Such are the vast differences between my spouse and I. While life has taken its fair share of jabs at me, I know that nothing bad can last forever. Wallowing serves only to make a crummy situation seem worse. On the other end of the spectrum is my husband, who takes life so personally that every single thing that happens, he believes is happening specifically to him and therefore believes affects him more substantially than anyone else. Being unable to distance himself from random circumstance leaves him prone to long lasting bouts of depression and nearly unbearable moodiness. And to be quite frank, it’s gotten well beyond the point of getting old.

To me, part of life’s grand experience is to learn, to absorb, to grow and to evolve. I don’t WANT to be who I was at 18. I love it that certain lessons have taught me to still my tongue so I don’t hurt feelings, which is truly never worth it. The years have worn soft my edges, giving my demeanor a patina that only comes with time and oft-repeated faux pas.

But the man I married is the exact same kid I loved and swore I couldn’t live without when I was just a kid myself. I remember praying that if God would make him mine, I would never ask for another thing, so long as I lived.
Well, I’m not a kid anymore and my vision of God has changed. I’m asking for different favors. Favors like, “Please, let me love him again,” and “Please, if only he would TRY,” – try to find a job, try to be a partner in this marriage, try to see that life isn’t something that just happens to you…the list goes on and on. And the thing is, I’m worth trying for.

I’m so tired of being the only adult in this relationship. Men, how is it reasonable to let your wife work 50 hour weeks while you hang out on the couch with your buddies playing video games? And when she walks in, the house is a mess and you ask her what’s for dinner??? Shouldn’t there be some masculine pride thing that wouldn’t allow this sort of slacker-ish behavior?

I don’t want to wake up one day and wish I’d had the nerve to speak up. Living without love – what kind of shoddy existence is that?!

No answers forthcoming tonight. Sparing feelings is just second nature these days, though no one seems overly concerned with mine.

See, I used to be sumthin’ – ya know? I was fierce. I was foxy. I had a presence, damn it. Now I feel invisible and small. I feel old and tired and sad.

I don’t love him anymore and I’m too much of a coward to say it out loud.

Granted, you get to be upset if you have family member or a dear friend who is sick, but you don’t get to make it about you. Someone else’s cancer isn’t about you, so you don’t get to ride around on the super-cool bandwagon called "Hey, this person I know has cancer, how sorry do you feel for me?" No one is going to throw a parade in your honor because you’re just so brave, "dealing with it all." Have I mentioned that you should maybe get a life of your own?

Oh, and as a complete aside — I’m also sick to death of pink ribbons and pink KitchenAid mixers and pink scarves. Guess what? Pink M&M’s haven’t cured ONE WOMAN of breast cancer. Not even if you buy ALL of them. Not even if you buy all of the M&M’s, mixers, scarves and ribbons. Not even if you eat all of the pink M&M’s in cookies you mixed in the pink mixer while wearing all of the scarves and ribbons at the same time. Not even then.

It’s just, well, up till she decided to quit chemo, I think deep down I was still hoping for a miracle or something. Some caped crusader would come and kick some cancer ass, maybe. And while logically I knew this wasn’t ever going to happen, the kid in me who isn’t ready to lose her mom was still wishing for a better outcome. And now? Well, not reality is sinking in and my rose colored glasses are suddenly much, much clearer.

And so I’ll just muddle through it all somehow because there is no other option and know that she made the right decision, even if it’s hard to deal with today.

Really, I have no cause for complaint – I’m healthy and I can do pretty much anything I want to do, at any time I want to do it. I watch Mom, having to allow us to vacuum her floors or clean her cat’s litter box and I know it’s got to be insanely hard to ask for that kind of help. Doesn’t matter that it’s a pleasure for all of us to help her in any way we can – the asking would still be difficult for such an independent person.

Picking up her chemo at the clinic last night was a strange sort of thing. How such a small bottle can hold so much poison and be worth so much money is a wonder. Almost three thousand dollars’ worth of pills that will kill you while they’re killing the cancer because chemo kills indiscriminately. They pump you full of toxic waste that makes you feel like dying so that you can live a few weeks longer. I’m sure to some, it seems reasonable.

At least the chairlift people managed to get that installed so she’s able to get up the stairs with her broken-and-un-fixable hip. Her pain meds have been tripled and her pain stays at "Oh, about a seven." That’s on a scale of 1-10. There’s cancer in her bones and cancer in her liver and cancer in her throat. "It’s an aggressive cancer," they say, and it’s good they pointed that out because I’m clearly not bright enough to grasp the obvious. And she keeps giving me all her clothes because she’s so tiny now that nothing fits anyway.

For me, it’s been a rough week. But I’m healthy and I have no cause for complaint.

You’re only 62. You spent your life taking care of your body. You fed it good stuff to keep it healthy and strong. You fed it the occasional slice of chocolate cake when celebration is in order or when your heart was broken. You got plenty of sleep, some exercise when the mood struck and you took your toes for pedicures sometimes because a pedicure is good for your soul (and your soles).

Then, one fine day, some doctor told you that your cancer is back and it brought lots of its crappy metastatic friends, too – the friends who never know when to gracefully leave the party. He tells you that the rest of your life is shorter than you had anticipated. A LOT shorter. Your hip breaks on you because, well, apparently just because. You can’t help but wonder how your body can betray you like this.

You’re only 62. And your daughter posts her rage about it all on a blog you’ll never read because she’s angry and sad and just not coping well with any of this, other than writing it all down for complete strangers to read. She wants to hit someone or break things but she knows it won’t make you better and will only cause you more pain. So she’ll just keep writing it down.

You’re only 62.

Now, we all know I’m kind of weirded out by other things other people have touched, but for some reason, shopping lists intrigue me. It’s fun to see what sorts of things people find meaningful enough to jot down on paper, and not just grab in a moment of weakness when passing by a display. See, for me, things like "Twinkies" or "home permanent" or "Gogurt" never make the list. Sure, I have occasionally succumbed to the call of the Twinkie while in the store, but to think of it ahead of time and write it down? That just doesn’t happen.

Anyway when I see stuff I rarely/never buy on someone else’s list, I can’t help but wonder what sort of person it was who wrote it down. Heck, sometimes I see things on lists that I don’t even recognize, so then I have to investigate like some long ago explorer, searching the supermarket aisles for untold treasures and mysteries. I don’t think I’ve ever found a rare treasure or mystery from someone else’s list, but hope springs eternal.

The point is, people are freaky. If you read things they write, you’ll find out all sorts of stuff. Stuff that maybe you wish you hadn’t found out, but still. If nothing else, it makes for an amusing anecdote to share at a cocktail party.