Ep.9: Telling B

The ‘Random Walk’ is a game I play with B.  We head out to the front of the house and toss a coin.  Heads go left, tails go right.  At every subsequent road junction we toss again.  Go left, go right? Go left, go right? In this way we meander through the centre of the city, sometimes looping back round on ourselves, frequently diving down streets we’d never usually choose to investigate, access roads and back alleys full of bins and wild flowers, paths leading to mysterious cul-de-sacs of oddly architectured 70s houses we never knew were there.  All the time we talk, share the stuff that mums and their girls share, sometimes we hold hands just for the joy of it and lots of the time we laugh.  We never invite anyone else on the random walk, this space is uniquely ours, its our game.  I sometimes take a pencil in my mind and rise up above us, following our progress across the map of the city, drawing a squiggle along our route, loving its utterly unpredictable nature, its curves and crosses, knowing these walks are something I will pocket and treasure for life.

A curious truism of the random walk is no matter how many times you toss the coin and how many times you take left or right, you always, always end up at Mieles ice cream parlour.  Always.  I can never quite see past cappuccino, for B it’s the raspberry and dark chocolate, although, as we take a straight line home, eating our ice creams and licking sticky fingers, I always wonder if I should have gone for the salted caramel.  Perhaps I should have tossed the coin.

All my routes now have an inevitable destination too, though one considerably less appetising, all routes now lead to mastectomy.  And I can’t put off telling B forever.

Increasingly I’m aware that the carefully constructed islands of time spent with B, where I keep cancer at bay, are shrinking.  The flood of tears that consume me every time I’m alone are starting to lap at the sandy edges and it’s becoming more and more uncomfortable keeping the knowledge of what’s round the corner from her.   But in a situation where everything in my life is spinning out of control, the one thing I want to control, more than anything else, is telling B.   Until I’m ready to tell her, the need to lock the knowledge of my diagnosis down, make it utterly secure and watertight, is becoming an obsession.  I keep walking through the possible scenarios, places, words, rehearsing what I’ll say, what she’ll say, but I can’t make any of it stick.  How the fuck do you tell your 11 year old daughter the truth without telling her the truth of how terrified you are of everything that’s swallowing you up? I don’t know how I’ll tell her I’m drowning without wanting to cling to her to keep me afloat, without worrying she’ll feel it’s her role to paddle us. 

In a spur of the moment decision I tell my team at work, all too aware that I’m already drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of hospital appointments, appearing then disappearing from the office, often as not to just weep, I figure they have a right to know.  So, at the end of the regular Tuesday morning team brief, after the usual business of the day and week, I just tell them. This is what I know, this is what I don’t, this is the lie of my land.  One of them gasped.  There’s nothing quite like seeing your predicament through someone else’s shock to underline just how shocking it all is.  And when they asked the inevitable ‘what is it we can do?’, I say all I need most from them just now is to hold the information to themselves.  Many of our colleagues have children at B’s school, no one must know about all this until B knows, I say I trust them to keep this close and closed.  I need them to help me protect her.

In the days following the realisation that I am going to need major surgery, that I can’t hide the knowledge of my cancer away from B forever, I spend time carefully constructing a net to catch her.  One side of this net I give to her school to hold.  I talk to the Head Teacher and together we form a plan which includes a few key staff who will be primed and ready.  We agree I’ll tell them when I’ve told B and what language I’ve used.  I want none of this to be left to chance.  

The other side of this net I give to B’s dad and his partner, again they patiently wait for my nod to take the strain.  I keep testing my weight against it, looking for the weak points, trying to judge if I’ve made it generous enough for her to feel its support without being trapped.

Each day I feel my way forward, wondering if the words and moment will come and they do come, quietly, calmly at the end of a gentle Saturday spent with David and B wandering through the town.  A day so random we could almost have been playing one of our games, we nose in a couple of galleries, visit a café for coffee and cake, play badminton, then buy fish and chips which we take home to eat by the fire watching TV.  When all 3 of us are full, curled and content I just tell her.  I tell her that in 10 days time I will have to go into hospital for an operation because there are cells growing abnormally in my left breast. I tell her that I’ll have a few days away then a long time recovering.  I tell her, because I know she’ll want to hear it from her perspective, that she’s going to stay with her dad if that’s what she wants while I’m away.  And she absorbs all this and says, ‘so basically you’re telling me you have breast cancer’ and I say ‘yes’.  Then she asks ‘will you be ok?’ and I tell her the surgeon says I will.   I ask her if she’s worried and she says she is a bit but if I tell her it will be ok then she believes me. 

And that was how, very gently, I tilted her world to align with ours.

Then David says – because no one has a keener eye for the value of humour in these moments - ‘you haven’t told her about turning blue!’ and suddenly the moment lifts and she’s giggling and laughing along with us as we share the potential side effects of my sentinel node biopsy the following week (which we’ve been told might turn me a bit blue for a few days).  ‘You’ll look like an avatar’ she giggles, impressed, ‘I’m holding out for smurf’ I say.  And there’s so much beautiful clarity in finally being able to be open and honest and united on all this.

The following week the school does its part and folds round her with just the right pressure for her to feel special without being smothered.  And she does feel special.  She takes a few of her closest friends into her confidence and, just like my colleagues at work, together they hold the knowledge of my cancer close.  And when she asks them to all keep it a secret, because that’s what she wants, to my astonishment they do.   When I bump into the mum of one of her friends at the hospital on one of my many visits, she acts with surprise to see me there, tells me that her daughter hadn’t uttered a word about me.  I realise B's friends have slipped alongside us to take hold of the net too and I’m deeply grateful to them for it.

I think we forget at the ability of children to cope, that when the moment calls for it, they can exhibit the most extraordinary empathy.  I remember when B was little, maybe only 2, and we stayed out at the play park beyond the wintry sun.  Suddenly the temperature plummeted, frost started to form almost instantly across the tarmac, sparkling in the orange street lights and it was freezing cold.  Cursing myself for being ill prepared and a fair distance from home I hurriedly wrapped her up in her buggy then started to take off my own jacket and jumper to wrap her up warmer still.  ‘No!’ she said emphatically, ‘mummy cold too’, and I was astonished at her ability at so young an age to walk in my shoes – or run as it turned out as I hurtled through the freezing dusk pushing the buggy as fast as I dared to get back to some warmth. 

And so it is B trips me again when, a few days later, I’m sitting on the floor of the spare room sorting paperwork and bills and she says, ‘will you need chemo?’. I ask her where she’s heard about it and she shrugs and says from a friend at school.  ‘I don’t know’, I tell her truthfully, ‘I won’t know til we get the results of my lymph node biopsy next week’.  ‘Don’t worry mum’ she tells me softly, ‘your hair will grow back’.  And I wonder how she knows that this is the one stupid thing that I’m fearing, that I’ll lose all the curls that she and I share, that David has already said, if it happens, he will shave his hair off too in solidarity and that we’ll get B to do it, make it fun. I wonder at her lack of fear in reaching into the dark part of my pain to comfort me and I love her so much it both buries me and bouys me but most of all I just wish I wasn’t right here, right now, having to deal with this.  I want to go back to the innocence of tossing a coin, go left, go right, instead of having to face cancer surgery and all it brings.