Flower Power

Ah, spring … longer days, sweet sunlight … March / April showers, showers, and more showers … delicate flowers escaping their cold and dark prison, their colorful little heads poking through the still rock-solid earth … Young lovers canoodling on park benches … Passover inside of the Christian Holy Week, with all the Easters – RC, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant - landing on the same Sunday … a time of rebirth, renewal, of life reawakening …

Yeah, whatever -

- because while the world is supposed to be expanding, blooming and bursting in celebration, this week my world feels mighty shaky. As if it’s folding in, hunkering down, preparing for winter. (Did I somehow switch hemispheres?) You see, on Good Friday, my mother will have surgery to remove a malignant tumor from her left breast. Tessie lost the right one to the same disease over 30 years ago, and has been cancer free ever since. So this delayed reoccurrence is most distressing. Very upsetting to see one’s mother go through the endless barrage of tests, exams, scans, consults, shuffling from doctor to technician to specialist, being poked and prodded and pierced and perused. (Soon to be cut and stitched and God knows what else. The paradox of Western medicine: marvelous yet brutal, sophisticated yet limited, harming in order to heal …) Wondering how quickly and completely a septuagenarian, however robust, will recuperate after such an invasive ordeal; how she will tolerate the post-op pain and discomfort, the follow-up procedures, the radiation “therapies”, the reconstruction. So far she has borne it all with incredible stoicism, an almost Buddhist monk-like detachment towards this unfortunate turn of events, taking every new development - some anticipated, some flying out of left field - in perfect stride. Bless her heart.

(Now, if you knew my mother, you’d see how very un-Tessie-like this is. Under normal circumstances, she veers towards bigness and overreaction - she’s Neapolitan, for goodness sake! crazier than Sicilian! and, shall we say, rather high spirited. And sensitive: she laughs easily, cries at movies, and can explode over a seemingly innocuous comment. Not to mention her penchant for procrastination and passivity … I imagine she’s scared, though I can’t detect any outward reflection of inner doubt or nerves or fear. She seems resigned to and at peace with her fate, bearing it all with focus and resolve, dealing as necessary with whatever comes up as it comes up. Taking one day at a time. No anger, no histrionics, no “why me” whinging. May her physical self prove as strong and centered.)

Then, there’s my own big-babyish, self-centered, me-me-me reaction: If, God forbid, anything happens to her, I’m an orphan. I lost my father six years ago. I have no husband / significant (or insignificant) other to rely on for support or comfort or anything. I have no children to fall back on, the way that a parent sometimes does later in life. Though fairly close to my siblings, they tend to be wrapped up in their own very complicated lives. I have some truly wonderful friends, but would not feel terribly comfortable having to turn to them. (Not that friends and family wouldn’t step up; I just would just hate being in a position to have to ask for assistance. Pride, you know …) As a freelancer, a self-employed muse, I have a decentralized, diffuse, disembodied professional network but no physical office culture in which to immerse myself should life head south. All alone in the world. Just me, bouncing around the universe, untethered, drifting rudderless … Talk about a nasty case of “poor poor pitiful me” –itis … Whaaaaa -

(Ah-ha. Another paradox: as one’s world contracts, it simultaneously expands? Interesting. I’ll have to come back to this in another blog ...)

… Really, I just want my mommy!

So how do those tiny flowers do it? The purple crocuses, the yellow jonquils?  They appear every year, dazzling and inspiring us with their beauty and fragrance, reminding us of the beauty and force and cycle of life. How do they manage year after year, for months asleep under the frozen earth, even before the world has warmed to welcome them, to break free and raise their pretty little heads up through the snow towards the sun? What guarantees do they have? Talk about enduring, resilience, about not taking “no” for an answer. Doing what needs to be done, step by step, intentionally, intuitively, intrepidly. Letting go of the outcome: just trusting, showing up, doing the dance, come what may …

Imagine my shock at seeing so much of this intent and resolve in my mother. Initially, Tessie’s dispassionate response to her diagnosis alarmed and kind of annoyed me: I mean, how can this news not upset her, not piss her off? Why doesn’t she scream, weep, rail at God, break something? How can she appear so unmoved and above it all? Doesn’t she realize - ?

Then I realized. She’s tapped into something grander, something like the flowers’ power. Maybe she simply understands and accepts “what is.” Where her energy needs to flow, what needs to be done and the doing of it, rather than woe-is-me-ing against the injustice of it all. And, as a result, seems more confident in and at peace with the process than any of her children, even her more progressive, enlightened one. (That would be me.) Much more trusting and accepting of the outcome, whatever it turns out to be. Very “que sera, sera.”

Has she given up? Or is this the wisdom of age? Experience? Satori, the enlightenment of knowing without needing to know? Gilda Radner, comedienne of Saturday Night Live fame, said: “I always wanted a happy ending … Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.” Maybe Tessie has somehow gleaned Gilda’s insight and wisdom through living, and she too has become deliciously ambiguous. “This is it; whatever will be will be.”

After the initial shock of hearing the “c” word, we are now all much calmer and cautiously optimistic. While surgery is still surgery, as Good Friday approaches her doctors et al expect her to come through with flying colors. Just like the flowers. Kudos to Tessie – she has impressed me beyond words. Mom as muse … who knew?

Silent well wishes, prayers, healing light and all the rest are most welcome. Can’t hurt, right? Have a wonderful holiday – and happy spring. May you bloom and grow, forever …

© 2010 Theresa Quadrozzi - A Muse In Manhattan