It's Sunday and I've been up since 4am, victim to misplaced fluids which refuse to leave my throat, and refuse to move, and won't respond to my attempts to dislodge it. I can breathe, but it's in the way, and I can feel it, and that irritates me. I made a pineapple upside down cake at 5:30am because my nephew and his partner, girl partner, woman, his "sex", are coming over in the late morning and his birthday is quickly approaching on the 12th.
I have had to twist his arm to allow me to make him a lunch, which I had hoped would be a dinner, which I believe he will enjoy if he allows himself to do so. He will, he informs me, forgoe the joy of White Castle for the privilege of the strip steak I have in soy dijon marinade in the refrigerator. For the honor of allowing me to make him some roasted potatoes, roasted brussel sprouts with walnuts and a small bit of fresh corn cut off the cob.
Jesus Christ, I'm like my mother.
This is the way she was--a bit snarky, everything an event horizon. My poor little nephew is probably ready to sneak out of Bloomington and drive back home, and I'm gluing his ass to a seat at my janky dining room table (it really is janky), and listen to me pontificate for an hour as politely as he can before he escapes. His girlfriend (I truly don't think that's quite the word, but I don't know what to call her) doesn't like me and has made that obvious on several occasions of being semi-rude to me; I care little. If my nephew likes banging her, it's not my business. We can be frenemies over all, as long as the boy is happy.
I am not quite as bad as my mother about cleaning the house this time around. I'm learning. Usually when someone is coming over for virtually any reason, I'm dusting the baseboards and freaking out about pubes. Today, not so much--Breathing is not normal, snot is not flowing as it should, I'm tired. Fuck it. If there's dust on the television and that traumatizes you, I pity the life you are forced to lead.
Thank you cancer, I'm not just like my mother.
But she too with her cancer had to step down a bit from her tornado of housefrauing. Once my father had died and she no longer felt compelled to wipe down the toilet with antibacterial after every visit he made in there, she looked about herself and understood she wasn't made to keep it up. It couldn't all run like Mussolini's trains. She wasn't young, she had cancer, and it was killing her, and she knew it.
I am like my mother when her practicality switched on. I'm tired, and I'll be tired. I have lower event horizon reactions. I wait longer to do things. I do them in smaller batches. I avoid up and down, up and down, and hope for long periods of interaction, not action.
Yet, I am like my father, which is a damnable thing. As established here earlier, the man just didn't like me, and never did. In my early years, he took delight in telling me what a disappointment I was; in later years, he simply ignored me as best he could. I in turn couldn't stand being in the same room with him, feared him, disliked him, and only put that aside for the last ten years or so of his life for the sake of my own sanity, to explore whether we had anything in common at all.
It turns out we have plenty in common, probably the biggest problem between us. My father never liked himself all that well, and he certainly didn't like encountering himself in me. He didn't like my smartass mouth, he didn't like my verbalness, he certainly was never in favor of my fagness, though he kept that to himself. But we both had stubborness. and intelligence and perseverance and intuitiveness and a belief that whatever we felt about ourselves personally, we were worthy of respect, and dignity, and by god if you didn't give it to us, we'd knife you as fast as look at you.
Those traits, benighted as they often are, are useful in fighting cancer, in fighting insurance companies, in demanding to be treated as a person of skill and agency and intelligence. You may not know but once you are marked for death in the system, a lot of people simply write you off--you become the ghost who watches as your spouse is consulted, the shadow who breathes while others sign forms, you are not the king anymore. Once in such a position you have to fight your way back, prove yourself, yell, declare your agency. You have to be rational but firm, you have to question your doctors and direct your treatment and demand that you be given the full range of options and information.
Then it becomes easier, as my mother would have had it.
Apparently, my mother was very popular at her infusion center because of her good nature, and she certainly had one. She was not tempted to blame anyone for her condition or make their lives more difficult because of it, and I've consciously tried to pattern myself that way because I respected that about her so much. Like me, her sentence to chemo was life long from the point of diagnosis. It went on for years, she was quite tough. I have that from her, her utter resilience, my sister had it. We three cancer victims learned from one another like water cascading down a smart hill. I am the fortunate recipient.
Today, I'm trying as best I can to be Mark, but Barb is poking out of me when I look at the pineapple upside down cake and second guess me decision to not use those gross cherries on it (ugh, maraschinos, so Fifties). Jim is sticking me in the ribs and telling me I'm a failure because I can't get my nephew to dinner, so he must think I'm stupid. Hardly, I tell Jim, the boy has his own life. Calm down, Barb, I say to her as she stands fretting, looking at the cake tray. Mark is here, the coffee is ready when I need it to brew, the steaks are prepared, the potatoes are roasting.
My mother didn't like most of her daughters-in-law when she first met them. They were just never quite up to her snuff, not perhaps good enough for her two heterosexual sons. My dates or relationships she was invariably nice to, but they weren't permanent to her (or, mostly, to me). She had no expectations. My father sat smoking in the earlier years, on oxygen later, and said little, preferring to act as if what was on television was much more engrossing that I or we could ever be.
And, I am all of that, all of them, all of me. Waiting for Jason, waiting to chat, and feed and fuss, and even love, a bit. Unlike Barb I'm not lovey, and unlike Jim I'm not distant. I am Mark, I have cancer, I am surviving it every day a little bit, and I am all of us.
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