By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

The emails come in a constant stream. Superintendent to parents, teachers to parents, parents to parents. This happening then. Keep that on your radar. Do this, make your kid do that, drop it off here, pick it up there. “Let’s try to make this abnormal year as normal as possible,” the last email says.  

I sigh, grab my coffee cup. Bring it to my lips then pause. It’s empty. “Keep things normal?” I laugh. “I’m gonna pass.”

“What?” my daughter asks, lifting the earphone from her head. She thinks I’m talking to her. 

“Nothing…” 

For months now (a year?), I sit only a few feet from my youngest child each day at our dining room table. I’m far enough away to be out of camera view, but close enough to uncap glue sticks, find loose sheets of white paper, spell f-r-i-e-n-d and w-e-a-t-h-e-r, and grab her math notebook from a pile that, without aid, would fall to the floor. This, right here, is my new office. My job for the foreseeable future, a permanent position in support of my children’s online learning. 

I will not do what’s requested in this email, this effort to keep normal the abnormal. But first I will try to talk myself out of my decision, and talk myself into what they want. One more trip to the store isn’t that big of a deal, is it? We have the time and patience to sit and coax and work on this, right? Two trips to the school—one to drop off, one to pick up—will be … worth it?

It’s not. And I know it. But I wait till the next day to send my reply. “Thank you so much for all your efforts, but my child will not be participating in …”  

Why do I draw the line here? With this? Now? I don’t know. It never dawns on me that I might be the only parent who simply cannot do one more thing. 

***

I walk in through the sliding glass doors. I notice the beat of my heart. I’m screened, as we all are these days, with questions and a temperature check. The smell of coffee ushers me past check in and down the hall to my pre-op appointment. I apologize to the man who’s just mopped the floor when I walk over his work to open the door on the left. I give my name to a woman behind clear plastic then sit. I read more emails, pretend I’ll answer them. A nurse with eyelashes an inch long calls me to a back room and draws my blood. We make small-talk about my fake tattoo—a feather—on my forearm. 

When we’re through, she walks me to a private room. I need an EKG. 

“Just take your shirt off and lay down with your head this way,” she says, motioning to the exam table and the machine against the wall. There’s also a desk and computer adjacent to two large windows facing a sidewalk. I wait, expectant. 

When she doesn’t seem to notice, I ask, “Can you close the blinds all the way?” 

“Oh!” she smiles, “I didn’t even notice.” 

I undress and end up apologizing because one of the leads won’t stick to the scarred skin on my chest.

On my way out of the building, I stop at the coffee kiosk. I order an expensive cup, the kind I don’t normally buy. “We don’t have that flavor,” she says. “It’s just the basics.” So I order something plain and predictable, trying not to be disappointed with taking whatever she can give me.  

This has been my only outing in the last two weeks, an appointment to make sure I’m healthy enough to get cut open. Again.

***

I drive down familiar roads to take my oldest daughter to her swim practice. We’d listened to the weather report—snow in the forecast!—then instead of comfortable silence, I ask how she’s doing. 

“Fine.”

“Yeah?” I wait. I ask a few more questions, stepping on her short answers like they’re stones. If I walk straight, just keep walking, the waterfall of words and emotions will soon dump out at my feet. And before long, she tells me what’s good, bad, hard, boring. What her friends are doing. What she misses, what she wants.   

We’re almost at practice. She stops, turns to me and says, “How are you?” 

Me?

“Oh. I’m … ok, I guess” I say. I pause now too. It takes me a minute to figure out, then lay out what’s on my heart. But I want to match her openness with my own. “I guess I just feel bad. That this whole year has been hard.” I stop at a stop sign, turn left. “It’s been hard on you guys, and because of me …” I do not expect to need to swallow hard to finish what I want to say, “... it’s been even harder.” 

The night before, we’d pulled out the calendar at dinner and counted backwards from my surgery date to mark the day we’d all need to start isolating again. She can go to practice today, but not next week. I cannot risk getting sick. 

