Standing Tall

This year marks my tenth anniversary of surviving breast cancer. I just scheduled my annual mammogram, and today share this essay, originally published in The Alpha Gamma Delta Quarterly in fall of 2001, in celebration and gratitude that I am still here.

There’s a lot going on at our house. Earl and I soon mark 20 years of marriage. A college freshman, high school freshman and elementary school freshman are packing their bookbags. We are each beginning something new, standing tall and saying thanks.

Our year 2000 did not begin with a positive bang, but with my diagnosis of breast cancer. Our plans for the year faded as we scrambled to gather facts, assemble a medical team and learn the lingo of our new life.

The year 2000 had surgeries, chemotherapy, daily radiation treatments and worries of the future. So far, 2001 has been much better. We have continued on with life. Cancer is not something you get over. It is something you live through. Life goes back together more simply and completely.

I am not, of course, glad I got cancer. But I am thankful for what we learned. There werelosses and gains.

I lost a breast, every hair on my body, the nerves in my fingers and toes and the security in believing I was planning a future.

I gained a reconstructed breast, a new head of curly hair, more nerve to stand up for my thoughts and the security in being better prepared for what lies ahead.

We do not often get to see what our kids are made of at a young age. But now I know my children more completely. Christopher, 16 when our ordeal began, maintained calmness, faith and integrity. He helped with household tasks, worked part-time and kept up with high school studies and commitments, earning several awards. He heads off to college this fall, fully equipped to handle what comes his way.

Benjamin’s 13th birthday was the day of my first biopsy. His sweet spirit wrapped me in warm comfort during dark days that followed. His happy-go-lucky attitude and ability to make friends reminded me that life is good! He brought flowers, told funny stories and held me on days when I needed to cry.

Hannah was not yet five when she helped me to choose a wig to cover inevitable hair loss. She plumped pillows and fixed tea parties on her plastic plates. She told me I looked pretty on days I didn’t feel that I did. Her drawing of two bluebirds, mother and baby, captioned by the pre-kindergarten scrawl “Surprise Mommie Today” is now in my wallet.

Knowing that I helped to create these children has been the strongest medicine. My daily radiation treatments consisted of three shots of a camera as I lay on a table. As the machine moved over me I had the same three images each morning: Chris hammering out cancer cells with his tools. Ben wiping out cancer cells on his skateboard. Hannah painting out cancer cells with her chubby brush.

I can only imagine Earl’s feelings, including fear of being left with these three children. On our wedding day he promised to love me in sickness and in health. He did not promise to shave my head or inject me daily with blood cell boosters, but he did these things and more, playing out steadfast love every day.

My angel mother flew in from out-of-state, staying for weeks at a time. She reminisced about my growing up, resounding that faith and positive thinking move us through horrible times.

I am often asked what the hardest part was. It was not physical pain, nausea or even fear. It was finding a balance between “This is serious” and “This too shall pass,” and applying that balance to life within our family.

The hair loss issue took close second. It is not a symptom of the disease itself but a visual reminder that something big is happening. As my hair began to disappear a fear set in, then an acceptance and finally a relief when it was gone.

I then displayed bald baby pictures of everyone prominently around the house as if to say, “Look! We all came from meager bald beginnings!” I became adept at styling my wig, tying a scarf, turning up the brim of a sassy hat—but the shock came in the mirror at night,gazing at a bare scalp and fading lashes and brows. Still, I held my head high and followed advice to “stand up and be counted.”

Facing a life-threatening illness makes you wonder how you have mattered in others’ lives. By telling me I was important to them, loved ones gave me spirit to move through the year. There were also those who did not know what to do, but perhaps silently kept us in good thoughts and prayers. From all of this I have learned the importance of sending a card, making a phone call, taking a surprise to someone in trouble. No gesture is too small, or ever too late.

I am told that I was an example for others. Many women say that they have scheduled mammograms because of me. Others share that they now appreciate life from watching my hardship. One friend’s daughter created an award-winning science project on chemotherapy and hair loss. A neighborhood teenager walked with me in the Komen Foundation Race for the Cure and later wrote a poignant essay.

