Five.

“How does it feel? Five years for you!”

A good friend asked me recently and I think I stopped breathing for a moment.

“Exhale,” I thought to myself, a loving reminder from a dear friend who walked through hell beside me.

I’d love to say that I have reached a fulfilling finish line. I’d love to tell you how deeply gratifying this milestone is. Five years ago I had cancer and a newborn then the entire world endured a global pandemic. It feels surreal. Did I really live that insane life of chemotherapy and breast amputation when I wore a mask, froze my scalp, gave my baby donated breast milk, and homeschooled my older kids? Surely it was a fever dream. Yet the scars, my medical charts, and my life insurance denials tell another story.

Five years. It offers no particular ease or peace of mind that is different from yesterday. From last year. From when my hair was finally ponytail length again. In reality, it’s another day that I get out of bed, workout, shower, drink coffee, pay bills, head to work, and do whatever else has to be done. I frequently remind myself that I “got out of it” relatively easily. Just chemo and surgery. No radiation. No collapse of tissue. No mets to the lungs or the brain. No loss of the use of my limbs. Not even lymphedema.

(Side confession: I get a LOT of joy from brushing and styling my long hair and wearing mascara.)

Folks who knew me before cancer  or “BC” would almost certainly say I have changed. I am more direct. More firm with boundaries. Less patient with garbage excuses and wastes of my time. More indulgent in all that brings me joy.

But I am not different. Cancer didn’t change me, it gave me clarity and peace.

I wasted a lot of time in the first four decades of my life trying to be perfect. If I could just be a little smarter, prettier, skinnier, more successful, funnier, more polite, more ambitious but less ambitions sounding, a better lawyer, cook, singer, sister, daughter … I would finally be worthy of love. I was never enough for everyone and especially one person in particular, my mother, and she made sure I knew it.  I was endlessly exhausted and heartbroken.

“BC” I allowed myself to subscribe to the theory that in order to be happy everyone in my life needed to love and adore me. I twisted and contorted myself to fit the vision of myself that others desired. I betrayed myself and the joke was on me, I was never happy.

Then I almost died.  In the long and foggy aftermath, I fumbled with my identity. My life had been hijacked and I did not want to let the experience change me. Like an old pair of jeans, I wiggled around in my old identity and tried to make it fit. But the perspective I gained meant that my old identity was like a pair of jeans without any stretch - I just could not even get it over my butt.

Though extremely painful, I began to see clearly. I realized how much time and effort I wasted when I focused on extraordinarily stupid and unrealistic expectations. I very nearly had my life cut short before I lived in a way that brought me joy. What a fool I had been.

Cancer brought me clarity and peace. Clarity to start living my life in a way that brings me joy. Peace to do so unapologetically.

Joy

It turns out that what brings me the most joy is experiencing life and this marvelous world with my children. Spoiling them unashamedly is my heart’s desire. Today, we have the extreme luck of health of having time together. Raising my kids is the most divine experience of my life and there is no guarantee that any of this will last, not just for me but for any of us, so we just continue to run, sprint most days, towards joy.

I am incredibly lucky to have birthed my children and had a family I considered “complete” before my fertility was fried by the poison that killed my cancer. I have lifelong friendships with incredible people who don’t seem to miss any of the pretense of BC Kate. I have deep and meaningful friendships with women I would never have known but for my cancer. I have a husband who puts up with going to Disney World five times a year.

All three of my kids are under my roof in this stage our lives are deliciously intertwined. They have big ideas about what we can do together, they are full of wonder and curiosity about the world, and I am working my tail off to make their dreams come true.

“She wouldn’t have believed me, she had to learn it for herself.”

A scene my favorite childhood movie, The Wizard of Oz, scrolls in an endless loop in the back of my mind: “You’ve always had the power,” the Good Witch, Glinda, says to Dorothy. The Scarecrow implores, “Why didn’t you tell her?” Glinda wisely replies, “She wouldn’t have believed me, she had to learn it for herself.”

I had to learn it for myself. I am worthy of clarity. I am worthy of peace. I am worthy of love. I deserve to be Kate, whatever that means to me.

Exhale.