From the moment of my diagnosis, through the scans, blood tests, and surgeries, I sought to find my rest by building a place with a view. I wanted to see into the future, to predict the outcome of my life and gain a sense of peace based on what I could see. Simply, I wielded worry as a means to control.
A house on sand.
But rather than control my circumstances, my circumstances controlled me. I focused on the view and, in the process, forgot about my foundation.
Thirty-three verses before Jesus’ story of the wise and foolish builders, he said words that held the key to saving me: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?”15
Boy, I sure tried. Fooled by both panic and pain, I convinced myself that worry gave me a measure of control. From morning until night, I attempted to worry myself into wholeness, as if preparing for the worst would guard me from any unwanted surprises. I’d had enough of those.
Only it didn’t. Worry, like cancer, consumes life, eating away at a person from the inside out. It exaggerates the unknown and clouds the known until the worried person sees only the horror of what might be, rather than the beauty of what already is.
In his mercy, even as I lay on the cold surgical table, God pulled me back to the only foundation that could weather my storm.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”16
Not a house with a view of the future but a house with a foundation that won’t fail. God’s presence in the here and now. A promise never to leave, never to give way. Stone, not sand.
“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”17
I opened my mouth, waiting for the doctor to cut me open once again. Tears still fell, and I felt anything but strong. Instead, exhausted and ready to quit. Even so, God stood near. I like to imagine he caught the tears that fell, holding them in those strong, calloused carpenter’s hands of his.
Then he looked at me with an intensity that trumped my own.
Quitting is easy, Michele. But I dare you to live. Whether you have fifty days or fifty years, don’t waste them worrying. Stop saying “can’t.” Pick up that hammer and live!
CHAPTER 10
Un-Mother’s Day
Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
— SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night
SEVENTEEN HOURS. GIVE OR TAKE.
That’s how long our honeymoon lasted. Leaving our three small boys in the care of their grandparents, Troy and I left our picture-perfect wedding venue late on a Sunday night and drove to Winter Park, Colorado. Tucked in the woods near the ski resort, a studio condo waited for us.
Our first night as husband and wife.
Seventeen hours later, we drove back down the mountain to Denver to pick up three boys after school.
To start math homework and spelling words.
That, my friends, is how our marriage began.
Insanity. I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y.
There was no gradual getting used to marriage. No slow warm-up to the idea of children and family. Instead, “I do” followed by a headfirst dive into the deep end of the parenting pool.
That is why counselors, pastors, and pretty much everyone who breathes recommends you marry before having children. Not after.
I’ve heard couples describe something they term “the honeymoon phase” of their marriage. When they do, eyes sparkle and cheeks flush. They lean in close and look at each other with secret-keeping in their eyes. It’s disgusting.
Okay, fine. It’s sweet. But here’s the deal: Troy and I never had a honeymoon phase. After our wedding day, my eyes moistened and cheeks flushed too. But for entirely different reasons. And not in a happy, I’m-so-in-love way.
It took a giant blue teacup for me to recognize our new family for what it was. What it is.
The trip had been a surprise, something Troy and I plotted behind closed doors. We spent a year’s worth of savings knowing we’d stand for hours in long lines for rides that would last seconds. But this is what crazy parents do for the children they claim to love: they take them to Disneyland.
The night before we left, we packed the car with bulging bags and suitcases, while the boys slept without a clue of the adventure awaiting them at dawn. In the morning, we all climbed into Troy’s Izuzu Trooper (remember those?) under the pretense of running errands. The boys chattered in the back while Troy and I stole secret glances. It wasn’t until we arrived at the airport that we revealed hidden suitcases and plane tickets.
How would you like to go to Disneyland?!
Woohoo! Yeehaw! Hip-hip-hooray!
For a solid week, we followed our three hyperactive, gradeschool boys across the full expanse of California’s theme park. They’d never been before and wanted to see it all. Along with every other family in the United States, it seemed. Even in September, people filled every inch of the park, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers with adorable children sporting Mickey Mouse ears and princess tutus.
As I remember it, in the late afternoon, I took my oldest stepson, Tyler, to the Mad Tea Party ride while Troy took the younger two, Ryan and Jacob, on something less likely to cause vomiting. While we waited in another long line, making microscopic centipede steps forward, I attempted to make conversation.
What’s been your favorite ride so far?
Dunno.
Are you having fun?
I guess.
What should we ride next?
I don’t care.
Exhilarating.
Slowly, ever so slowly, we approached the front of the line. Only a couple of shiny, smiling mothers and their children preceded us, followed by a long stretch of others winding through silver cattle fencing behind. It made for a storybook’s illustrations, all these faces plastered with glee. After all, Disneyland is the happiest place on earth.
Finally, our turn came. I looked to the sprightly Disney employee waiting to direct us onto the platform of swirling teacups. Rather than address me, she bent down to look my boy eye-to-eye: “You and your mom can get in the blue teacup, right over there.”
