Parenting daughters is a tricky business

I’ve been feeling progressively better lately. So much so that I feel like I’m waking up from a deep freeze, or a bad dream. Sometimes, I’ll forget that there are certain foods that I still can’t eat without getting horrible heartburn, but it’s nothing like it was with the previous chemo regimen. So far, I’m tolerating this current one much better. I am starting to get tingling in my feet and legs, some bone pain, and fatigue, but nothing horrible. This has me wanting to distance myself drastically from the last 10 weeks. Even if it’s just for a week or two, should new symptoms start to accumulate and put me back in bed. Because of that, I’m refusing to write about my cancer this week. It has shrunk the parameters of my world over the last four months, and as I reengage with things and people who are really important to me, I want to not think about the cancer for a bit. I even treated chemo today as a chance to sit back and listen to an audio book by David Sedaris guilt-free, while nurses fussed around me, and I pretended they were fussing about anything other than cancer.

Instead, I want to write about my favorite topic: My daughter. Yesterday was the 9-year anniversary of the day we adopted her. She is starting her last year of elementary school in a few weeks, and has firmly planted herself into tween-hood. All of this makes me reflect on her, parenting her, parenting girls, parenting tween girls. It’s a tricky business. Perhaps it’s a tricky business to parent boys as well; I don’t know, and probably never will. But as Miko grows older, I recognize in a way I only grasped intellectually before, that to successfully parent a girl in a society that undervalues her talents and intellect and overvalues her looks, is a scary and frustrating endeavor. Maybe especially for a mom who tends toward the anxious. It’s not frustrating because of Miko, mind you. Miko is this fantastic child who is wholly and uniquely, well, Miko. She’s got this way about her that shows she knows what she’s doing, even when she doesn’t. When she was 10 months old, we took our first plane trip with her. My sister said that if the plane crashed, her dad and I would probably perish on contact, while Miko would somehow survive and toddle her way back to Seattle to find family. There was something about my sister’s scenario, however hyperbolic it may have been, that rang true. No, parenting her is difficult because of all the messages she (and I) receive multiple times daily, messages for which I feel this need to maintain constant vigilance. Also, because she is adopted, meaning she was entrusted to me to raise the best way I know how. And I take that responsibility seriously. I want her to be strong and independent, but not aloof or lonely. Considerate of others, but not self-deferential. Ambitious, but not ruthless. Well-rounded. Confident. Happy. Self-aware. Secure. Capable. You know, all the things.

And largely, she is. Like I said, I have this fantastic child. But she’s at this age, this scary (but exciting and fun) transitional age, in which the opinions of and interactions with others outside of her dad and I are becoming more and more important. Maybe especially because she’s a girl, and so is socialized (and perhaps hardwired, but I don’t feel like getting into that debate here) to value the interpersonal more. So she notices when people comment first (and sometimes only) on her appearance. She hears that this is important. And the thing is, she is a particularly beautiful child. She also has this look about her that she is older, or more worldly than she really is. In truth, her favorite kind of day would consist of playing dress-up with her best friends, pretending like she’s part of the Arthurian Legend. Or doing an art project. Or cooking. Or playing mad-libs over the phone with her cousin. She still thinks boys are “gross” and “dumb,” unless they are little boys who let her boss them around. Then she thinks they are cute, endearing. She’s not particularly worldly. She’s firmly 10.

But she’s perceptive, and she notices that people find her looks to be important. This is a hard one to navigate for me. I went through a wildly awkward stage that lasted for years, and I believe I’m better for it. When she tries to elicit confirmation about her looks from me, it feels like such a complicated answer (ok, I’ll admit here that this is in part because I am, by nature, neurotic, and have this insatiable need to make everything more complicated that it really needs to be). I will tell her that yes, of course she is beautiful, but that that is the least of her many wonderful qualities. To which she usually rolls her eyes, establishing that she thinks I am so Mom. Sometimes I will tell her to never let someone try and make her looks the most important thing about her, never let them make her smaller than she really is. To which she’ll answer something like, “Mom. I’m Miko. Nobody can make me smaller.” And then I smile, and relax with it a little. A little. For a little bit.

