Modifications

“Is there anything I should be doing or not doing to lower my chances of lymphedema, after having lymph nodes removed and that whole area repeatedly nuked?” I asked my radiation oncologist at my weekly checkup. This whole cancer thing was dragging on longer than I ever pictured and the last thing I wanted was to finally finish treatment, only to have my arm swell up like Baymax.

“Don’t lift more than ten pounds with your right arm,” she answered.

“Sure, yeah okay,” I said. Seemed reasonable. Give my shoulder and arm a break. After a lifetime of being right-handed, it was time ol’ lefty carried its weight around here anyway. “For how long?” I asked, gathering my things and getting ready to head out.

“A year,” she said.

Record scratch. A year? A whole year?

I started asking specifics. What about laundry baskets? What about my Kitchenaid stand mixer? Oh gosh. What about yoga?! I’d finally gone back a few weeks earlier, after my chemo port came out and my immune system returned.

“Yoga?” I asked, my eyes above my mask begging her to agree that yoga was fine.

We talked about poses. I asked about push-ups, or chaturangas as they’re called in my sweaty hot power yoga class. You plank, lower down chaturanga, swoop into upward-facing dog, then push back into downward-facing dog. My body was definitely heavier than ten pounds.

“No push-ups,” she said.

I felt my plan to Come Back with a Vengeance after cancer, to get strong and feel less vulnerable and prove to myself and everyone else that cancer hadn’t slowed me down, crumble.

But I was going to be awesome, like that one guy, Max Parrot, who did twelve rounds of chemo then won gold in Men’s Slopestyle in the Winter Olympics. I wasn’t asking for athletic. I wasn’t athletic before cancer so I didn’t think the ordeal would transform me for the better. I just wanted to stretch on my Lululemons and bang out some sun salutations.

I couldn’t do yoga without the down-up-down vinyasas we did again and again. I needed my arms. I couldn’t be the middle-aged, half-bald lady on the mat just lying there while everyone else worked. Forget it. I was out. I guess it was leg day every day for the next year. If I couldn’t have it all, I wouldn’t have any.

But I loved yoga. And I could still have some yoga. So I asked myself a really hard question. What if some was enough?

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is show up broken.

***

English is my oldest kid’s third language. She changed countries and families and by the time we adopted her at nine, I wanted to offer her stability. She was in a different school each year of her young life until finally in middle school she stayed put. She was done moving around.

I always got good reports from her teachers; she has the best handwriting in the family, and an artistic eye and a green thumb. School has always been a struggle, but she managed it each semester, bobbing at the surface and staying afloat. Until the pandemic wave hit her first couple years of high school. She drowned.

I was a public school girl, and my kids were public school kids. As moms we do what feels right for the kids we have in the community we’re in with the resources we have, and public school felt right. But the pandemic was hard on a lot of our kids.

My friend recommended a small private school that specialized in helping students thrive at their own pace. We visited. I was skeptical. My heart is in public school. But as I toured the classrooms and they told us about the students, I discovered that most of the kids in there had struggled at their first schools and now here they were, learning in spite of their past problems. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is show up broken.

We enrolled her.

***

I went back to yoga and began a year of modifications. For a decade and a half I’d heard the instructors offer modifications on the poses. I never took them. Modifications were for quitters.

The first time I went to class ready to modify, I talked to the teacher ahead of time. I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t listening when I did something different. She was so supportive and offered options to keep the weight off my arm. When the class went to plank, I dropped to my knees.

I felt like everyone was watching me take shortcuts. Surely they were all snickering to themselves and judging me for being a yoga slacker. I stole a glance. No one was looking. No one judged me or even noticed. They were too busy focusing on their own journeys.

Over the year, I learned to modify my practice, and it surprised me. I still grew stronger. I still felt good. And as I modified, I learned new things about my body. Like when I put my knee down in side plank, it helped me raise my hips higher and gave me a deeper side stretch.

It was a year of discovery. How could I gain strength without lifting more than ten pounds? I learned new moves. I learned to experiment. I learned to play. I learned humility and acceptance of my body.

Putting a knee down seemed weak before, but it wasn’t weak, it was different. Different was healthy.

***

My oldest called me from school yesterday, crying. “Mom, I didn’t think I’d ever even graduate, and I just finished my last exam.”

She’s graduating from a different school than I expected, but different is healthy.

Next week we’ll watch her receive her diploma. She’s graduating with honors. I’ve been thinking about modifications and the freedom and success they can bring. I’m discovering that for myself as I build back after cancer treatment. And I’ll be cheering wildly for my daughter in her cap and gown because of modifications that got her on that stage.

We threw out our original plan and found her a better fit and I see her now, this confident woman who’s great at math and completes her work and takes pride in her academic achievement, and I’m so thankful for the humility to admit when something wasn’t working, when something no longer fit, when we hit a limitation, and modified.

***

I passed the year mark last week. I came to class nervous. How much strength had I lost? What if I couldn’t do anything? When the teacher said to flow, I moved into plank, took a deep breath, and dropped down into my first chaturanga in a year. As I pushed into upward-facing dog, I grinned. My modifications had kept me strong. I’d lost some strength, but I hadn’t lost it all. Some is better than none. Some is good enough.

It can still be good, still be enough, even if it’s not everything we planned. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is show up broken.

Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and Calm the H*ck Down. She’s a writer for the TV series Creepshow, a monthly contributor for Coffee + Crumbs, and her essays are published in The Magic of Motherhood. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in articles in Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, The Bump, Working Mother, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. To get out of the office, she spent the last few years shambling about as various zombies on The Walking Dead. She and her husband live in the Atlanta area with three kids from three different continents and an anxious Maltipoo named Khaleesi.