She smiled and pointed as she said it, delivering her announcement with perk, like a wrapped present topped with a bright red bow. I couldn’t help smiling in return. You and your mom. I loved the sound of those words.
I reached for my boy and started to move through the turnstile. And that’s when his shriek interrupted my bliss.
“SHE’S NOT MY MOM!”
Wha . . .?
There, in the happiest place on earth and inches from giantsized, magical teacups, I shrank to the barest fraction of myself. If I could’ve found a hole to crawl into, I would have. Instead, I stood transfixed and mortified. Embarrassed. In front of hundreds of perfect traditional mothers and fathers, my stepson exposed me as an imposter.
His stepmom.
In a second, we went from happy family to fake family.
That’s when I knew: no matter how many blue teacups we share, no matter how much I love his father and wish it to be different, I am not — and never will be — his mother.
Although I’m sure those early months of our new marriage and stepfamily had glimmers of bliss, what I mostly recall is how very hard it was. And how it wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. If I thought single motherhood had been characterized by exhaustion and thankless effort, a second marriage with three children took both to a new level of discomfort.
About the time I thought I’d figured it out and had learned from my plentiful mistakes, our sweet angel boys turned into teenagers. Overnight, the rules changed, and I didn’t have a clue. Any progress we’d made seemed to disappear. Instead, mood swings. Conflict. Disconnect. Some days, I thought it would kill me. Other days, I hoped it would.
You should know I enjoy teenagers, love hanging out with them. For years, I was a youth sponsor in the high school youth group. I led a small group and mentore
d students almost every week. During the summer, I went on youth trips, up to two weeks at a time on a chartered bus with more than sixty hot and hormonal students. On purpose. I felt value in that space.
Except when it came to my own teenagers.
Then I felt inept.
The tension escalated soon after Tyler turned sixteen. On the outside, he seemed a typical teenager, happy even. He had his driver’s license, was doing well in school, and was involved in the church youth group.
But at home, where emotion wasn’t so easily masked, he seemed irritated and angry more often than not. Later I came to recognize this as fairly typical for adolescence. At the time, I just knew he hated our rules, resisted being told what to do, didn’t want to show respect or consideration for his brothers or his dad and me.
So we called him on it. He didn’t like it.
And so, one unsuspecting Monday, he didn’t come home. I’d been working all day in my home office, writing, cooking, and doing whatever else occupied those routine days. I remember glancing at the clock midway through the afternoon.
Tyler should be home from school by now.
But he wasn’t. Dread quickened my pulse, my heart knowing the truth before my head did. I checked my phone, scanned for a text message.
Nothing.
The bus had come and gone. Other kids had already disappeared behind their front doors, scavenging for snacks, maybe telling someone about their day.
My kitchen remained absent one boy.
I texted him. No response.
I texted Troy. He hadn’t heard from him either.
Maybe an hour or two later, our son finally answered his phone. Simply put, he wasn’t coming home. Sick of our boundaries, he was going to live with another relative, a place with more freedom, he said.
And just like that, we went from being a family of five to a family of four.
Every day following — every single day — I tortured myself with impossible questions: How did this happen? Where did we go wrong? If we’d been the right kind of parents — if I’d been the right kind of stepmother — he wouldn’t have left, right? This is my fault. How do I fix it?
No matter how hard I prayed, I couldn’t unravel the tangle of knots. Though Troy grieved, our son’s absence was particularly difficult on me. His choice to leave felt personal, a pointed rejection of me as a person and mother. I’d failed him.
Years later, after parenting two more teenagers with their own struggles, I realized that much of his rebellion and our conflict were simply a normal part of a child’s transition from childhood to adulthood. A part of parenting adolescents and learning to let them go.
But it took me a long time to stop seeing it all as my fault.
The Mother’s Day after cancer, I woke up in Syracuse, New York. Two thousand miles from my husband and children.
I’d been invited to be the guest speaker for DeWitt Community Church’s three weekend services. The invitation felt awkward to me. Didn’t my stepfamily status exclude me from expertise on the topics of motherhood and family? Hadn’t I blown my chance when I ended up divorced? Why would a church ask a woman with my background to speak on Mother’s Day?
That was precisely the reason Dr. Mark Sommers invited me to come.
“Broken families are more the norm than the exception any-more,” he told me through the phone. I cringed at the “broken family” reference, the label I couldn’t shed. Still, I knew he spoke the truth.
“Your story is real and authentic,” he continued. “You can deliver the message with a credibility and perspective many others can’t.”
Wow. I accepted the invitation. My background didn’t disqualify me from ministry but created a unique opportunity for it. His affirmation gave me validation and boldness I hadn’t yet experienced. Perhaps others, like Mark, believed redemption could reach even the divorced. To that point, I hadn’t discovered many.
My message was simple: the power of a mother’s influence as evidenced in the portraits of three of history’s notable mothers: Monica, mother of St. Augustine; Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles; and Corrie ten Boom, who never married or had children of her own but who “mothered” many of us through her example of faith and forgiveness during the Holocaust. I chose expected and unexpected women, for good reason.
