Tiny Trauma
How are our two young kids dealing with their mom’s cancer?
Telling the kids their mom has cancer was awful. We told them, answered their terrified questions, and then went for dinner. A few minutes later I slipped away, hiding in the bathroom, and cried gulping, silent tears, knowing we’d shaken the ground beneath their feet.
Our daughter is 11 and our son is just 8. They’re funny, energetic, precious young things, loved with a strength that could smash planets together.
At first, we gave them the simplest, most reassuring version of the story: My wife had two tumors in her right breast, we needed to remove that breast, then the cancer would be gone. She’d be wonky for a while, with only one breast, but she’d have breast reconstruction once the cancer had been beaten. A few weeks later the reality, and the story we spun from it, had both moved on. During my wife’s surgery, they removed a chain of ten lymph nodes and found cancer cells in the first three of those ten. A later CT scan of her abdomen, pelvis, and thorax — the normal locations for secondary cancer — showed no such tumors, but secondaries were knocking at her door so they still recommended chemo. Now the rosiest version of events we could find was this: the doctors think her body is cancer-free, but she needs chemo to stop it coming back, and she’ll be sick for months, most likely losing all her hair.
Then we made a mistake: Two days after giving the kids this new news we sent them to the other end of the country, for a few days with their grandparents. My wife and I went for a mini break, then she had the first chemo cycle. The kids love being with their grandparents, but we should have held them close, giving them the chance to ask questions, to express their fears, and to feel the reassurance of our love.
Two days into the mini break we were sat having dinner when my mother called us. Our youngest was in tears, saying he was feeling sad and missed us. This has never happened on previous trips to his grandparents. We offered whatever reassuring words might work at a distance of 200 miles, knowing it could never be enough. Later in the week, I drove up the motorway to bring them home, meeting my parents at a service station halfway between their town and ours. After tight hugs (who was squeezing who?) my son asked “Is mommy bald now?”
Our boy is soccer mad and is a goalkeeper at one of the youth academies. He’s super talented, but gets anxious and worries about mistakes. At the start of this week, I drove him to a check-up for his asthma and thought I’d use the time together to discuss his anxieties and see if we could soften them. He froze up, turned his face away, and answered in single words. Then a dam burst and I lost him to tears. He couldn’t tell me why he was crying like this, so I turned the conversation to what I called “his worries”. With that framing, he soon told me he was worried about his mom. “What will happen to her?”
I drove us into a deserted business park, stopped the car, and hugged him once more. Then I went too far. I told him his mom needed to be made sick for a while, but after that, she’ll be fine. What should I have told him? How could I possibly get him through this worried moment and then back into psychological security? How on earth can I do that?
Sensing I should find out more while his guard was down I asked what other worries he had. “I think I have ADHD” was his response. A child in his class noticed his fidgeting and told him this meant ADHD. I pulled up a list of childhood ADHD symptoms, asking how many of those he had. It turns out he has one symptom from the eight listed. This was easy compared to talking about his mom’s cancer, but proved to me he’s a little man with worries. We agreed that talking with us about his worries is A Very Good Thing, and I made a mental note to have this conversation every week or two.
How about our 11-year-old daughter? Where our son is a quiet, self-contained, and sometimes anxious boy, his sister is quite the opposite. She’s an extrovert. But when it comes to discussing cancer she only wants to close the conversation down, to shut us up, to leave the room, leaving us wondering whether to drag her back. I’ve forced this conversation twice since we first told her: once she went mute, and the second time she stomped out of the room.
The only time our daughter broke this silence, and raised the subject herself, was last week and it nearly broke our hearts. She’d been in bed for an hour. My wife had stayed in our son’s room because he’s been asking that someone stay with him until he falls asleep. Although he’d been asleep for a while, she’d stayed in situ, doom scrolling on her phone. Then the door was pushed open and our daughter walked in.
“Mommy, are you going to die?”
I wasn’t there and don’t know the detail, but my wife told her “no”, she won’t die, fumbling for words at least in sight of truth’s zip code. But I worry for these kids. We’ll hold them tight, taking our own reassurance from these hugs, but surely it’s a losing effort. The extra hairs now appearing in our shower basin remind me that things are about to look even worse than they do today.
But things aren’t all bad. These moments of fear are peeking through daily life’s normal ups and downs.
Our daughter has discovered TikTok. (Yes, I know she’s underage! We’ve thought it through and put all the safety rails in place…) She’s been TikTok dancing through each day. She’s dealing brilliantly with the step up to secondary school, making new friends, and she’s an undimmed source of joy, shining her light on every corner of our home. She recently got her own bedroom for the first time, and we’ve loved helping her decorate, watching her flourish in her first owned space.
Our son has also been decorating his new bedroom — By which I mean he’s been choosing from the various Minecraft-themed options I show him on the Amazon app. The little man sleeps beneath a Minecraft duvet, with his head on a Minecraft-themed pillow, and sits on Minecraft-themed beanbags, pressed against Minecraft-themed wallpaper, reading books of Minecraft tips, by the light of Minecraft-themed torches. And when you’re eight years old, what could be better?
But when they come to us for reassurance, we come up short. Do the words even exist that could reassure a pre-teen girl and her young brother, when their mother is suddenly pallid, bald, and has cancer?
The statistics — the coldest language of all — are in our favor. After the chemo, radiotherapy, and hormone-draining drugs there’s an 80% chance she’ll survive the next ten years. But I don’t want to use these words with our daughter, because they answer her question “Are you going to die?” with “Maybe.”
Maybe. Perhaps. That’s where we are, and that’s where we must stay, for six more chemo cycles, 12 weeks, and beyond. Meanwhile, it’s hurting. Hurting my wife and me, and hurting these beautiful, vulnerable children.