Now, people ask me if I am still afraid. Here is the truth:I may outlive everyone I know. We never know what will happen to us. We cannot control our death. What we can do is decide how we are going to live.

There were many vivid dreams during my treatment. During my nights I was trying to make sense of my days and imagination would spin out Wonderland-esque tales of the real, blended with the ridiculous.

But the dream that was most telling was this:

I listened to a summer concert with my family on a hillside. There was a cottage in a field, covered in beautiful flowering vines. An aging woman in a kooky hat worked among the flowers. As I watched her garden slowly, laboring over one potted plant, I realized that this garden had not sprung from many sources. All the vines covering the cottage came from one small pot, and had grown to enhance the world with beautiful blooms and lush leaves.

If we nourish our one life, it can grow to touch not only those around us, but lives of others whom we may never even meet.

Cancer is not a disease of one group of people. It is everyone’s disease. There must be women reading this now who are facing what I faced this past year. And to you I say this:

Stand tall. Hold your head high, no matter how much hair is on it. Smile. Learn. Be thankful. Stand up and be counted.

Your life matters.

Happy Birthday, Christopher

Happy 27th birthday to my first born! Here is a poem from those early days of motherhood, written for him when he was almost two years old.

Happiness

is wound up in Christopher

as he winds himself in me.

A bubbling, simmering happiness.

He putters

around the yard

busy with cars, trucks, rocks.

I watch

his chubby face and bobbing yellow hat

running after Dickens.

His song is simple

as he carefully walks the bricks:

Toe, heel, toe, heel.

He takes his joy

from whatever he wishes---

like scraping frosting off a cake.

My joy

is like ice cream melting inside:

soft and sweet.

It trickles down to say.

"Thank you,

Christopher,

for being my baby."

March 7, 1985

My Own Kind of Mother

It’s official. I’ve become my mother.

I’m not going to take credit for this line. Even though you might see it on nightshirts, Momblogs, bumper stickers, post-its and calendars - it’s from the 1986 movie “About Last Night,” adapted from a play by David Mamet. The character has just finished hosting and clearing away her first Thanksgiving in her own home. The dishes are done, the leftovers are put away and the carcass is in the trash can. She turns to her friend, wipes her hands on her aproned hips and announces, "It's official. I've become my mother."

I've had this moment many times: Over a kitchen sink and a baby's crib; at a door waving goodbye to a kindergartener, a teenager, a grown man. It's a flash of memory where I suddenly change places, picture myself on the other side, looking back. It's happened when I reach into my purse for my wallet and remember that I have fastened it with a rubber band. It's happened when I put the groceries in the trunk and spy that extra pair of shoes for days when my feet hurt.

It happened the first time when I held our first baby, cradling his head in my hands. I looked into his eyes and suddenly I saw my own mother, holding me the same way. Only I was the baby. I saw her eyes glowing and her face laughing. I felt her gentle, up-and-down rocking, my toes burrowing into her softness. It was a moment of connection, not only to my baby, but to my mother. It's a moment I'll remember forever.

More to come......

Happy Birthday

Today is my Hannah's fifteenth birthday. It's been a good day - a full day. And all along I have reflected on what a dream and a gift she is to all of us.

Fifteen years ago when she was born at 3:15 a.m., Earl and I couldn't believe it when the doctor announced, "A Girl!!" After four boys, we never thought we would have a daughter and yet here she was: rosy and pink and beautiful. Right from the beginning we saw that rosebud mouth, those perfect dimples, the upturned nose, the watchful eyes.

After her bath, Earl settled with her into a chair by the window. At daybreak he sang “Here Comes the Sun.” I remember making him promise that he would never let me become a "polyester pantsuit mother" - now that I had a daughter, I would need to keep my fashion sense together! I started making plans right then, and I haven't stopped since.

My mother brought Chris, 12, and Ben, 8, to see her later that morning. They had their baseball hats on and were just as charmed as we were. Ben drew a picture of "Hannah: The Baby Floren" in Chris' arms. We laugh today at his cubist portrait, worthy of a Picasso nod. Son David arrived after work that evening, his blue eyes twinkling as he held her, knowing that the two of them would share a special bond. Oldest son Joe sent roses from out-of-town with a card that read: “Here is your reward for all those years as the mother of boys. In the purest sense: Happy Mother's Day."

