‘Attention’ implies to attend, that is, to listen, hear, see, with all the totality of your being…completely.In that total attention – in which there is no division – you can do anything’

This quote if from a Buddhist website, I saved it over a year ago when I felt nothing. I felt nothing. I looked fine I always look fine. It’s some learned behavior which has evolved in me to an art form. I am resilient.

A dear friend visited me after my surgery for rectal cancer. She brought over her toddler who just delights me — better than flowers.  My friend looked at me and exclaimed, “You look GREAT. What does it take for you to look like shit? Get hit by a bus?” I chuckled, slightly embarrassed. What do you say to something like that?  I read to the baby and they left when it was clear I was tired. But my friend pays attention. She sees me.

It seems to me that the strong woman in the room is most times also one of the alone. Some times it’s an attractive woman but this attractiveness is not the organization of her face or body, but the glamor of confidence. She will remember something of you. She will smile, her own smile. She laughs at dirty jokes. She is quick witted. She flirts but does not lead you on. Men and women like her, most of the time, for the strong woman is not needy in public. It has never served her to do so. She has attended to many empty wells. She pays attention to this.

So this woman is forgotten in times of struggle. She is the one you forget to call, she is easy to leave.  And still she is resilient. She will look good. The company she keeps, those in her community, will see what they expect to see. This is not done with any forethought of malice. It’s just a lack of attention.

I’ve been told I’m strong so many times it makes me sick to hear it. I’m not. I have a faith that makes me less fearful. I was a single parent and had to be the one.  My beloved choice at a young age, which makes me who I am now.  I have a way of going out lately that takes work. I am working out the leftover consequences of rigorous cancer treatment, which literally took my body to the edge of life. At my last chemo treatment I watched my blood pressure plummet and my detached mind thought “Wow, this is how it feels to crash.”

Beside me at this last treatment was my sister. We’ve gone years without being able to be close. This rift healed when her daughter was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. We have a genetic disease called FAP.  Her daughter died of cancer at 21, as I washed her face. Don’t tell my sister she’s a strong woman. . . so many did during the four years of her daughter’s sickness it became meaningless. Her church community where not there for her. The pastor never once visited her home, visited her daughter. “Strong?” she’d say to me, “What else am I supposed to do? Fall apart? It’s my daughter!” She vented her disgust with me over tea and fried egg sandwiches. . . early mornings, her daughter’s labored breathing a descant to our chat.

Four months later I have to call her to say, ‘I have cancer’. I dreaded this and she says, “Don’t keep ANYTHING from me. Let me know.” I do what is hard first. That phone call. Telling my son.  I paid attention to how they responded so I could support them as they supported me long distance.  Even with cancer deaths in our family, they were not afraid, concerned yes.

Cancer scares people. Just the word, even now. Even with the improved treatments and inter-disciplinary, integrative care available. I knew in the long haul of my care people would fall by the wayside because it is the nature of the disease. Some I let go of because they needed the propping up and I had no strength for that. I had no interest taking care of anyone but me. This was new territory for me. I’m the strong one. I’m the one who shows up. I’m the soup-maker and coffee brewer. I do things.

When I was done with the poison and radiation and the rest. I was hollow inside. I had no me. I had this shell, this face, this skin that looks like me and the face of the strong woman. But I was fractured and frail and few saw it. I kept to myself more and more. I found that quote. I wanted to believe it at the time but did not.

Last year I came to terms with this altered body, this altered me. I came to find the grace in the change. I came to understand the core of myself, my essence and strong is not one of them. I find myself seeking women who seem solitary at parties, alone, not unhappy but alone. I’ve found new friends, kindred hearts.  I am not a strong woman, this is a label others have put on me so I put it on no one myself.

Next week I start Tamoxifen, prophylactic protocol for five years. There’s this lump, that’s not a tumor. I get all my estrogen sucked out of me. I’m told I will be extremely emotional over the next few months. I’m doing the hard stuff, again. It’s my life and no one can live my life but me. I pay attention to it. I pay attention to those around me but with detachment. I’m still dealing with depression and anxiety disorder but, see, I love my life and not giving it up for nothing, no how.

