“I rapidly started to gain weight. I’m talking double-digit, rapid weight gain. No matter what I did to get rid of it, I kept packing it on. Each month, I was waiting longer and longer for my cycle. I said to the operator, ‘I am upstairs, last door on the right. I am losing a lot of blood rapidly. Please hurry.’ I don’t remember speaking after that.”
“She’s so big. How much does she weigh?”
“I don’t normally ask strangers in Target if they are okay but at that moment you weren’t a stranger. You were a fellow Mom knee deep in emotions in the folder aisle just like me.”
“It was cancer, and had spread. Here I was, married to the woman I will spend the rest of my life with, worried about how much of this new life my mother would be able to see.”
“I went door to door on my street to find her!”
“When the triplets were born I almost died. I remember feeling like I wasn’t enough, like I failed them because my first moments with them were through FaceTime.”
“Hmm. My story. I never know where to begin. Should I reveal the ending at the beginning? Because really, there is no ending when it comes to chronic illness.”
“Don’t ever discredit a mother. You don’t know the half. No one told me your belly doesn’t go down immediately. No one told me I’d be bleeding out.”
“You never shake the desire to want to help them all. Stepping into this world shows you things you only had heard about in the news. The victims of those new stories suddenly begin sleeping in your home.”
“Dad is pretending he is asleep but I know he isn’t, because when we arrive next to his recliner, he is smiling. Not in a ‘Nice to see you’ kind of way, but in a ‘How was that quality time you just had with your mother?’ kind of way.”