I just knew that from these moments on, life was going to be a wonder with this daughter. She has had the blessings of her father and her brothers, and she has absorbed the best of each of them in becoming her own self.

She also takes in from the women that came before her. She comes from a long line of strong women – strong in different times, and for different reasons. From Mary Amelia, who opened her home to everyone and who burned dinner nearly every night because she was paying more attention to her books than to her stove; from Ada Florence, who was widowed at 28 and raised her children on her own, then opened her own grocery store at 50; from Eleanor Jeanne, who has met numerous hardships and tragedies with humor, strength and determination; from me.

I didn’t know anything about raising a girl today, and yet she was entrusted to us halfway into my 40th year. So I draw upon the strength and wisdom from these women who created me.

What I have learned is that raising a daughter today, like it must have been all those years before, is helping her to find a balance: a balance between being confident, yet humble; contemporary, yet classy; reserved, yet brave; adventurous, yet calm. I have learned that it can be, at times, like watching a little movie of myself - the good times and the painful times.

And what I have also learned is the lesson that is there for all of us as parents: That being her mother has brought out the best in me.

Happy Birthday, My Sweet Hannah. What a dream. What a gift.

Weavings

For nearly twenty years, I have carried a basket. It’s a strong basket, handcrafted in Ohio by a family-owned company known for heirloom quality weaving. It’s a basket that’s been filled with, at different times, different things. At first I bought it just for magazines, picturing how nice it would look next to my bed: current issues of reading journals and gardening tomes nicely stacked, waiting to be devoured. Then I decided to use it as a car basket, filled with necessities for a trip across town or across country: a map or two, a bottle of water, a sun visor. The basket became, over the next months, a carrying case for many things: flowers from the farmer’s market, sand toys for a walk to the park, lunch for two little boys and me. On the day that I decided to make it a diaper bag, my life was changed forever.

I packed the basket up with enough toddler gear to last a couple of hours, perched Baby Ben on my hip and walked into the principal’s office at the school of our then-kindergarten son Christopher. I smiled, gulped, and offered myself as a volunteer. “I’d like to help children write poetry, stories, anything, for a few hours a week,” I began, “because I love writing and would like for them to love it too.”

“Great!” the principal responded. “I just got a grant to hire someone just like you. How would you like a job?”

That’s honestly how it happened. I was offered a job at that school, on the spot, wearing my momjeans and tennis shoes, as a California Writing Project Writer’s Assistant. I didn’t know if I wanted a job, what the job was, how many hours I would work, how my husband would react or what I would do with my baby. But I said yes. And my life was changed forever.

We worked out the details, of course, which aren’t so hard to work out when it’s something you really want to do. Over the next five years I filled my basket with picture books, stories, poems and ideas, and spent a few hours with kindergartners through fifth graders each week. It was great: There were not a lot of parameters, because this was a grant position at the school and we could make it whatever we wanted it to be. The teachers were each glad to have me for an hour a week, working with their kids, while they were free to do prep-work or teacher-work. The kids seemed to enjoy it, and I liked the extra money. Chris was proud of his Mom working at the school, and Ben had fun in the preschool sandbox.

I liked teaching children so much that I decided to get my multiple subjects credential, encouraged by that same principal to keep the job and attend classes at the same time. I learned about and started weaving more substance into my lessons. I felt I was making a difference in the students by bringing the world of writing to them. I began to prepare myself to enter the world of “real teaching”--- that is, finally getting my own classroom and having my own students to mold into little writers. I was ready! But all that was put on hold when we had another baby, our Hannah, and when I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer when she was four years old.

The story of my battle with breast cancer is another story, but it does figure here. Dealing with a life-threatening illness changes your perspective on things. It makes you pay attention, and it makes you closely evaluate how you spend your time.

Our family dealt with the illness, did what we had to do, and I got ready to go back into the classroom. I approached the same school, and offered myself to the new principal. The grant that had supported me all those years ago no longer existed, but he hired me with other monies. So I started up again, discovering new picture books, planning new lessons to take to each class and learning new kids’ names.

