I always think I’m doing okay at life, taking it in and relishing its good things like I mean to. I even take pride in how often I avoid its speed and chaotic filling up of every single day. But then a holiday comes, four quiet days to do only the things I love most, and it’s sort of like seeing them again after a really, really long sleep.

Oh, hello, tall boy. You’re twelve now, and I knew that – I noticed after all, when you first came into life and every anniversary of that day since. Still, it’s nice to look at you, watch you savor your happy things as I savor mine.

And speaking of my happiness, hello, dark table. You’re the largest of the prettiest things I notice at home. You make supper better. And birthday cake. And the rounded edges of folded shirts and pajamas. I like your rich color and your still-brand-newness, which reminds me we just don’t see you enough.

I haven’t seen you in a while. That’s what I say to the top of the bright white dryer after sorting and putting away the heaps of things that have piled there. And what a useful white shelf sits above you when it’s not crammed with things that don’t belong. Little white vase and white flower, photo of my sisters in a frame, detergent, softener, and scrub brush: Welcome to my zen.

I’ve been meaning to finish you for a while, Ms. Voskamp. And you didn’t disappoint. This post is sort of inspired by you really. A list of noticed things. And a bright hello to the books unfinished on my computer or not yet begun in a folder marked ideas. I had time to think of you this weekend – big, long quiet after late, creative nights and long, restful sleep. I like you again, very much actually. I’ve planned our whole future together. I hope you cooperate, but I’m not worried. You’re my favorite work.

Hello boy of ten. I see those eyes and how they’re aging you. A child’s are found about half-way chin-to-crown. Did you know that? Yours aren’t there anymore. And they crinkle when you smile. And they’re Papa’s. Except they’re not when I take the time to look. They’re yours. All and only yours. Just like your comedy and your heart.

My bright, bright sunshine of five. I see your cheek before I press my own to it, praying I’ll never forget how that feels. Your hand still wants mine when we walk, and I love that. You’re right, you know. I said, “Will you always stay little for me?” And on my lap you said, “I think not.” And your brave and blatant fineness with leaving me someday made me almost as happy as the fact that you happily curled up with me then.

Hello, cat’s purr and heater’s whir and the ticking of the clock. Hello twentieth-century fox, how I love your sound. I’ve missed the noticing of all these happy things, the deep, satisfaction of really seeing them and truly taking them in. This morning I sat alone with the bread and the cup. I love how they feel, I love the lingering taste, I love the hot tears I welcome every time I hold them and think of the one I believe in who made me and watches as I notice all these happy things.

And it mattered to me, because it’s my anniversary. And I’m married to one of the two good friends who taught me to parallel park the night before my driver’s test. I mean technically I knew how before, but they LET ME PRACTICE ON THEIR VEHICLES. I wonder if their parents would have let them do that if they had known. I mean, just for curiosity sake, what do you suppose an insurance plan might do if a permit-wielding 16-year-old scrapes the side of your 16-year-old’s car while learning to parallel park or crashes into your 16-year-old’s truck when he jokingly told her to floor it and she obeyed?

It didn’t happen. I mean, I didn’t hurt anyone’s car that night, and I ACED the parallel parking portion of my test the next day.

And five years and some days later, I married one of those guys who made me a parallel parking rock star. And fourteen years after THAT  … I totally still have it.

I’m pretty sure it’s a sign.

I was reminded of that this weekend. Jake and I are still in that mama-child stage when I’m the best one. The one he wants to tuck him in and change his clothes and definitely the one he asks for dessert. But one night as we walked to our car beside a wooded area, we heard a loud crashing and booming kind of sound. Someone thought it might be fireworks, though we couldn’t see them. And suddenly Jake was beside Michael, and he slipped his hand into his dad’s. He didn’t cry or look particularly scared. But he did suggest that the crash and the boom sure sounded like a T-Rex.

Sometimes only Daddy Power will do.