I had to speak up when face to face with openly expressed bigotry in the lobby of a Best Western waiting for the shuttle bus to take me to M. D Anderson.  Who could have imagined my cancer treatment would put me in such a position but it did. On August 20^th, 2008 I was diagnosed with rectal cancer, stage 2b. An adenoma polyp had grown at the distal end of the rectum and growing up against my vagina so the treatment plan was to shrink and hopefully kill the tumor and then have surgery. 2008, when the entire country was caught up in public battle: the presidential elections.

And with good reason, for the first time a man of color was in serious contention to be the next president.  But the only country I could focus on was the landscape outside the car windows as I traveled between Austin and Houston for 28 days of radiation treatment.  In my mind, that autumn is noisy with learning terms for treatment and care combined with the ugly side of presidential politics. Every waiting room in M. D. Anderson had a television, and each television was talking politics. Here were patients and medical professionals, care-givers and administrators moving through the world of cancer treatment and in the background political discussions on how to deal with health care. Each candidate, national or local opining and posturing. Some of us, after asking the group, changed the channel to house-fixing or a food channel. Some just turned off the televisions.

The last five days of my radiation treatment I spent alone at this hotel in the Medical Center. It seemed like a good choice: a shuttle to take me from the hotel to the hospital for free and each room had a refrigerator and microwave. Since I could only eat mac & cheese, apple sauce, mashed potatoes by this point, zapping food was easy. Only in retrospect I can say how I was very ill for at the time: chronically dehydrated due to crippling diarrhea; taking some sort of meds every two hours. At night, to help sleep, I was on good, old-fashioned tincture of opium. The night of the presidential elections I watched the results in a drugged state from my hotel bed. History was in the making while I was trying to make cancer history for my body.

Two days later, as the few days before, there is a clump of people in the lobby waiting for the shuttle. A hefty sized man rattles the daily paper, shuffles sections and tosses the paper in a huff on the coffee table beside me. He says to his wife gesturing with his chin: “Look at that.” I can’t help but hear this exchange for they were not talking quietly to each other. The woman picked up the paper, scanned the front pages then tossed it on the table disgusted. “Well,” she began, “I guess that’s what we’ve gotta expect now: blacks on the front page, blacks on the metro.”

I was stunned. I’d never heard people talk in such a way openly and in public. I have heard bigotry and racism but not like this. Something was different, I felt the wrongness. All during the campaign I thought of my parents how they didn’t teach us to feel we were better than anyone else because of religion, gender or color of skin. In second grade I came home gushing about my new friend Cort.

I thought Cort was cool. It was 1967; he wore oxford shirts with stripes. He was tall. He had the best tan I’d ever seen and I told all this to my mother. That Sunday I saw Cort with his family at mass in the small church we attended. Of course I pointed him out and my mother exclaimed: “Oh look, his mother looks just like Diane Carroll.” That’s it. It was around the same time I’d hear a new word on television or on the bus and then use it at the dinner table. One night I used the word ‘negro’ in reference to something on the news and my mother corrected me and said, “Black. They want be called black and you will do so.” She also had corrected me to say ‘Jewish’ and ‘Scot’.

I didn’t think much of these lessons as child. They were just part of my childhood memories along with go-go boots one Christmas and singing in choir. Many years later my son was accepted to an all-boy’s middle school. It was a new school run in part by the Jesuits and housed in picturesque Roxbury, a part of Boston, MA. It was an academically demanding school where the teachers, for the most part, were young college graduates doing a year of service. The parents chipped in to help keep the school clean and orderly, we had community suppers on Fridays. Of the fifty students, there were four white boys, one in each grade. I called it “polka-dot-school” for the variety faces was vast which created a stronger bond between us all.

One evening I was driving by the school after my son had finished there. I was (she admits openly) on the cell phone with my sister, Mary. She was talking about her neighbors in Jacksonville putting up a fence so her kids and the ‘other’ kids couldn’t play on their land.

Mary was incensed and we talked awhile about not caring about another’s skin color or religion or such. I called my mother soon after and told her how Mary and I had talked. I reminded her of meeting Cort. I remember a pause and my mother saying: “Your father and I figured there was enough hurt in the world and we didn’t want to add to it.”

My father had been Irish-Catholic in the times when signs in shop windows read: “No Irish Need Apply”. My mother’s father was a very successful business man and was the first Catholic to buy in the wealthy Protestant neighborhood in their small city.  This was during the Great Depression, my parents came from different classes but surrounded by the same cultural bigotry. As a little girl, my mother’s playmates were the Jewish children for the Protestant mothers would let their children play with Catholics.

