Today is the 17th day of counting the Omer...

and I haven't missed a day of counting yet. The counting of the Omer is an ancient ritual, used to mark the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot, between the seven weeks when sacrifices of barley were brought to the Temple in ancient Israel to the time when the first gleanings of wheat were ready to be offered. Hundreds of years later, the Kabbalists attached different mystical interpretations to each of the weeks of the Omer and to each day within each week.

Rabbi Yael offered me the idea of counting the Omer, of taking on this spiritual practice to meditate on each week's theme and notice what arises for me. Each night I say the blessing and count the day.

The Kabbalists gave this week the spiritual quality of "Tiferet" or beauty/grace. Rabbi Yael's kavannah (intention) for the week is to simply notice the beauty of the natural world around us.

That noticing has given me some relief this week. Noticing the symphony that is my little backyard, how my cherry blossoms became pink, then white, then fell off the tree, scattering the paved path where George rides his two-wheeler with training wheels and June zooms over the petals on her Barbie trike. Noticing the wild purple flowers creeping through our lawn, noticing the patches of daisies in the hedge in front of our porch. Noticing the hosta leaves sprout up, noticing my hyacinth bush getting ready for her bright shining solo to come next month.

The noticing has given me great relief, in fact. (Oh--at work, at Mishkan, there is a patch of garden near the front entrance where my Gan, Alef and Bet classes planted tulip bulbs last fall and they are MAGNIFICENT, blooming in every color.) And the counting has given me relief, too. There has probably never been a better time for me to count: I'm waiting for a lot of unknown things that have serious implications for my life.

I'm waiting to see how my body reacts to chemo (my first treatment is Friday). I'm waiting to see how my energy will be and how much help I'll need with the kids.

I'm waiting to get results of genetic testing that will tell me whether my cancer came from a genetic mutation and whether I will need more surgery or not.

This is some big waiting. And so an ancient practice feels right; I can imagine my ancestors watching their barley crops, noticing how the wheat crops were coming up. And knowing all of the things that could go wrong, the insects, the drought, the flooding, the random nature of nature.

And here I am, watching the crop that was called "cancer" that grew in the soil of my body (grows?), waiting to get rid of this threat for good, and I am counting and noticing because it gives me at least a little bit of dignity and even some control.
****
At the same time, I am waiting for George's kindergarden placement. It's a long story and feels too overwhelming for me to write much about at the moment, but if you have a child with any kind of "special needs," there's a lot of testing and evaluating and negotiating that goes into getting the child into the right kindergarden class.

Last Thursday morning, I had to take George to see Dr. Ferrare, a school psychologist from our local school district. He had observed George in his classroom a few weeks earlier. I had braced myself, I had put on my armor for that visit with Dr. Ferrare. Because of George's limited language skills, any testing is going to show how little cognitive ability he has.

We went into Dr. Ferrare's office. He was an older man, maybe 60. He brought some puzzles and legos out for George to play. He wanted to talk with me before he tested George.

"When I was watching George in the classroom," he said. "Something about him really moved me."

That was not what I expected a school psychologist who had been at this game for probably thirty-five years to say about George.

"He is really sweet, and intuitive," he continued. "He didn't know who I was, but I would catch him watching me watch him. He would look up and smile at me."

I nodded my head, blinking back tears. For me, having a child with special needs often means that people don't really see my child: they see behaviors. And they often judge those behaviors, over which George has little neurological control, very harshly.

Dr. Ferrare saw my child. We went on with George's testing; it went okay. George was able to point and identify some pictures. Dr. Ferrare made some notes.

"Testing is not going to tell us anything about George and who he can become," he told me.

It is something that I know deeply in my heart and yet at moments it's hard to not feel like I haven't pushed George as much as I should have; that if I had spent hours every day over the last few years drilling him on words, he could have identified all of the pictures. It doesn't make sense: at home, when I say, "George, let's put the dishes away," he goes to the dishwasher. But when Dr. Ferrare asked him to choose a picture of a dish from a bunch of pictures, he didn't point to anything close.

But I can't get caught up in doubt of myself or doubt of George. Dr. Ferrare observed George in his classroom and saw that he is sweet and intuitive and he wants to find a classroom where that will be honored in him.

I didn't get George to that reach that cognitive benchmark that I thought I would have by this age. But I am noticing and experiencing something more important that I have done:

I have not squashed George's beautiful spirit.

And I do believe that because of that, given the right setting and instruction, he can and will learn everything that he needs.

And that he is entering kindergarden knowing--I am sure he knows--in his "kishkas" that he is loved and celebrated unconditionally.

And that is something that I am working on noticing in and also giving to myself.
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This is not an easy time in my life. Counting, waiting, chemo, kindergarden, Fred, Junie, work.
But it is at the same time a time of intense connection and beauty and grace; friends old and new reaching out to support me, a thousand prayers lifting me daily, colleagues at work standing beside me. Fred, George, June, flowers.
It is everything.
And if moments of beauty and grace, are opening in me and around me now amidst all of the nitty gritty hard stuff, I can barely anticipate how they will come, how I will feel them, how deeper to the earth my connections will be when I know, absolutely know,
that the cancer
is
gone.
****
Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes:
"A new philosophy, a way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort."

