The Things We Share a Memoir

I’m working on my memoir, telling the story of how I survived cancer while caring for my mom who had cancer as well.

 

The Things We Share ~ Synopsis

I didn’t know if I would survive the Leukemia. The doctors gave me a 3% chance of doing so. To make it worse, my mom was then diagnosed with another type of blood cancer. I know she didn’t get sick on purpose, but I was angry with her. Maybe irrationally so, but I felt it all the same. It seemed she was upstaging me again. No matter what was happening with me, she had to take the spotlight. I needed my family, I needed support, but my needs were subsumed by hers. They were with her now in the cancer ward while I was left to go through treatment and a bone marrow transplant alone.

This reminded me of other times my mom had taken the attention of my family from me to turn it on to herself. Such as the trauma of going through a divorce. I told my family that my husband had left me, and I needed their support. Not two days later my father left my mother, and my pain was ignored because Mom’s took center stage. That time I ran away, halfway across the country, so that I could deal with my own grief and escape hers. This time I couldn’t run away as the same doctors were treating both of us in Dallas, Texas.

This experience caused me to reexamine my entire relationship with my mother through the lens of cancer. Even though I needed to be cared for during this time, I ended up taking care of her. I struggled to stay alive while also keeping her alive. My doctor worried that this would kill me, even if the cancer did not.

My relationship with my mom was fraught with pain as well as love throughout my life. I learned that the issues we faced between us became inconsequential with life and death at stake

This is the story of my journey through cancer while I also tell the story of my mom’s path with the disease. The overall story will examine the mother-daughter relationship. While there are books and movies about mother-daughter relationships where one or the other of them has cancer, this book is about how the relationship evolves when both are fighting for their lives. A new relationship was forged in the fire of cancer. . Healing comes in many forms, just like mother-daughter relationships come in many guises.