Birthday reflections: cancer, aging and mom.

Yesterday, October 28, 2009, I turned 42. I barely noticed when I turned 40, but this birthday is full of meaning and self-reflection.

I have been writing this blog since 2006. I have achieved many of my goals. I have many readers, I have connected with a wonderful community of bloggers, and I created This Lush Life, a shopping website primarily focused on fashionable clothes for full-figured women.

There is still more to do. I’d like to see more fashion segments on television including plus sizes, and to see those segments styled much more fashionably than they are currently. Also, I am struggling with the technology behind my new website design and I would like to just wake up tomorrow morning with a deep and profound insight into how to make it work so that I can get it up and running. I’d like to see people of all sizes treated with dignity and respect and have affordable health care.

I have personal, non-website related goals as well. I’d like to publish my fiction – hell I want to be famous for my fiction truth be told. I want to continue traveling the world – see more countries and visit friends overseas more often. I’d like to go hear live music more often and read more books. This year I am the happiest I have ever been in my life. I like myself, I like my appearance, and I like my husband. I hope that I never feel old, that I continue to improve my communication skills so that I can be more kind and loving, and I’d like to do more charity work.

But overall, I am most focused these days on my relationship with my mother and her fight against a rare form of Lymphoma. Over the years she and I have been frequently combative and our relationship has been filled with angry recriminations for unjust behavior on both our parts.

Experiencing her strength and determination through chemotherapy is helping me find a sweetness and a sense of calm acceptance in my feelings for her that I have never felt before. Over the last few weeks I have begun to confront that my life, my actual existence, is a direct result of two people wanting to have another human being to share their love with, and this has been a humbling realization. A friend recently asked me to describe the ways that she and I are similar and truthfully, while I have fought this for decades, she and I are so much alike that it would be a shorter list to describe the ways we are not alike.

So on my birthday this year I ask not what my mom is going to do for me, but what I can do for her. It seems that what she wants now is all that she has ever wanted – for me to be happy and to occasionally spend some fun time with her. And I am finding more and more that hanging out with my mom is a very good way to spend the day.