***

Seven months ago, I had a double mastectomy for early stage breast cancer. It was successful in terms of clear margins and excising cancer. A grace. But it was unsuccessful in preserving my body. Of all I lost from that surgery, the chance to look like my old self was taken with it.  

Nearly every time after I shower, I stand in front of the foggy mirror to look at my body. For months I’ve been compartmentalizing. It’s me, but not me. I won't be like this forever, I tell myself. The surgeons will fix this. Mirror, Mirror—I start to say one day, then stop. No, please no. Don’t tell me. Don’t say it. I don’t need to hear I’m not the same woman I once was. 

***

When I was a kid, I slept through the commotion of my neighbor’s house catching fire. It was a Sunday morning and I moseyed out of bed to find my parents all dressed ready for church. “What time is it?” I might have asked. I remember my parents looking at me with surprise, “Are you really just waking up?” I’d slept through the sirens of multiple firetrucks right outside my windows. 

But these days, sleep doesn’t just escape me. It’s nowhere to be found. 

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Next to me, my husband breathes deep, rhythmic, steady breaths. I blink, blink again, try to focus on what I can’t see: sky above the roof, an eternity beyond. The future.

I lay on my back and though dressed, though covered, I am exposed. 

A couple of years ago, my marriage nearly fell apart. And I used to stare at this same ceiling in the same dark and cry out to God, begging him to fix me and this man I slept next to. I wrestled with anger, despair, hurt, hope until all I could do was let go. I could not make what was broken better. You want my marriage, God? I finally said in defiant surrender. Fine. Here. Take it. It’s yours. 

Tonight, I look into the beyond and say, “So what? You want my body now, too?” 

***

The offline effort to make the abnormal normal, the school activity I decided was unnecessary, turned out to be an on-screen activity for the class to share. 

“Do you want to play instead of doing school right now?” I ask my daughter while the kids and the teacher chat. 

“No, I want to watch.” 

“Remember I told you we weren’t going to do this? That we’d do something else special?” She nods, returns her eyes to her friends in little boxes on the computer. I sense a shift in her stoic face. 

“Are you sad?” I ask, scooting closer. 

She stares at me, quiet. 

“Are you disappointed?” 

Her chin quivers and her lips curl. Tears fill behind her little purple glasses. I’m usually so impatient, so quick to gloss over the drama of this child’s mercurial emotions. But this is different, for both of us.

“Oh Honey,” I say and I reach out my arms to pick her up out of her chair. I stand up. Her legs curl around my middle and her arms hug my neck. She buries her face in my hair and I wrap my arms around her back. I walk over to the couch and sit down. I am numb from my previous surgeries, but I can feel the hollow pain inside my chest.   

“I’m so sorry,” I say to her cheek. Then it hits me, the emotion of what I can’t fix, can’t hold, can’t control or make better. I pull away from her and say to her face, “I couldn’t do it.” And with that admission, I burst into tears. “I’m so sorry but I just couldn’t,” I cry and pull her to me again. 

As mothers, aren’t we always told we are capable of giving more, doing more, offering more, sacrificing more? 

Is a mom ever allowed to say enough? 
Or I can’t?
Or I have nothing left? 

I don’t want to be scared. Empty. Bare. I don’t want to put my body in someone else’s hands and say, “Do what you can with what’s left.” I don’t want my first thought to be about the blinds being open, and feeling vulnerable, or knowing I have to say no to even the smallest of things. 

I want to be layered. Protected. Impenetrable. Self-sufficient, limitless, and in control. 

But this is not who I am. 

My body, my marriage, my motherhood; friendships and family, even my work and my community. All of it, all of it, feels stripped down right now. 

My lips swell and my breath shakes. “I’m so sorry.” I whisper into her silky black hair. My daughter’s small body molds into mine, and we hold each other tight. Together, we release a sadness we cannot yet say and emotions we cannot quite yet name. 

It will be another day or so until this feeling settles and I remember it’s here, right here in this, where God does his work with me. When I am empty, he fills. When I feel exposed, he is my shelter. When I am naked, he covers.

Before I can be transformed, I first have to take everything else off. 

Photo by Lottie Caiella.