August seems to be a reflective time for me. I don’t know if it’s the dog days of summer and being hot beyond repair, the Boulder County Fair parade and all its memories, or what, but every year it seems to pull me backward into old versions of myself.
I got curious, what did I write this time of year, years ago.
Well, well. I wrote this essay. Four years ago.
One year out from a failed cell therapy dose that left us in an eternal wait and watch, I was working to make the world make sense. Clinging to the puppeteering strings of an if-then reality where if I did this, then this would happen, and if I didn’t, then it wouldn’t.
I was researching ingredients. I was focusing on toxicities and risks. I was reading headlines about Roundup and class-action lawsuits. I was holding what the doctors said, that they didn’t know what caused it, while holding my child during his chemo.
And I guess if you have never held both of those, I don’t care much for how you think a cancer parent should handle the unknowns.
Some of it was reasonable. Some of it probably still is. But some of it was hypervigilance dressed up as research.
Trauma parading around as something else. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The horror of cancer, and honestly, worse still, relapse, slowly carved a path in my nervous system that terrible things could, no, would, happen if I wasn’t looking.
So I kept looking. At ingredients. At symptoms. At exposures. At everything I had done before diagnosis and everything I might do afterward. Because fuck if I was going to let anything else slip by.
I’ve spoken a lot about how cancer in general, but for sure relapse, felt like wandering around a dark room knowing there is a bad guy with a bat.
When Hypervigilance Stops Being Protection
The tricky thing about trauma is that there is a point where vigilance stops being protection.
Four years later, I have a little more compassion for the mama standing at preschool drop-off reading the back of a bottle of bug spray.
Turns out she wasn’t really trying to decide whether tocopherol was safe.
She was trying to figure out how to keep her children even remotely safe in a world that felt like a never-ending threat.
Mozzies: The Original Essay
Originally published in August 2022.
This weekend Selah sat outside all afternoon, playing in her "swimming pool," and was eaten up by mosquitoes. I would say “eaten alive,” but I said that in front of her later that evening while showing the bites to Joshua, and she was quite taken aback by the mental image. She’s got the genetics that show up as big welted circles at the site. When she came inside covered in splotches, I felt terrible that I hadn’t noticed.
But I did notice.
I noticed that when I looked out the window, I saw her engrossed in independent play for an extended time, and that was ideal. She didn’t seem too bothered, and aside from visualizing herself being eaten alive and scratching a couple in her sleep, nothing much came of it.
The next morning, as I dropped her at summer camp, which happened to be at our neighbor’s house next door, I wondered if I should do something to prevent round two. I debated putting her in long sleeves, but we don’t exactly have lightweight, “middle of August heat” long-sleeve clothing. She would surely be too hot.
Had it not rained so hard the night before, leaving everything humid and damp, I probably would have just let it ride. But even the 20-foot walk to drop her off resulted in me swatting away multiple mozzies.*
I went home and searched through the mudroom for bug repellent. Last summer I had purchased some overpriced spray that was a collection of essential oils, in hopes that we could ward off the incessant vampires with citronella and wintergreen. But as with all things natural, there is a cost. The cost of this product was that it didn’t really work, but did leave you really greasy. Or oily. Castor oily.
And natural or not, I just never feel quite comfortable saturating the skin with something meant to repel other creatures. Sure, citronella and wintergreen are not DEET, but nothing is neutral.
I shuffle past the expensive bug repellent every time I get sunscreen and store in the back of my mind that if we need it, we have it. But we never use it, because what if...
But this morning, with the rain and the welts and the mozzies on the prowl, I figured, “Eh, now’s the time,” and so I sprayed her from head to toe. I told her that we’d have to do a bath after I picked her up, justifying in my head that if we washed it off four hours later, we’d prevent full saturation. (False, yes, but this is how I do my mental gymnastics.)
Another mom saw me spraying her and asked to borrow the spray.
Then another mom inquired.
“Oh, is that a natural one?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s super clean,” I replied as I turned over the bottle to confirm. “The most questionable ingredient is tocopherol, vitamin E, which is likely synthetic.”
I handed her the bottle.
“Oh yeah... but no DEET. That’s good. I just haven’t pulled the plug yet. We haven’t done the whole bug spray thing because they are all so toxic! I actually think this is the first time she’s been sprayed!” she remarked.
I felt it rise in me straight away: the jealousy, the grief.
Oh, you’re still living inside that alternate reality where choosing not to put bug spray on your child will prevent bad things from happening to them, I thought to myself.
I begged myself to just let the swirly feelings swirl, but before I could stop myself, I was speaking.
“Oh yeah, I was that way, but once you do ALL the things and your kid gets cancer anyway, you just kind of give up and buy the all-natural bug spray.”
I tried to push it out as a joke, but I could feel the salty taste of the words as soon as they left my tongue.
The mom let out a resigned laugh, as one does when what they want to say is, “Yeah, who the fuck knows,” but they are at preschool drop-off and so they can’t.
I immediately regretted saying anything.
For fuck’s sake, Betsy, just let her live!
Thankfully, I know the mom well enough that I wasn’t worried I’d be cast out as the cancer downer. She knows me, us, and she knows it’s all very complicated.
Even still, I wanted to rewind the moments and say nothing.
But bigger than the regret of saying it is a part of me that sometimes feels so dark and stormy and sometimes feels so fucking self-righteous. The part of me that feels the need to lay before these parents the real warning:
The world is toxic, and it’s coming for your children.
It’s cloaked as a warning, but it’s not. It’s jealousy and grief. It’s trauma.
And there are times at preschool drop-off when a non-cancer-kid mom seems to be bragging, at the loudest possible decibel, that she kept her kid safe and I didn’t and all I can hear is the deafening scream of how badly I failed.
And I know, I know it’s bad luck, or bad genetics, or who the hell knows.
No one knows what caused it, but everyone tells me it’s not my fault.
But no matter what anyone else says, all I can hear is:
It doesn’t matter how hard you tried, Mama. He still got sick.
Healing From Hypervigilance After Childhood Cancer
Four years later, I can still hear it:
It doesn’t matter how hard you tried, Mama. He still got sick.
But it doesn’t feel like searing, gutting pain anymore. It doesn’t feel like a cruel whisper that keeps me up at night.
It feels like a balm.
A potion made from pain and suffering and disconnection and isolation, distilled down to its essence and mixed with mindfulness and embodiment and meditation and the actual work of getting out of fight-or-flight mode. All of it whipped into a beautiful amber salve that, when I feel swirly and sick, I can rub over the scarred parts of my heart and whisper:
You tried so hard, Mama. He still got sick.
For years, I heard that sentence as proof that I had failed. Now I can hear something else inside it: This was never mine to prevent.
And this, I think, is healing.
If you know someone who might need this today, please send it to them.