Right away I noticed differences in the classrooms. The new administration in the district had made some big alterations. Many of the “creative” things were gone, replaced by strict literacy blocks and stringent schedules. All of these things had woven together to make a change in the teachers and in the students. I wondered how they were going to make a change in me.

Teachers were glad to see me because I was going to bring something back into their classroom that they felt had been missing. But, since I was also a different person now, I had to evaluate how I wanted to make a difference. How did I fit into the bigger picture? How could I make it matter?

I quickly found I wasn’t the same person that I was before. I had faced death. I had faced the prospect of me not being here to continue what I had started --- with my family, my friends, and my students. I just wanted to pick up where I had left off, but that was impossible. I had to create a new path and a new journey. A new sort of basket.

As I worked with the kids at this school, a new desire formed. I now longed to be more than the enrichment person, more than the Miss Rumphius of Writing, striding in with her basket of cute projects and ideas. I longed to make a difference in their writing lives, not just for the day, but forever. It would have been easy to return to that younger me, but that wasn’t enough. Was it that I knew more about writing, more about teaching, more about life, or more about me? Probably it was all of these.

My goal was always to spark a passion for writing in the students and teachers with whom I work. Now I wanted to do it in a more lasting way. I began to look around for great resources and mini-lessons, and found many. But my urge was to show the teachers and students more than a mini-lesson and, more importantly, to become more than a mini-lesson giver.

I began to believe that we can help children become more confident writers by teaching focused skills and crafts that they can weave into their writing organically, such as using powerful verbs in everything they create. I began to prepare my lessons by intertwining some of the points that have become the center of my belief system about teaching writing.

We need to not just talk around writing, but model writing in the classroom. We need to help our students find powerful writing in mentor texts. We need to look at what other writers have done in appropriate mentor texts, and try these craft moves in our own writing. We need to know what we are teaching. We need a focus. Within a context, we need to let our students have freedom. Beginning with a certain structure or focus may seem limiting at first, but it can be safe and then motivating because the students have something to hang on to. We must encourage our students to move beyond the safety net, and find the power and the voice that is uniquely theirs.

A change happened in my students because a change happened in me. I started to notice it when these new children, my second generation of students, would run up to me during recess or after school, clutching their notebooks and screeching, “Mrs. Floren – I LOVE writing!”

“Writing is my passion and power,” declares Adrian.

“Each day when you come, I feel like a brand-new boy,” scribbles Jay-Von.

“It was a starry fall night when she was born, Mainya-Laya,” pens Mara. “On the border of Texas, stood a little house. There she lived. It was the beginning of a new cowgirl.”

A new cowgirl, indeed. It’s a very small time that I am with them, really, such a small window of time. And it would be a very easy thing to not claim the space as mine, the students as mine. But when I watch those students beam over a poem, listen to them read a beginning that hits the mark, and feel their words sweep at the soul, I know I am their real teacher.

The lines we lift each day show wisdom in these young writers. That, coupled with my own wisdom from dealing with an ongoing, life-threatening disease makes me want to squeeze the most out of every moment, and that is what makes it real.

Two years ago, I bought a new basket. It’s chunkier, but then, so am I. It has leather handles that are easier to grip, easier to hang on to when glowing boys like Adrian and Jay-Von run up to enlighten me about how they are becoming writers.

Most of us teachers have some sort of basket---those places close to our heart where we weave the words, stash the ideas, let the language churn and burn. Some are backpacks, some are tote bags, some are carts with wheels. Some are little handheld devices where our thumbs and forefingers tap out words in a quiet room.

Being a teacher - and a writer - is figuring out what each of us has in our basket--the full corners and the empty spaces. How to weave all that we already know into our teaching, and how to look for those things we want to plump up. We weave our thoughts onto paper, our words into ears, our yearnings into hearts. Sometimes, when the splints don't go quite right, we have to unweave and weave again.

But in the end, we weavers know we have something that is uniquely ours: A finished product of different shapes and sizes that will really never be finished.

And now that you know it - What will you do with your basket?

(originally written as an article for the San Diego Area Writing Project Summer Invitational)

Coming Home

He perched high on the dealer’s shelf, gazing down at all the others, his smudged face still. He was old and dirty and discolored, but I still saw the glint in his eye and the all-knowing smirk to his lip. His green hat was jaunty, his sword tucked into his belt at a cocky angle, the tips of his shoes turned up ever so slightly. I recognized him immediately – the Peter Pan doll that my brother had treasured as a child.