I’ve just finished Committed: A Love Story, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Gilbert is the author of EAT, PRAY, LOVE, which I loved both as a travel/spiritual memoir and as a Julia Roberts film. If you’ve heard the book is intensely self-indulgent, perhaps with the words me-me-me thrown in, then I feel compelled to point out that it is a memoir, which by its very definition is kind of one person’s take on the world, their place in it, and what any given thing means to them. I find her writing voice so charming I want to drink it with red velvet cupcakes on the side. Only occasionally do I wonder if it’s quite exhausting to think so deeply about everything around you, and then I realize I don’t need to wonder. It’s pretty much my vocation as well. Similarly it wasn’t until very near the end of this book that I wanted to shake her the tiniest bit and ask if she ever just went with the flow already. (Fortunately, her husband-to-be did this instead, and I was back to the drinking and the cupcakes).

Elizabeth Gilbert has, in her own words, an extremely Greek view of life, otherwise known in my circles – which are decidedly Hebrew (see book for details) – as secular. Though she is very spiritual, her religion is best defined by the line in the first memoir and its film, “God dwells within me, as me.” I only say that to give you fair warning in case you only want to read about marriage from a person with your worldview.

Technically, Gilbert and I have a different worldview. Yet, I loved almost every moment of this journey with her. The journey is this: Having survived, but barely, a heart-wrenching divorce and its aftermath, Gilbert has fallen in love but completely renounced the institution of marriage, only to find that she will have to marry the man she loves in order to live in the United States with him, which she very much wants to do. So while immigration does its thing, she does hers. She studies marriage and thinks about it and talks of almost nothing else for ten months, trying to come to peace with it – why we do it, how we can possibly keep it together, and whether or not women are doomed to be lost within it.

I dare you to read the book and not find yourself somewhere inside it. Even if you are single and wish to remain so, you’re in there. This was my favorite part. Maybe it will entice you.

With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness…

Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone’s contradictions – someone’s idiocies, even – is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table in the daily acceptance of your partner’s most tiresome, irritating faults…

These paragraphs, and other beautiful paragraphs around them, remind me of my favorite theory, which perhaps describes my religion, that God is not really in you or in me, but in this little space in between.

I’m convinced just about anyone could find something of value in this honest, mostly objective, yet wholly personal look at marriage. It’s a book that makes you ask yourself questions like, Why did I or Why do I want to and can that desire sustain the thing I’ve built or hope to build? It celebrates contradictions and absurdities like our unshakeable belief that marriage can probably work even if we’ve failed at it before or the way we want to be wholly individual and nonconformist yet we want to be these things very near another human who’s chosen us.

It celebrates the wives and the aunties, the Hebrew and the Greek. It recognizes all of it, the history, the philosophy, the inexplicable. In the end, Gilbert finds a way to come to peace with marriage and the life she’s found, and through her delicious wording and variety of perspectives, I think any person, married or single, could read it and come to peace with their own.

The happy memories are triggered by a song I loved back then or a movie we watched every day or just anything really. And it always makes me think, how will I look back on now? Won’t I be glad I worked from home? Instead of mad I hadn’t made more money? I want to live in a bigger house, one with a basement or family room where the kids can play their games while grownups visit. But then, with so many rooms to spread out in, how I’ll miss now when the boys squish together in the same chair to watch television. I want to give them their own rooms, but then I’ll miss now when they deny one room completely and all pile into the same space to sleep. Two in bunk beds, one on the floor on a pallet he calls his couch. And anyway, if I’m going to look back on it so fondly then, can’t I find a way to be totally satisfied with it now?

Lately, I never tell Jake to hurry up. I watch him as he pays such close attention to his sandal straps and carefully, deliberately matches the Velcro parts together. I stand still, not even tapping my foot, as he gets into and out of the car as if the car is as much a destination as the store is, or our home. And I learn from him. To slow down and notice what I’m doing when I do it. To be glad I’m alive, and with him.

It’s so fun I almost don’t care that I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever have hair again. (ALMOST IS A HUGE UNDERSTATEMENT. I CARE.)

I gotta show you another picture from yesterday too. It’s extremely cool. But I think it’s the reason I went all Recent-Cancer-Survivor on my kids last night and grouched at them for being glum. I was all, Dudes, in the last hour you’ve grouched about the cape you can’t find and the fact that I wouldn’t make up math problems for you for fun while I was cleaning the kitchen and the fact that I wouldn’t let you go on the internet to find math problems, and the fact that you missed the beginning of Shark Boy and Lava Girl while you were in the tub. I did not say, BUT NONE OF THIS IS CANCER, as I wanted to.

