Cancer

A few weeks ago my mum was diagnosed with cancer, uterine cancer. She had a hysterectomy and today was given the news that all the detectable cancer is gone but just in case there is any left she is going to have 4 rounds of chemo.

It's all been so fast it hasn't really sunk in yet what has happened. I think about it and feel that I should be more worried, concerned, scared or something but I just have this huge blank that I feel should be full of feelings of something. Sure I can fake it when people ask me how I am and I can give them the answers they need to hear but is there something wrong with me that I can't generate any great feelings about this. Am I just in denial about it all because it is happening so far away and I don't see any of the changes that are happening. I don't feel I'm coping with it but then I'm not sure how to cope with it or even what I should be coping with.

Is this going to kill my mum? at the moment it seems unlikely and she's just going to have a really hard time for the next few months. Is there anything I can do? I don't know.

For as long as I don't think to hard about it then everything is going to be ok. I feel I have to be strong for someone but I don't know who or why or if that is just a standard response and my way of dealing with it by not dealing with it. I've read pages and pages online until they all start to say the same things and I'm still not getting any answers, I still feel like I'm not getting the information. Without knowledge I can do nothing. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do, no way I can control this. I am cut off and helpless, I don't like this feeling.

Reality sucks sometimes, I just want everything fixed. I want to fix it and I can't and I hate that. Why does this have to happen to us?

He lied

Just got a phone call from some bloke asking to speak to my husband. He wouldn't give me his name, he asked if I was my husbands sister because he knows my husband isn't married. He said he was meant to be meeting my husband in givat shaul today because he knew my husband had a meeting there. He told me the relationship with my husband was quite personal and he wouldn't tell me about it but then when  I said I was my husbands sister he said, "oh, you must know about it". This bloke was very cagey and in the end said he was feeling threatened by my questions, I kept asking for his name.

My husband lied to me. When he told me about all this stuff he'd been playing around with online and a couple of times actually meeting people he promised me it was over. I forgave him and was beginning to trust him again. I don't know what to think anymore. I haven't yet spoken to my husband but I don't know if I can believe what he tells me.

Some things to remember

My little girl smiles and when she does she makes really cute baby gooing noises, then she pulls funny faces, then she smiles again and makes more noises. She looks around to see whats going on. She has big blue eyes that pull you in but the smiles and the face contortions and the noises are what I love right now.

My big boy starts school tomorrow. We had a met the teacher meeting today and he sat there spellbound, looking up and watching her. He couldn't sleep tonight because he is excited, he can't wait to put on his uniform tomorrow - he wanted to wear it today for the meeting in school.

The middle one. I took him to meet his new gannenet today. He walked in to gan and was overcome with shyness, he just wanted to hold my hand and stroke the baby but he settled in fine. We played with the lego and then he had a look around at some of the other stuff. He's got so big recently and he doesn't evven realise it. He has huge hands, feet, ears and head but he's still a very gentle and loving soft little 3 year old (ok, he's almost 4) I can see him being one of these physically very big people who are so soft and gentle.

New school year starts tomorrow, lets hope it's good for all of us.

Finality

I'm not sure that that is even a word but this is all about the end of things. I was at my father-in -law's stone setting on Sunday.  Ithought it would seem more real afer I had seen where he is buried and actully had achance to say some sort of goodbye but it doesn't.

I still can't seem to get my head around the fact that he is gone. I'm writing this sitting at my mother -in-law's house and everywhere I look there are pictures of him, he just seems so full of life and joyfully alive that I can't quite equate that with a cold hard stone and a dead body. He absence is (obviously) much more noticable here. the way things would be different, the joy he would have in playing with his newest granddaughter. The huge gaping hole of things that are missing.

I thought it would be easier now. A year has passed and things change. I thought the stone setting would, after I had my chance to say goodbye would give me some kind of closure and whilst it may have, right now I'm too close to see it. I wrote in an earlier post that when my husband was away sitting shiva last summer I had no time to morn for my FIL as I was so worried about my husband and what he was going thorugh and me not being there with him adn all that guilt. Maybe that's why this is so hard or maybe it would be like this anyway.

Marathon

I feel like we  are getting to the end of a long race. It's been a long year and our lives have changed over the past 12 months. But even when we get to the end it's not even over. It's changed the course of our lives and changed us. I see the changes in my husband and how he relates to things and us us differently.

It's been a long year. I don't know that time really heals anything or if it's just that you start to think about things differently.

It's a girl

4 weeks ago today I give birth to a little girl. She was 4.1kg when she was born and came after a short painful labour. A girl, I wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time (wasn't sure what I felt about anything at that moment to be honest) and now I've had time to think over what it means.