I had not seen Mark’s Peter Pan in many, many years. It was probably long gone by now, gone with the rejected baseball cards, the old firetruck, the sand pails and the rainslushed boots of our backyard playplace. We spent many hours there - two motley cowboys with hats askew, gun belts slinging between our knees. Hours would pass as we made up our games, sang our songs, munched our Fritos and chased our dogs. In the afternoons we would tumble into to the galvanized tub, he with Peter Pan and I with Effie Lou. Nana would add bubbles to the sunwarmed bathwater and we would splash away the crumbs, the sand, the grime. Fresh pajamas and kisses in the sun, and we were ready for Mama, for Daddy, for supper.

I reached for Peter Pan, my hand curling around his rubber body, carefully carrying him to the shop proprietor. The price tag showed that he was within my reach. I asked for a magnifying glass to check for tears in his little rubber hands – as a doll collector I know that the fingers of these vintage babies are the first to go – and was glad to see that he was still intact. I thought about Effie Lou – wrapped in a towel, carefully tucked away in my own closet with other childhood treasures – and secretly smiled, thinking about the two of them finding each other once again. He had traveled the world; she had stayed close to home. How well they reflected the two of us. I plunked down the money. It was worth it – just for the memory, the thought, the hope.

Peter Pan had a bath this morning, in the kitchen sink with the bubbles and a soft toothbrush to loosen the grime of some other, long-gone child. Effie Lou stood patiently by, waiting. The two of them are now tucked into the Easter basket that we shared as children.

And Brother Mark will be here in just a few weeks, to start his new life.

Day Two

Reading and Writing

I read for a mixture of reasons
one of them being
the sheer satisfaction of the sound:
the imagery, the language, the words themselves.

I write for a mixture of reasons
one of them being
the turn of the phrase, the flick of the pen, the crank of the wrist,
searching for the just-right words
to hit upon my voice.

I often read for the joy of it
which means that I have a little workroom full of

scraps, tablets and folders
bursting with those choice words of other writers.
Having a little workroom
filled with scraps, tablets and folders of other writers’ words
does not make you a better writer
any more than having a garage stacked with nine irons

would make you Tiger Woods
or a closet plumped with period costumes

would make you Dame Judi Dench.
What it does give you
is a sense of mission and comfort:
Music can be made on a computer keyboard
given enough time and chance
and persistence.

When I am reading
I hold a book in one hand
and a black felt-tip pen in the other.
I capture passages
then move them to the scraps, tablets and folders that fill

this little workroom.
Sometimes
when I read out loud
the words peal in my ears
reminding me that literature is
- first and last -
language.
The words themselves are rarely new, nor are they usually exotic.
Most of them I use all the time:
when chatting with a pal
shopping for a new ceiling fan
or planning my mother’s eightieth birthday party.

But when I am writing
I hold those same words in my mind
flipping through them just as I sort through coupons at the market
searching for the one that fits the situation
letting my fingers fall on their edge and plucking them out of the packet.
I try them on for size
shifting tenses back and forth
rearranging their neighbors like colored beads of glass

on a summer necklace.
I string them together and they make music in this little workroom
where junebugs click at the hot nightscreen
in the same moment that my fingertips tap at the keys.

In my best reading
and my best writing
the words are simply and exactly right
perfectly placed
for the writer and the listener
for the meaning and the music.

The First Day

I have been thinking for awhile about returning to writing - writing for me, for others, for fun, for thinking. I have gotten away from writing for myself. I am not sure when that happened, or why. Probably it has something to do with being a teacher. I have spent a lot of years helping kids to develop their own voice, and in the process have neglected to use my own. That happens. We get so caught up in our work and lives and doing for others that we forget what we truly love.

So here goes. I have lots of stories to tell, observations to share. And maybe they are only for me. I do know that writers need an audience, a purpose. For now, my audience is the page, and my purpose is to see words pop up as I type them. For today, that may be enough. And as the days go on and I grow more courage, who knows what will happen?