But then we will meet someone new, and more often than not, the first thing he or she says to my daughter is something about her appearance: what she’s wearing, her face, etc. And I just want to jump in front of her and yell, “No! Ask her what she’s reading. Or better yet, what she’s writing, or creating. Because she is, every day. Ask her about her favorite hobbies, what makes her happy. Elicit her opinion on some issue going on in the world, even if you don’t think she knows anything about it. Because even if she doesn’t, you’re telling her that her opinion matters, and that it’s important to care about issues bigger than oneself. Don’t reinforce the idea that her world should rotate on how she looks to others!”

But that’s too neurotic even for me. So I don’t. Instead, I hold it in, and watch as she navigates these interactions herself, often interjecting some of these subjects on her own, without my interference. And I relax, realizing that I can worry all I want, but Miko came to me fantastic, and is going to be fantastic no matter what I do.

Still. Parenting daughters is a tricky business.

The Mothering

I’ve been trying to think of how to describe how chemo makes me feel. Mostly, when people ask, I say something like, “I’m just tired and nauseous.” And while that’s true, it’s not complete. It’s just what I say when I’m too tired to think of any other words. A more complete description would start with, “Everything feels more, bigger.”

Mostly my senses. Sounds are louder. All sounds. Which makes them annoying, and sometimes almost painful. Everything is brighter, and I feel like I’m squinting a lot to keep out the blaring light. My skin feels weird, and when I tried to clap at Miko’s end-of-the-year program, it hurt. My taste is off, and is both more intense and less pleasant. Same with smells. With these two in particular, it’s not like I taste the good things and smell the sweet smells more intensely. It’s more like the smells and tastes are more pronounced, and mostly gross. I go around saying, “Why does everything smell SO bad?” and am met with puzzled looks. All of this is very overwhelming and makes me irritable. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse into the life of someone on the Autism spectrum with sensory issues. Everything is overwhelming, and it’s all too much. One night I had the fun experience of feeling as if my senses were all mixed up; I heard the dryer spinning and became so dizzy I couldn’t walk straight.

And then there’s my brain, which is on a definite slow-down. I do things like mix up the plot lines of Game of Thrones and Merlin, a show Miko watches. They aren’t super similar. Or stop midway through a sentence because I can’t remember what I was saying. The other day, it literally took me hours of thinking that I felt like eating something bready to come up with…. toast. The confusion of my slow brain combined with the confusion of my overactive senses shortens my fuse, and makes me irritated at all people around me. Lucky them.

That leads to the mothering. The hardest part about chemo is the mothering. Not because I have a difficult child. I don’t. I have an incredible kid who makes me meals, good ones, and keeps herself busy with art projects when I am too sick to interact. But that’s the thing, the being too sick to interact. She only has one summer as a ten-year-old, and I hate to think of her spending it this way. Being patient with a sick mom, being understanding when she has to miss out an an activity because the other kid has a cold and I can’t chance it, having no immune system. And yet she does, with grace. But I see her face, when I’m short with her because she dares to act like a ten-year-old when I’m feeling especially crappy, or when plans change because I’m not able to go through with the originals. I see her disappointment when I can only make the last part of her school program. Don’t get me wrong, she has a lot of fun, too, thanks to all of the sweet others who step in. And to even more others who are conspiring to make the rest of her summer pretty fantastic. So maybe it’s more of a selfish thing that makes mothering with chemo hard. Maybe it’s not the changing of her 10-year-old summer that I’m lamenting. Maybe it’s that I only have one summer as a mother of a ten-year-old, and I feel like I’m watching it from the sidelines, only able to sometimes engage. Or worse yet, and this is hard to admit, but sometimes I feel so sick that I can barely get myself to care that I’m not engaging. And that, with the sensory overload and dull brain, makes me angry.