Voices
A Mother’s Courage Parenting in the face of an insecurity so elemental as survival By Caroline Wright
Caroline with Theodore (l), Henry (r) and puppy Nessie
The day I realized that I would be the source of the disaster that altered my children’s lives forever, I felt paralyzed. In my prior years as a parent, spanning my oldest son’s infancy and toddlerhood, I had taken all reasonable measures to protect him from the aspects of humanity that were too terrifying, too nuanced or too mature for a mind and heart so new to this world to understand. My sons were only 1 and 4 when I was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given a year to live. My younger son had yet to speak his first words, had only begun to understand that I was a separate being from him. I feared my older son, whose fluidity with language and expressing his emotions hinted at his desire to know everything at once, would know too much too fast. I felt as though I’d detonated a bomb within our home, reducing all that any of us had known together to rubble. What’s worse is that I was not only responsible for setting off the explosion, but had unwittingly created the weapon inside my own body.
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Worse still: I was their most trusted source for comfort, for repair, and I had no way to know if I’d survive long enough to convince them that they would survive, too.
personhood had become a kind of abstraction through my diagnosis and treatment, during which my body and emotions operated independently of one another. I lived in this blurry, surreal space for a year.
Parenting in the face of an insecurity so elemental as survival required me to live a contradictory life of acting without judgment or fear of the future while nurturing the sources within and outside of myself that believed in my healing. (This idea alone requires a distinction between the confused ideas of healing and curing — one which I understood I control and the other which I could not, based on what I was being told by my doctors.)
And then … nothing happened. I survived. All that imagining, the protection, projection and scaffolding for a future that never came. It felt surreal, too, at first, hard to trust. (If I’m honest, it still does sometimes.) Reassimilation into “normal” life felt impossible somehow, because I no longer defined my happiness and fulfillment by the same forces I did before my diagnosis. I had changed completely.
This kind of parenting took the form of open, clear conversations, during which I couldn’t pretend to know what I couldn’t possibly know and I couldn’t attempt to shield my sons from sadness; both approaches formerly had been foundations of my parenting instincts. These conversations were led by my older son alone, their trails defined only by his questions. I mothered from a place in which my own
So, I just kept doing what I had been doing: having honest conversations with our oldest son. His resilience, his joy, begged my company. Instead of devoting my days to the search for hope as I’d done during my treatment, I devoted myself to searching for gratitude. I found it in small, everyday moments with my family. I found it in writing my story, in advocating for fellow cancer patients whose outcomes weren’t as lucky
