Talk to me...

I’m writing this in a draft and I don’t know if I’ll ever really put it out there. I mainly just need to get everything off my chest because what you don’t anticipate when going through this journey is how hard its going to be on everyone else and the strain and pressure it’s going to put on relationships.

I want to start by saying that I have the most amazing husband in the entire world. Truly. I thank God everyday for blessing me and my children with the most amazing husband and father. He is the most generous, loving, compassionate, selfless person that I have ever met. I often think to myself, how can I be just a little bit more like Paul? Now he’s not perfect, although my sisters often disagree. Ha ha ha

When you go through something as extreme as cancer, it puts a lot of stress on every relationship because only ONE of you is physically going through it. Every time I look in the mirror, I see cancer - no hair, no eyebrows, no lashes, dark circles under my eyes. Every time I put on my clothes, I try to choose clothes that will hide my port protruding through my chest. Every time I leave the house, I have to think about where I’m going, who I’m going to see and if they’d be more comfortable if I wore my wig. I wouldn’t go longer than 20 minutes without thinking about my cancer. I rarely talked about the darkness and lonely side of cancer. I chose daily...hundreds of times a day to choose joy and live in the light! But there are plenty of dark times and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again...you HAVE TO go to those dark places and have those dark thoughts because if you don’t really think about it, if you don’t FEEL it...if you shove those feelings down, they’re going to come up! They’re going to come up later and probably at an inappropriate time. For a long time I thought all I needed to do was let my mind go there and feel the feelings, but I never talked about it. Since I never talked about it...neither did Paul. 

Truly, Paul and our family’s everyday lives did not change much through this journey. I stayed extremely healthy all through chemo. He came to a few chemo treatments with me, but other than that I had family and friends with me every week. Paul rarely had to come to appointments, because I had a very flexible schedule (working from home) and I felt so good that I “didn’t need people” to help.

I may not have “needed him” like I said, because I was strong and I could do it. But our relationship changed. 

When people, especially women go through cancer and go through chemo, it changes them. For me, having breast cancer and going through chemo took away EVERYTHING that made me feel like a woman. EVERYTHING that made me feel attractive. If you don’t feel attractive, if you don’t feel beautiful when you look in the mirror you think to yourself - How in the world can my husband still find me attractive? 

We have 3 young children. I firmly believe that a marriage is put to the test, truly when your children are small - they WANT you, they NEED you and you start to become two ships passing in the night. Throw cancer in there, we’re in a whole new ballpark. It’s not even the same game! We didn’t sleep in the same bed for months - I was on the couch with insomnia, he was in bed with my daughter because I was having hot flashes, our boys were in and out of our bed. Now I understand that other parents are nodding their heads saying “yeah, that’s us too!”, “We rarely sleep in the same bed.” BUT I THOUGHT my husband was choosing to sleep with my daughter, I THOUGHT he was asking me to go to the couch because he was avoiding intimacy, I THOUGHT he didn’t want to sleep next to his bald, unattractive, sick, cancer spewing wife! Goodness, our minds are powerful and cruel. 

So we let this go on for month. Months went by where we were just gong through the motions of cancer and parenthood. I never brought it up because “I was fine. I got this. It’ll all be over soon.” But yet I found myself crying not about the darkness of cancer, not about the fear of dying anymore...I was mourning. I was mourning the loss of my marriage. I was mourning the loss of my husband. I was mourning the loss of the couple we were before this terrible disease. Could we ever get it back? 

As hard as it is to write this now, it was even harder speaking these words out loud. He was hurting me - so unintentionally, but it still hurt. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t know how. Actually. More importantly I wanted him to just “Talk to me...”