I have a daughter. It seems to me that there are so many more questions and decisions  to be made with a girl. The responsibility feels so much heavier than with the boys. Maybe it's because I feel that I will have to make more decisions about my life in order to be the sort of role model I feel I should be for a daughter. Raising a religious boy seems much more clear cut but the rules and roles keep changing for women and girls. This is a good thing, I wouldn't want to be stuck in a time where we had pre-proscribed roles and no flexibility, that the world is open and we can make the right choices for ourselves is a good thing. With choice comes responsibility, we have to take responsibility for what we do in a way that we never had to in the past.

My daughter is growing up in a different world than I grew up in, she will have more choices to make in areas that maybe weren't open to me. I hope I can help her make the right choices and more than that I hope I can be the mother she needs me to be.

it's coming

I'm due next week and I don't remember being this worried about when I give birth for my previous two pregnancies as I am for this one. Part of that can be explained by what else was going on , with number one I expected to be late and rally for the first timing is less of an issue. With number 2 we had just moved house, I had just started a new job and there were a million other things going on. This one I'm worried.

I'm worried about being ready to fly to the UK, about whether or not my sister in law and her family will be here when the baby is born (or for a brit if that's relevant), the time of day and sorting out the other kids, missibot siyum, holidays and keytana, is it a boy or a girl but there is one thing that worries me more than anything  else. What is it going to be like for my husband.
How is he going to react to having a child his father will never meet, a child who will only ever know 3 grandparents. What is he feeling and what is he going through right now. I don't know how to start the conversation. I don't know how to get him to tell me. I don't know how to get him to share anything he doesn't want me to know. He has a lifetime of practice hiding his feelings and even after 10 years of marriage I STILL don't know how to get things out of him unless he decides to tell me. I feel that there are huge parts of his life that he just shuts me out of and some of them I don't care but the important stuff like how he's feeling it really bothers me that he won't let me in. I don't believe that this upcoming birth is not in someways difficult for him and I want to help or at least be there and understand some of it but he just won't let me. I want him to trust me enough to let me in. Yes, I still feel that I deserted him last summer when he was sitting shiva, that I should have been there and I wasn't and I don't think that I will ever get over that or ever know if I made the right choice but I will learn to live with  the choices I made.

I feel that in this birth I am trying to please too many people. I can't focus on the birth and the arrival of the baby because there are too many things to focus on and organise for the next few weeks. Tickets, passports, packing, flying, rest of the family and the list of other things to do and sort out seems endless. Actually having this baby seems almost to be getting lost in what at times seems an overwhelming list of things to get done most of which I can't even begin to do until the baby is born.

The only up side to all this is I have kind off stopped worrying about the actual birth and the pain that it will entail because I've been distracted be all this other stuff. I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I guess it's just a thing.

I don't like not knowing, not being able to organise things and plan when things will happen. I don't like this feeling of being stuck in limbo. I want to know when it will happen and I want to know that my husband is ok and if he isn't I want to know what I can do and what is not ok about him.

I don't want to feel that I have abandoned him again when he needs me. I don't want him to decide that I've got a baby to deal with and don't have time for him. I don't want him to shut me out again.

Baby boy

My sister had a baby boy today. I'm really happy for her and the picture looks very babylike and quite cute. When she told me she was expecting 6 months ago it crushed me.  I was in the middle of infertility treatment and getting ever more depressed about the whole thing.
I'm happy to say there is nothing stopping me being happy today, no faked joy or hidden resentment...and my boys finally have a male cousin!!!

It has to be written

I have avoided putting this down in any form for about 5 months but I can't escape the fact that it keeps bubbling away in my mind. In September my husband told me that he has been spending large amounts of time on various porn and meeting sites. That he has been carrying on long relationships with people over the internet, in some cases it was women and in some cases men.

Maybe it was the timing or maybe it was the truth but I told him then that I loved him and I still do but I can't get it out of my mind that he had an affair (or possibly more than one, I'm not sure how to count these things). You hear stories of women who take husbands back after affairs only to be hurt again and again. I never thought I was that type of person but maybe I am. He says he won't ever go back to it but maybe he will, how much can I trust him? How much should I trust him? how long should I be suspicious?

My husband had an affair online. I wonder how often he was chatting with these people whilst sitting opposite me whilst I was sure he was working? How often was he up late allegedly working but really carrying on an alternate life whilst I was up in bed, at times desperately wanting him to come up and come to bed with me? When if ever do I get my old life back?

I don't see a difference between an online affair and an actual one. He betrayed my trust and destroyed the private intimacy between us. I don't know what of himself he ever showed to anyone but I have an idea of what he was looking at on at least one of the websites. I once found a chat from someone he met on one of these sites. I recongnised the language he was using to chat with her because he used to flirt with me like that. He spoiled that memory and destroyed that part of our history. I thought it was just me, when I read the way he was chatting to this other women I wondered how much he meant it with me or was I just another person he could fit in to his patter.

Logic tells me I was different, he married me and sometimes even says he still loves me but this is not a logical situation. I haven't spoken to him about this for a few months because I'm not sure that it would help and maybe part of me still isn't ready to believe his answers.

Despite all this yes I love him and I am happy that in a few months time we will have another child.