{"id":560,"date":"2010-05-26T10:33:45","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T18:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/?p=560"},"modified":"2010-06-03T19:32:49","modified_gmt":"2010-06-04T03:32:49","slug":"a-new-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/26\/a-new-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We have things to do.<\/p><\/div>\n

The past few months, when I\u2019ve thought about my approaching five year cancerversary (anniversary of diagnosis), I\u2019ve considered all kinds of ways to celebrate. But the truth is, that week, that whole month in fact, was busy. Real busy. I could see it coming well ahead of time with the events\/commitments\/fun all piling on top of each other on the calendar \u2013 Paul\u2019s ship party, my mother\u2019s birthday party, my mother\u2019s back surgery, a night of sailing, a friend to pick up from the airport, a writing retreat.<\/p>\n

Then there was a blog post to write. At first I thought I would tell the story of the breast cancer diagnosis and of the day I found out it was Inflammatory Breast Cancer and the sensational article I stumbled across, during my first terrifying breast cancer awareness month, that stated in simple terms it wasn\u2019t an issue of if but when the cancer would come back and that there was a 90% chance I\u2019d be dead in 5 years. But I don\u2019t want to tell these stories again. They\u2019ve all been written and told. Instead I want to tell new stories.<\/p>\n

I want to tell the story of my mother\u2019s birthday party. There\u2019s my great husband who struggles with a punctuality problem who, of course, forgets he\u2019s supposed to leave work early. There\u2019s his meeting that runs long. There\u2019s the changing of the child into her party dress in the parking lot of my grandmother\u2019s retirement home. There\u2019s our late arrival. There\u2019s my daughter\u2019s uncharacteristic disinterest in her grandparents, her inability to eat dinner, her intense dislike of her own chair. Then there\u2019s my daughter\u2019s barf, all over my great husband, all over the table and the carpet. There\u2019s the rushing to the bathroom and changing out of her party dress and into the ugly and too-small backup outfit. There\u2019s the rinsing of the party dress in the sink and the janitor cleaning up the carpet. There\u2019s our return to the dining room for just long enough to say our goodbyes and go home and feed our dog who is starving and exhausted after a weekend of long-distance swimming adventures.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next day there\u2019s a sick baby (and I do mean \u2018baby\u2019 here, not toddler, because when she\u2019s sick, she will always be my baby) and soup to be made and my mother\u2019s surgery and flowers to be gathered to be taken to the hospital, and hospital rooms to be visited and doctor\u2019s appointments to be made and none of this. None of it is for me.<\/p>\n

This story, and my life right now, is exactly as it should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past few months, when I\u2019ve thought about my approaching five year cancerversary (anniversary of diagnosis), I\u2019ve considered all kinds of ways to celebrate. But the truth is, that week, that whole month in fact, was busy. Real busy. I could see it coming well ahead of time with the events\/commitments\/fun all piling on top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mom","category-cancer","category-popular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":578,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katherinemalmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}