I put my daughter on the kindergarten bus in 2009. A week out of treatment for high-risk cancer, she had hearing aids, leg braces, sparse hair, endocrine issues and kidney damage.For 18 months, the first day of kindergarten had been our North Star. We cuddled in Emily’s hospital bed, chatting about the details of that upcoming day, which, when it finally arrived, included a pink rolling backpack, two packages of Barbie gummies in her Dora lunch box and sneakers that lit up.
It was as though she had an agenda and timeframe. And maybe she did, because by the end of kindergarten, she could read, scale the monkey bars and didn’t need her leg braces anymore. My worries about her not making friends were replaced by a daily report of which snack she had swapped with her friends during lunch.
The highs of typical kid milestones and the lows of collateral cancer damage left me exhausted. Elementary school talent shows, band concerts, the school state fair, summer camp and sleepovers had the power to take me down almost as much as waiting on an MRI for unexplained shading on her lungs. Extreme joy and extreme grief coexisted in a way I didn’t ever know they could.Most of the time, the good moments sustained me.
A few weeks before a middle school dance, Emily and I walked around the mall for hours trying to find a dress that fit and wasn’t from a children’s clothing store. On the way home, we cried, defeated. But the next day, we rallied and went to a fancy store in town that made the same prints for women and kids so her friends couldn’t tell her dress was a kids’ size.On dance night, I morphed into the paparazzi. “No more pictures,” Emily snapped. After I dropped her off, I called my sister.