I also offered a fourth portrait: my own. An unglamorous mothering journey through childbirth, divorce, single-mothering, remarriage, and step-mothering. It was a moment of uncomfortable and oh-so-public honesty. Like finding your skirt tucked inside your underwear. Humorous, maybe, but mostly humiliating.
As I held up framed black-and-white portraits of Monica, Susanna, and Corrie and told their stories, I thought of our family portrait back at home. It hung above the family room fireplace, wrapped in a three-inch, chunky black frame with silver brocade etching swirling around the edge. The smiling faces of father, mother, and three boys.
The photograph captured a younger us, taken two or three years past. Thick trees of Denver’s Observatory Park surrounded us as we sat on lush grass wearing jeans and coordinating shirts. Tyler sat on the left, seventeen years old, a senior in high school. Ryan, a junior at the time, sat on the right with one knee in the grass and the other propped under his elbow. Jacob, twelve, smiled front and center, his face filled with still-sweet-as-ice-cream innocence. And Troy and I sat in the middle, sandwiched by our children, my hand on his knee and his arm an anchor around my back. We smiled, of course. The photographer told us to.
Framed familial happiness on a fireplace mantel.
This is how we displayed our family to the world. Posed and edited perfection. But I knew the truth. I saw the details that didn’t make it into the frame. The years of grieving our former families while trying to cleave to a new marriage and stepfamily. The long hard work of learning how to let go of what was lost and grab onto what was gained. And then the years during which our admiring little boys turned disgruntled teenagers, and how that change left us frustrated, exhausted, and screaming at each other more than loving each other. And how, after the dust had settled, we emerged less a portrait-ready family and more five separate individuals licking wounds and trying to figure out where we go from here.
I shared all of this from my place on the stage, a purging and exposing that both unnerved and relieved me. And then I shared the tenderest part, the piece I’d held back and guarded for months.
Mothering when you hear a doctor say the word cancer.
With that single word, the entire room stilled. Men, women, and children collectively held their breath. I’d soon learn this is the typical response to any kind of cancer pronouncement. It isn’t a word we like to hear, so we shrink back. It reminds us we are, in fact, mortal, and this life — and the people we love — will not last forever.
Cancer, as terrifying as it was, forced me to wrestle with my mothering, I said. Had I done enough? Had I been the kind of mother I wanted to be? This was both an excruciating and inspiring exercise, to look at the role I cherished most through the magnifying glass of limited time to see what impact, if any, I’d had.
I used to believe, back when my children were small and I managed their contained little worlds, that the worth of a mother is measured by the behavior of her children. A good mom raises good children who make good choices. Any other result reflects poorly on the mother herself.
Then my children grew up, made choices of their own. Worse, I discovered the hard way that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how determined I was to be the best mom I could be, I still came up short. I lost my patience. Snapped curt replies. Chose selfishness over serving. Not all the time and not every day, but enough to be fully aware of the fact that I was a flawed and less than perfect mom.
Yes, I knew the imperfection hidden behind the Photoshopped smiles in our fireplace frame, even if no one else could see. After cancer, those flaws became more apparent, highlighted by my desperation to do right by the ones I loved. I felt wave after wave of regret, seeing w
ith painful clarity the many ways I hadn’t been the mom I wanted to be.
As I stood in front of a filled church sanctuary on Mother’s Day, taking in the faces of other equally human and struggling people, I knew the truth after cancer and all those months of wrestling: motherhood is more than posed and frameable moments.
It’s not the sum of blissful images filling the pages of a scrapbook. A mother is made in the difficult, challenging, and very real crises that never make it to a page. It’s choosing to love when you’d rather run away. Being a mother is becoming an expert at saying, “I’m sorry,” “I forgive you,” and “I love you,” as many times as necessary. And teaching your children to do the same.
Motherhood didn’t turn out quite like I’d thought, I told my new friends at DeWitt Community Church. It involved more hard work and less glamour than I’d dreamed once upon a time. We are a family who came together as a result of horrible loss. There is no way to erase this truth or ignore it. Divorce is the circumstance that brought us all together. Thrown together into swirling teacups, we tried to blend and recreate the magic of all we’d lost.
Although isolated by grief, we also learned to be joined by it. Divorce and remarriage are characters in our family’s story, as is cancer. But they don’t define us. Now, when I look at the family portrait on the mantel, I no longer see flaws and the many ways I failed.
I see a story taking shape behind the scenes.
Months before Syracuse, Troy called me to the kitchen late one night as I pulled out my pajamas and dressed for bed upstairs.
“Honey, can you come downstairs for a minute?”
The day had been a long one, and all I wanted to do was to crawl into bed and go to sleep. Couldn’t this wait for tomorrow?
He called me a second time, kind but persistent. More than a little frustrated, I slid into my slippers and headed back down the stairs. I didn’t expect what waited for me when I turned the corner and entered the kitchen.
Undone Page 8