Tonight I will count the 18th night of the Omer and I will fall asleep waiting, anticipating, ready to dream.

Very literal, short entry...

because today I am just happy to be dealing with concrete things: getting my chemo scheduled, planning for child care, looking into the wig situation. A lovely woman I just met at Mishkan who recently finished her treatment is going to give me her $1,500 short brunette wig that looks an awful lot like my hair. What a blessing! But I need to get a blond one and also an auburn or burgundy one, too, so I'm asking around, checking out ebay, seeing how much my insurance will pay. If I have to go bald for goodness sake, I want to have a little fun with the situation. People at Mishkan know how I love to play around with wigs at Purim, so I'll just have to get into a Purim spirit every day until my hair grows back (have I told you I decided I'm going to let it grow long again after chemo? and if blond is popular, maybe I'll go blond?)

I'm having fun with the "breast cancer thang" when I can. Some days I'm not playful at all, I can have moments of being quite frightened, overwhelmed and down, but when I'm feeling like I am right now, able to let go and be non-attached, I'm 100% letting go and being non attached. And then I can do what I need to do and make plans and be efficient and have a bit of fun with it all.

And I am experiencing the way I've shifted and grown emotionally in just the last month or so. I am really getting good at just being concerned with my own feelings and knowing that everyone has the responsibility to take care of their own feelings: not my job. It sounds so simple and obvious, but I have often been a "caretaker" and am learning that that's just a role. I don't have to hold anyone else's emotional stuff and this realization is freeing. I have much more mental space to heal and to create and to live my life

like today dancing with Georgie in my dirty kitchen to Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up" and just making an ass of myself because it was so sweet and moving to watch how he anticipated me moving my arms up to the air each time the chorus came around and didn't take his eyes off me and was laughing hysterically and this is a child who is supposed to be difficult to engage.

So that's where I am now. Chemo begins May 1. I'm not scared about it; I'm ready.

(But know that tomorrow I may say the opposite of everything I'm expressing now...)

***Warning, warning!!!***My most metaphorical blog entry so far to date

I haven't cleaned for Passover at all and I'm not planning to. Frankly, I don't know where to begin.

I usually love this yearly ritual, scrubbing the vegetable drawer in my fridge with baking soda until it's white again, tying up bags of clothes we've outgrown over the winter to give away, dustbusting under my couch cushions and in the crevices between my floorboards. Opening the windows, airing the home, letting the spring air flow in.

Throwing out half-eaten boxes of crackers and gluten-free snacks I thought George would like but he didn't.

Rather than doing the physical work the holiday demands, I'm trusting in metaphors this year. I've been so spent physically the last few weeks, I'm cherishing my energy coming back to 100% in my body and I'm not willing to do anything to f--around with that at the moment. No one expects me to do much cooking or cleaning anyway and I'm embracing a slackerish acceptance of myself.

But living in metaphor is happening effortlessly and unconsciously. Each year at Passover, every Jew is supposed to feel like he/she is personally liberated from being a slave in Egpyt; each one of us is called to cross through a miraculously parted Sea, headed to the unknown place called Freedom.

And here I am leaving Egypt, in Hebrew "mitzraeem", a narrow place, and it's true, I really am. I am leaving the narrow place of fear and shock that I have been living in since the 16th of February when I was shaving and felt this weird little thing jutting out from under the pocket of my arm.

I'm leaving that narrow place, where I went from lab to doctor from doctor to lab with a nauseating numbness. I am leaving the place where I would stop driving my car and call a friend from my cell phone because I couldn't talk about it but needed to cry. I am leaving the place where I was waiting, for days on end, for biopsy results, for surgery results, for consults. I am leaving the place where I imagined my life without me in it.

I am leaving it, I am taking a step into the water of freedom, it feels cold and inviting, it stings the numbness out of me, it teases me to swim in, to swim out, to swim as far as I can. The sea is not parted; it is whole. You're alive, it calls. Alive.


It is the water of freedom and I am crossing through it in slow, metaphorical time. At moments, I see the shore on the other side, at moments, I only see water stretching ahead of me, meeting horizon.

I see the me, though, in my vision. I see the me there, in a way that I never could before. I see myself naked, bald, I see my scars. I see my strength like a light coming off the water, both within me and outside of me, coming up through the water and down from the sky. I feel myself being held by the water, I feel myself letting go, trusting the tide.

It is exhilarating, this effortless floating to freedom. See the woman, who was a slave, who is me, who is moving through the water now, for a moment she thought

she was losing everything

and now she is floating and laughing wildly, calling out to whomever can hear her

I lost everything! I lost everything!

and the water makes love to her

and pushes her

along.