Thoughts

One of the reasons I wanted to go back to blogging was because I feel like my brain is always on.  Sometimes it comes up with some weird scientific questions, sometimes it replays events from my day with alternative endings, some times it just gets stuck in thought.  When my brain does this I have a tendency to feel weird while expressing these thoughts.  All throught life we get a lot of practice expressing two emotions: happy and anger.  Happy is the easy one, anger we are taught what is acceptable and how to control it.  But the other emotions are hard, sometimes I can't even appropriately label the emotion I feel.  Therefore, blogging allows me to express my thoughts without the actual awkward social interaction that I want to avoid.  I do want people to know the thoughts but I don't necessarily feel comfortable in that moment.  I guess this is the point that I should warn all of the emotional readers out there at work (Mom), if I as reading this I would probably cry.  So close down the web page and wait for later or grab your tissues and here we go...

This year has already put our family though a bit of a roller coaster and we are bairly 60 days in.  During the first few weeks of the year we found out BJ's mother was rediagnosed with breast cancer but that was all we knew.  We spent many days talking about what test she was going to have, what it would tell us and how would we react to the information we would get.  It came down to cancer localized in just her breasts which would mean chemo followed by a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.  All very scary.  All kinds of emotions that we didn't have a lot of practice dealing with.  I mean his family hasn't yet healed from the loss of BJ's grandfather in August, let alone a new family member being horribly ill.  But as the weeks go by the thoughts that are stuck in my head are these:

-Several years ago a pastor did a sermon on Why God? The question we all ask when bad things happen to good people.  The result of the sermon was we are asking the wrong question.  We should be asking "What do you want me to learn from this God?"  So I have been.  Still waiting on my answer, but I think I may be able to help my mother-in-law with her answer. 

-God creates us both externally and internally but sometimes our eyes and minds overlook our best assets that we are given.  My mother-in-law is a strong woman who has had to deal with lots of things in her life that most couldn't imagin.  But I don't think she knows how strong she is.  She has one of the most kind hearts, which makes her a great nurse, but again I don't think she knows it.  She also had beautiful red hair, that she did know.  But notice it is now a had, the chemo that will fight off the cancer stripped her of her hair, but it can't take away the other parts of her.  I think God needed her to know her true beauty.  She needs to be able to see how amazing of a person she is, no matter what she looks like.  This weekend we spent Saturday with all the family and you know what? The littlest kid, never even noticed.  He knows and sees the true beauty, love.  He loves her and she loves all of us.  

-I also feel that this strong, caring heart has taken away her time to really focus on herself.  She is so concerned about how everyone else is she forgets to be just the smallest bit selfish and do things for her.  Well now she is doing things for herself and saying things to people she might not have before.  It pains me to see great people be taken advantage of and walked over just because they are too afraid of the others views.  In reality most people don't even know that they are doing something rude or wrong.  I mean how many times do people get into arguments because they thought the other person knew something they didn't? More often than we probably think.  I just hope she continues to say what she feels, and listen to the responses she gets.

Tomorrow is treatment number two which will take us on yet another crazy ride, but as her body fights the cancer she grows stronger in ways I bet she never knew and I the end she will have boobs perkier than most twenty year olds and more hair/wigs than most actresses and her inner beauty will be shining out of ever part of her.  Talk about life cycle of a butterfly...