And, yea, I think the reason I freaked out on them is because this picture was all it took for me yesterday. It’s my niece Violet. And it made me wonder all day, are grownups EVER this happy? And if not, why aren’t we? It makes me want to sing in the car and dance more and laugh way, way more often. And for some reason I couldn’t figure out why my 5 and 9-year-olds didn’t feel this way too.

I should have shown them the picture.

It’s been a little over a year since I guest hosted Serenity’s blog. At that time we were looking forward to celebrating a very important anniversary for Serenity, being five years cancer free. Well, it turns out we’re not done with that trial quite yet. Since then, Serenity has undergone major surgery to remove a cancer that returned in her lung, and she is just beginning to start her third round of an aggressive chemotherapy treatment. She’s endured things physically, mentally, and emotionally that I’m sure she didn’t think she could. Let me tell you, she is as tough as nails and as brave as they come. She is an amazing person who has refused to let cancer define her. She hasn’t stopped being a wife, a mother, sister, daughter, and friend. She is continuing to live life to the fullest, and she just happens to be the love of my life.

Fifteen years ago today, Serenity and I went on our first date. I remember that she didn’t eat much, which my dad said was a good thing. I don’t remember what we talked about, or many other details about the date for that matter, but I remember knowing that I loved her. We had known each other since we were ten, and there was always an infatuation there, but this was the first official step towards a relationship. Best decision of my life. We got married about a year and a half after that first date. So I wanted to say happy anniversary, Serenity, of that day we took our first step towards the rest of our lives. I love you more today than yesterday, and I’m sure less than tomorrow.

I have a secondary purpose in sharing my thoughts today. I’m writing this for my boys, because someday soon they’ll be men. And I’m doing my best to teach them how to be real men, how to be strong, respectful, honorable, honest, trustworthy and loyal. And I want them to read these words, and understand that it is right and good to fall in love with a woman, and be devoted only to her. I want them to know that real men aren’t afraid to look into the eyes of the woman they love, and say “I love you”…every day, for the rest of their lives. Boys, down the road, when you find that one, give your all to her. Be willing to do anything for her to be successful in reaching her dreams. Be the one she can talk to, when no one else would understand. Don’t be a coward when she needs to cry, sometimes for no reason (at least not one a man would understand). Lay down the things that are important to you, if she needs you – for anything. You’ll find that nothing is as important as she is. Be her friend, her best friend. When she is facing hard times, be a rock she can lean on. And when the good times come, savor them, and don’t take for granted all that you’ve been given. I love you guys, and I’m proud of you. I expect great things from the three Bohon boys.

So I guess while I’m at it, this is for any of you other men out there, especially any of you who are raising boys. Teach them what is right. They’ll love in life how they’ve been loved. They’ll treat people how they see you treating people. Be a man, and you’ll teach your son how to be one. So go grab your wife, in front of your kids, look her in the eyes, and tell her you love her – then plant a big one on her.

Michael

I like the idea of inspiring you by how great I’m doing during this – let’s call it a trial (since I don’t want to use on my blog the kinds of words I’m really thinking) – but today I totally can’t do that. Instead I come to you because this is one way I can reach outside myself when all I really want to do is curl up in a ball and think about my trouble.

I have a PICC line in my arm. That’s how they administer the chemo every couple of weeks, for a full week, three different times. (That’s my schedule, which I didn’t mention before because I was trying to follow appropriate blog safety rules, which frankly go out the window every time I post a picture of my children.) And sometimes during the day, too many times, and sometimes at night, I want to rip it out so badly I can hardly stand the sensation. I want it to go away. It freaks me OUT. “If I’m gonna go to the hospital for anything, it’s gonna be for this THING STICKING OUT OF MY [ARM].” (Classic Joey. From Friends.)

Then there are the side effects which keep coming like a torrent, like the nurse practitioner who warned me about them actually spoke them into STONE and I brought that stone home with me so my body could follow it like a happy little checklist. I don’t like the tiniest one. I don’t like it because no matter how tiny it is, it REMINDS me what I’m going through and how awful it is.

And today, sometimes, I was overwhelmed by all of it.

So instead I gotta tell you how good other people are. I gotta tell you about this guy, the 5-year-old, who started a new adventure today to ride the bus home from school because we think it will be easier through this process. And you know what he said after the full two minutes he was on there? “Whew! What a ride! I want to do that EVERY day.”

