
I woke at seven and started painting the shelves; I finished at one with only a short coffee break. It was very satisfying doing the job and they really do look lovely. I was a bit concerned they would make the room look too cluttered but I’ve de-cluttered the piano, which is a station for letters and correspondence we don’t know what to do with, and have taken a rather busy rug off the floor and it looks really really nice. Front door also very nice.
Osh’s bedroom is over the front porch and there was only a thin piece of board between the floor and the outside world so it is no wonder it has been so cold in there; that’s why we had the outer door put on, all very plain, simple, and tasteful of course.
I snuggled Osh up last night and I said, ‘You’re nice and cosy now, Osh, with your new windows and your new door keeping out the cold.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘new windows and new doors in the bank’s house.’ He and Elis are always arguing about whose house it is. Osian says, ‘It’s Oshy’s house,’ and Elis says, ‘It’s my house,’ and I say, ‘no, it’s the bank’s house.’ So Osh now calls everything the bank’s. The bank’s blue door, the bank’s garden, the bank’s windows. I would try to explain that we own a percentage of it but think that might be lost on him. I’ll be putting our books on the bank’s shelves tomorrow.
Dropped Elis off at Jonah’s and decided to get Osh a haircut. He fell asleep in the car and stayed sleeping when I put him in his pushchair, for over an hour, so I nipped into a café and had a coffee and read a whole newspaper in one go without him waking – what bliss! Met Rhodri after the footba
ll match and we went home together and then on to Ian J’s.
January 14, Sunday
We had a lovely evening at Ian J’s, and needless to say drank far too much champagne. Ian likes his champagne and who am I to complain? I’ve always been a bit of a champagne socialist. I felt slight twinges of, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this,’ but it’s not as if I am drinking all the time, and the last time I had a hangover was eleven days ago, to be precise, and that would have been unheard of before I had cancer so I will bloody well pat myself on the back for being good.
I definitely need to give myself a break from my own constant criticism. Oh my God, is this what I am like with Rhodri? No wonder we have entered into an aggressive-defensive relationship.
Rhodri got all the books down from the attic and there’s one called Hot Buttons; it’s about how to resolve conflicts and calm everyone down. It’s explores aggressive and defensive relationships – well, the bit I dipped into did anyway. And I thought, God, that is me and Rhodri: I’m aggressive about something and he is defensive, then I get aggressive about him being defensive and he is probably only defensive because he has lived for years with my bossy aggression. We so have to get out of this cycle. Correction, I have to get out of that cycle as I think I might be the cause in the first place.
Deborah would no doubt be proud of me, that I am realising that not everything is actually Rhodri’s fault and maybe, just maybe, it might be something to do with me as well as him. I will work on that – I’ll read on in Hot Buttons to see if I can get some ‘tools’ to resolve it.
My Mummy Wears a Wig - Does Yours? A true and heart warming account of a journey through breast cancer Page 19
