I remember the first time I went out without Miles. I was a plump postpartum mess. Sweaty with nerves and fears of all the things that could go wrong. No matter that I was leaving him with Jim and just going to a movie with some girlfriends. On the way to the movie, an intuitive friend realized this was first time I'd left Miles, and clucked over me and how brave I was and how fine he'd be. She was right, of course. But this pattern repeated itself the first time I left him overnight for a girls' weekend getaway.
This weekend, I started from a better spot. A little bit wiser and a more seasoned mother of two. On Saturday morning, I kissed Miles and Ian and was waiting by the door for Jim. I hustled him to the car and on our way.
Blue skies. Perfect temperature. Lattes and open road. But if you are reading this and you have cancer and you are heading out for your first trip away with your spouse, let me tell you, it won't be the trip you thought it would be. At least mine wasn't.
I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe it is because you forget, or I did, that these little junkets are how the whole thing starts. Two people who have interests, chemisty and curiosity in common. Getting to know each other. Taking little trips (in our case, to New York City after we'd known each other for about eight minutes). Talking, talking, talking. Figuring out that together the possibilities are limitless. And thats how, a few years later, life finds you married, happy, busy with jobs, mortgages, nanny-shares and sweet little bunnies who wipe their runny noses on you and you don't mind.
And then you are back in the car again. Road trip. Talking, talking, talking. But instead of which foreign city would you want to live it, it was all of the potential limited possibilities. What would Jim do: about school for the boys? about the house? about childcare? What would I do: to maximize the time? to make sure the boys knew me or had something of me? Just hashing and crying through the life without wife logistics.
Jim thinks, and he is usually right about these things, that it is the mental angst of December creeping back in again. We understand this phase of the process (chemo, surgery, radiation) but now we look ahead to the awful unknowing. Is it gone? Is it back? Did we beat it? Do we repeat it? Grief anew.
On the whole, the weekend was lovely. It is just that some aspects of our lives are a little too sad to consider and without the hectic mess of our lives, without the demands of the kids and jobs, with the time to talk and think and be together, it can be a bit overwhelming.
An example. Massages Sunday morning. Sounds lovely but after the massage, Jim complained that it was too long. Too much quiet time to think. I managed to distract myself, though I cried through a bit of mine, too.
Two funny moments from the weekend. Well, first, it really was lovely. It was a very pretty setting and a nice hotel. I am so grateful to have had the time to get away together and we did have a really nice time. We talked about other trips we had taken and reminded each other of favorite meals, hotels, rooms and funny moments along the way. The size and spector of Istanbul. The hang-gliding. The soda on the mountainside with bougenvilla. The restaruant and pool in Daliyan. The rooftop in Marrakesh. See, despite our grief, we still know how to have a good time. We lazed and read at the pool. We had cocktails and a cheese plate by the Miles' river. We had a bubble bath. We biked to dinner. We tucked into a spot for dessert. We puttered around and explored town. We got massages. We had breakfast in the sun by the water. We read the Sunday paper.
To the funny moments. First, Jim capped off our big weekend out of town with a big Saturday night watching Cspan. For real. I went to bed and he stay up watching the last few minutes of the White House Correspondents' Dinner and then spent another chunk of time watching the guests file out of the Washington Hilton like it was red carpet oscar action. Isn't that Madeleine Albright? Did you see Sofia Verga? Who is with Barbara Walters. Big night without the kids:)
Second, a different kind of funny. On the spa services form, it wanted to know all sorts of stuff that apparently would help them deliver exceptional treatments. I was debating whether I needed to or should disclose that I had cancer (which would I'm sure have lead to an uncomfortable and irrelevant conversation with a complete stranger) when I noticed that two boxes down on the form was nail fungus. I mean, seriously, are these conditions comparable in anyone's world? I laughed, ignored it all and just signed the form. The bald head and the skin might have suggested that I wasn't totally forthcoming but no one bothered to mention it.