And I gotta tell you about his dad who, taking all things into account, has pretty much the same mental onslaught that I do – and yet he has taken on different responsibilities at work, which is pretty much the OPPOSITE of the leave I’ve taken just so I can take the time to cry every now and then and rebel against the need to eat every single time I have to. And I gotta tell you how he came up with the brilliant plan that I take these three weeks of chemo, and I give one to each of my boys, like I’m birthing them all over again. Which I kinda am – into our new life together, cancer-free. Technically I’m still working on the first since I have a couple weeks to recover from Chemo Week 1, so John’s new life hasn’t quite begun and Drew and Jake are barely thought of. Which is weird, because they’re all here, kissing my head, bringing me food, drying my tears, picking up after themselves, picking out movies to watch that they remember I actually enjoy as well, and doing their lives, without complaining, without confusion by some of the adjustments to it, without complaint.

Look at them tonight instead of me. I know I am. I have better little boy quotes for what I’m going to say when this is all over. “That was berry hard,” comes to mind. And, “You know what happens when you leave that place? You feel good.”

But if I had any moxy. If I had half the wonderful my children do, I’d smile and say it.

Whew. What a ride.

I think the best part of cancer is probably the gifts. For instance, after surgery the first time, my mother-in-law gave me a beautiful journal. It has the Willow Tree angel, Serenity, on its cover and says, “Calm the soul, free the spirit.” I love blank books, and those who know and love me keep me pretty well stocked in them. And since I don’t journal every day, it sometimes takes me a while to get to each of them. You know what blank book I am writing in now that I have cancer again? That gift from Jane.

My younger sister, Charity, got married in 2005, when I was first diagnosed. And I guess she made a decision then to name her first daughter after me. In 2008, after losing her first baby through miscarriage, Charity had an ultrasound to see if her three-month pregnancy was still healthy the same day that I found out a suspicious spot in my bone wasn’t cancer again. The baby of that ultrasound became Nola Serenity six months later, because Charity decided you shouldn’t only get someone named after you if you die.

The day Nola turned two – the very day – a very nice, very sorry nurse told me that my lung biopsy showed cancer after all. And a friend of Charity’s reminded her Nola is named for me because I lived.

This week, the day of my first appointment since being given the diagnosis again, while I talked to a thoracic surgeon about the surgery that should cure me of cancer but basically terrifies me otherwise, that very day only a few hours away, Nola got a sister named Violet.

What do any of these things mean? Maybe nothing in the whole scheme of things, but everything to me. They mean we’re connected, we’re not alone. They mean life and death are so tangled up that you can almost always rejoice more than not if you try hard enough. They mean that sometimes things come back around. Some of them you really wish wouldn’t. Most of them you’re so glad you get to experience again.

We celebrated a few things – two anniversaries, my five years cancer-free, my dad’s fifth year of recovery from an addiction, plus lots and lots of children and many years of love.

And on Sunday we gathered in this room for church. And we read things from the bible and talked and maybe cried a little. Some of us cried a lot. I did, for instance, when we sang the song about God’s feelings for us that’s titled How He Loves. “He loves us, oh how he loves us.” That’s the chorus, over and over. And I couldn’t even sing it because I just cried instead.

The last time I saw the song performed, it was with cardboard testimonies. People held up cardboard with their former troubles and sadness on one side, then flipped it to their victories and happiness on the other. Things like this, for instance, from my niece. You can see what’s on the cardboard when you roll over the picture:

And as we sat in this room my mom now calls the Sanctuary, and Dan played the piano and those who know it well sang the song, I didn’t even remember that performance that had also sent me directly to The Ugly Cry with its stories of redemption. Instead I was just feeling loved. And it was only later that I thought of the cardboard testimonies we could have shared…

Cancer

Addiction

Miscarriage

Separation

Loss

And then, of course, I thought of that room which for the time at least held nothing but the victory to all those things. Health, recovery, babies, love, and life. And then I really cried when I heard the words again. He loves us, oh how he loves us. I hope you can hang onto that if your cardboard looks more like trouble right now than redemption. And even if you can’t, it’s still true. And I hope you get the chance to feel it soon.