April 17, 2002
What do you do when your mom has cancer?.
How do you live when death seems to surround your every waking hour? And you are alone with her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
Well, you exist while you desperately want to live. Like you once did not too long ago.
Do you talk to people about it?.
Well, if you were me, you didn't because you never could talk about your feelings. Never could admit hurt and pain to people.
How do you put into English words your fears about the future?. How do you tell someone that you don't want to live anymore when each time they look at you, they see your future shinning brighter than theirs?.
My mother was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in the Spring of 2000. And my family ushered in the New Year reluctantly, as if we knew the horror it will bring to all our lives.
At first it was like we were all in a movie, like "One True Thing" where Meryl Streep, the mom had Cancer and, Renée Zellweger, the daughter had to come home to take care of her.
In my case, I was already home. I was born a Mama's child. The last and only girl in a
family of three.
My mother is my everything. My sister, confidante, best-friend and support system.
Growing up in the Nigerian culture where female babies were ultimately groomed to become good wives and great mothers, my up-bringing by my mother was not that diferent. But I was spoilt.
My mother getting Cancer in America had its advantages and disadvantages.
Good because she had a better chance of survivng with the medical attention she would and did get. Bad because America as wonderful as she is, is a lonely place to be when you come from people who hug you on the streets because they recognise the face of you mother or father in you. People who have no conception of 'old peoples home'.
In Nigeria, my mother's illness would have called for the most somber and yet beautiful family reunion in the history of my family.
Her female cousins would not have let me and my brothers go to bed hungry. They would have taken care of Mom like she was Jesus and they, Mary Magdalene reincarnated.
My cousins would have kept vigil in my stead day and night. Feeding her and bathing her if needed.
But no, America didn't give us a chance to regroup.
My brothers and I had to learn how to swim in mid-stream, how to fly with our clipped wings.
Floating like debris, afraid a gust of wind might blow away what's left of us.
So life went on as always, bringing new experiences, new sorrows, new plans. I had to redefine myself in a new way that was not at all my choice.
Lauryn Hill sings for her son in ZION that, "someday we'll understand how a
boy becomes a man". I wish someone had told me how a girl becomes a woman.
I had thought it happened when you are allowed to wear make-up out of the house, in
the company of men.
I had thought my womanhood came to me the day I fell in love or the minute I had my drop of blood from my first menstruation.
No one told me that it would come with misery, with trial and tribulation.
I would have rejected it if I had known.
I thought being a woman meant only being grown
enough to attract a man's eye.
But all that went away the day I saw my mom, my pillar of strength like a child, waiting to be taken into surgery, at the mercy of those strangers who now know her name because they get paid to do so.
Seeing my mom helpless, I had to be strong for her. I had always been comfortable in my own skin, happiest in my own company, but during mom's battle for life, I withdrew, even from myself.
I stopped talking to myself, but most importantly, I stopped talking to God. I stopped inviting Him into my daily life to be with me. And He let me as I fell deeper and deeper into my agony and timely depression.
Inside, I began to dislocate my bones one by one. Gradually, I peeled away my outer skin, even as unknown and scary as what lies beneath seemed to me. But my mother needed me to live, to breathe, to be strong and to go on.
So, unlike Renée Zellweger's character in the aforementioned movie, I didn't help my mom lose her life, I helped her find it and keep it.
And something happened with mom having cancer. It no longer has the power it once
had over us. Somehow, it, that scary and harbinger of evil word 'CANCER' became just another English word like 'come'. Because Mom resolved to fight it, with everything she has, she fought it.
With the best friends who rallied around us with love, prayers and support, she fought. With acceptance and faith in God, she fought.
And a year after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mother is still fighting.
She has long regained her strength, energy, vitality and hair which she lost during her Chemotherapy treatment. And her baeutiful caramel skin is healed up from radiation treatment.
She is once again THE MOTHER. And I, willingly, gradually, am going back to being THE DAUGHTER.
And my family is closer than we ever was before cancer came along.
I too have regained my strength, energy and vitality back. And I have learnt many a lesson from this experience, from this amazingly disastrous year.
I learnt that love and hard work heal broken hearts, not time.
I learnt that parents especially mothers are not perfect, they are someone's babies
too and somethimes, they too need to be mothered and fathered.
I learnt that it's alright to admit pain, sadness and discomfort to people because we are
all each other's angels.
I learnt that life is a series of unplanned events happeneing when you are too busy planning it.
It's the little minute by minute, day to day experiences that make a life. As each day passes, it goes straight into our memory book. So we always have the power to say and do what
will be written in our memory book.
Now, although I still plan on becoming a very important citizen of this modern world, I am no longer obsessed with worldly things, people's opinions of me or fitting into an existing group in modern America.
I now know that it doesn't matter where we are, home is where the heart really is. Home is where true love finds you.
And as long as Mom is alive, my home is with her 'cause
even as I am my own woman (you go, girl), she's still my heart and my true love.
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The Year I Became A Woman