I feel these lessons standing there in that lobby. My body hurt inside, lungs burning from small exertions and cold all the time. I hear my mother. I see Cort’s brown face and wonder what it feels like to see a tall, thin black man win the election. I can hear my father tell stories of what it was like for him when JFK won, how it was hard and yet freeing. I look at the couple hard.

“What do you expect? Obama was elected two days ago. What do you think – African-Americans are only allowed in the newspaper when they’re killing each other?” The words came out of me so fast I stunned myself. The lobby went quiet for everyone heard.  Some looked at me as if I’d just messed on the floor.  The others pulled out cell phones or examined their shoes. The couple, well the man when red, the woman walked out the door. I smelled, sensed fear in all of them, the fear of change being forced on a society that wasn’t quite ready.

When I arrived at the Radiation Center on time I was shaking, almost crying. I spurted out my story to the receptionist, a kind and efficient woman who’d watch me shrink from treatment over the month. “Never mind Mizz Irwin.” She said patting my hand, looking me firmly in the eyes, “You are not like those kinds of people and all we can do is ask God to change their hearts. You have enough on your plate without adding this kind of worry. Go along now. You’re a good woman, God knows that and so do I.”

In February I will be going to the AWP conference which will be hosted in Washington DC this year. I haven’t been in three years and I’m excited to see (and hug) friends, hear discussions, and soak up poetry. Then there’s the fact I’ll be in DC and can visit the various Smithsonian museums, the Library of Congress and Lincoln Memorial, which holds a new significance in my life now.

After the infusion of culture and language, I’ll take the Bolt and spend time with my grandson. Still an infant, I will rock him and coo at him and willing change his diapers rather than hand him over. I will have about five days, chunks of time, to absorb his scent when I hold him on my shoulder, listen to baby noises,  sing to him, recite poems in soft tones. I will imprint into my muscle memory the feel of his small frame when he lets the world know his displeasure, his need for food and that weight as he sleeps.  I will kiss his feet.

He is the first grand-baby for both sets of grandparents and as such, he gets to name us.  My mother wanted to be a “Nana” but my son called her “Nanny” and then just “Nan”. One of the ironies here is my mother’s name was “Ann” and she cringed if you called her “Annie”. Oh but her grandson could call her anything he wanted.  My grandmother was supposed to be called Grammy. . .but the first of her 18 grandchildren, said Mim-ee which got spelled, Mimi.

There’s identity in naming. Our parents name us. his parents, gave him a name once he was born. My mother didn’t choose a girl’s name because she was convinced she was having a “Jimmy”.  Yes, I was born wrong. My father said, “Ann” after her. But this was a name she never really liked, so she added the “Marie”. I was to be called both names after her friend, a woman who went to medical school in the ’40′s. But when my father held me, clean and dressed in the delivery room, he said: “Oh isn’t she a little Tinkerbell”. So really, my parents called me “Tink” and only Ann-Marie when I was in trouble.

When I married I got to choose what names I wanted. Did I want my family name or choose my husband’s.  Everyone kept asking. Charlie said, “I don’t care what you call yourself but you have to make up your mind.”  . I was helping my mother-in-law set the table for dinner. I realized she kept her family name as a middle name just as my mother had. Both made this choice of identity before feminism was a social movement.  I had a number of poems already published and never really had a ‘middle’ name, so as I laid out silver ware and glasses, the decision to keep my family name became self-evident. I had the audacity to claim all four names, and use them. It also made for great initials: AMMI.

As a parent I was Mommy. Ma. Mother. Mom. During one of those times when our kids test boundaries, my son called me by my given name. I asked nicely that he not to do that. I was his mother not his friend. He did it again while I was making dinner and he got on my last nerve. I turned on him, threatening him a wooden spoon (a teenager bigger than I at this point) and spat: “There is only one person on this earth that has the privilege of calling me Mom, Mother or Ma and you will do so!” I can still feel the heat in that moment.  Anyone and everyone calls me Ann-Marie.

Now his child gets to name me. Sometime this year as words form out of his babble, among the landmark first of solid foods, grasping things and first steps, he will find the name for this new identity. The anticipation is sweet and I am powerless over such joy.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!