NYT OPINION: My Child Is in an Impossible Place, and I Am There With Her
By Sarah Wildman
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 17, 2023 at 02:00AM
That’s not to say we are morose. We are not. Nor are we particularly profound. If anything, we lean into the ridiculous, and the silly, whenever possible.
At the same time, in over three years of managing our daughter Orli’s liver cancer, we have had to navigate the unimaginable, and also translate it to our children. Each stage seemed, at first, impossible on its own: diagnosis, chemotherapy, organ transplant, surgeries removing metastases in her lungs and brain, radiation, weeks of hospitalizations. Through it all, my partner, Ian, and I have attempted to meet both our children at the point between frankness and oversharing, optimism and reality. There is a weirdly direct line between despair and joy, between clarity and too much information.
To be clear, I am not particularly conversant in how to discuss the hardest subjects with adults, let alone a newly minted 14-year-old and her 9-year-old sister. (They were 10 and 6 when all this began.) My first impulse is not to face anything at all; the very idea of anything other than optimism makes me want to scream. But these days the consequences of Orli’s disease have become palpably more complicated, altering our days and our nights. We have stopped talking about a cure.
At the end of September, as she endured more radiation and before she (briefly) received a drug in trials, Orli stopped attending school. It was temporary, but then she stopped worrying about falling behind and we stopped asking when she would return.
In the late fall I took the girls to the movies and the theater as often as I could, to step away for a few hours from the medicalized monotony of daily life. (We would go to the theater at off hours, to empty movie houses; we still wear masks.)
It was, even then, no longer a simple matter. We took a wheelchair for Orli to navigate the multiplex, scheduled her medications so she wouldn’t be too sleepy. For a time, we also brought an oxygen tank.
One afternoon I took Orli, alone, to see “She Said,” the film adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about the brave women who confronted Harvey Weinstein. Orli told me after, over pho, that “She Said” was far scarier than “The Menu,” the dark but cheeky movie that she, Ian and I had caught two days prior. “This,” she said of the Weinstein horror, “was real.”
Later that week we saw a friend of Orli’s, and the girl’s mother. I recommended our recent films, and “She Said” in particular.
“Isn’t that very mature content?” the mother asked. I was taken aback. “Our life,” I answered, admittedly with some pique, “is very mature content.”
In my family, I wanted to explain, we talk about hard things, and not in the abstract. I cannot shield my children, as much as I have desperately wanted to try.
When I stopped bristling, I realized that many eighth graders may not be ready to be immersed in a true-life story of sexual harassment and abuse. Orli is uniquely interested in understanding how hard the world can be. She often asks nurses to describe the worst things they have ever seen. She means it: She wants cinéma vérité and gore and (whenever possible) triumph. For us, discussing the cruelty and violence at the core of “She Said” not only resulted in an important conversation about power and consent, it allowed us to shift perspective: Other people experience hardship. We are not alone.
By Sarah Wildman
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 17, 2023 at 02:00AM
Three years into my daughter’s cancer treatments, my family has leaned into talking about hard things.
In my family, we talk about hard things.That’s not to say we are morose. We are not. Nor are we particularly profound. If anything, we lean into the ridiculous, and the silly, whenever possible.
At the same time, in over three years of managing our daughter Orli’s liver cancer, we have had to navigate the unimaginable, and also translate it to our children. Each stage seemed, at first, impossible on its own: diagnosis, chemotherapy, organ transplant, surgeries removing metastases in her lungs and brain, radiation, weeks of hospitalizations. Through it all, my partner, Ian, and I have attempted to meet both our children at the point between frankness and oversharing, optimism and reality. There is a weirdly direct line between despair and joy, between clarity and too much information.
To be clear, I am not particularly conversant in how to discuss the hardest subjects with adults, let alone a newly minted 14-year-old and her 9-year-old sister. (They were 10 and 6 when all this began.) My first impulse is not to face anything at all; the very idea of anything other than optimism makes me want to scream. But these days the consequences of Orli’s disease have become palpably more complicated, altering our days and our nights. We have stopped talking about a cure.
At the end of September, as she endured more radiation and before she (briefly) received a drug in trials, Orli stopped attending school. It was temporary, but then she stopped worrying about falling behind and we stopped asking when she would return.
In the late fall I took the girls to the movies and the theater as often as I could, to step away for a few hours from the medicalized monotony of daily life. (We would go to the theater at off hours, to empty movie houses; we still wear masks.)
It was, even then, no longer a simple matter. We took a wheelchair for Orli to navigate the multiplex, scheduled her medications so she wouldn’t be too sleepy. For a time, we also brought an oxygen tank.
One afternoon I took Orli, alone, to see “She Said,” the film adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about the brave women who confronted Harvey Weinstein. Orli told me after, over pho, that “She Said” was far scarier than “The Menu,” the dark but cheeky movie that she, Ian and I had caught two days prior. “This,” she said of the Weinstein horror, “was real.”
Later that week we saw a friend of Orli’s, and the girl’s mother. I recommended our recent films, and “She Said” in particular.
“Isn’t that very mature content?” the mother asked. I was taken aback. “Our life,” I answered, admittedly with some pique, “is very mature content.”
In my family, I wanted to explain, we talk about hard things, and not in the abstract. I cannot shield my children, as much as I have desperately wanted to try.
When I stopped bristling, I realized that many eighth graders may not be ready to be immersed in a true-life story of sexual harassment and abuse. Orli is uniquely interested in understanding how hard the world can be. She often asks nurses to describe the worst things they have ever seen. She means it: She wants cinéma vérité and gore and (whenever possible) triumph. For us, discussing the cruelty and violence at the core of “She Said” not only resulted in an important conversation about power and consent, it allowed us to shift perspective: Other people experience hardship. We are not alone.
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/childhood-cancer-family-conversations.html
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