My mother is here. I am so happy. She is mothering. She brought cookie cutters with her and yesterday baked dozens of little people and stars, and today, when the kids come home from school, we’re going to have a big cookie-icing party, with lots of colors of confectioner’s sugar-icing and paintbrushes. And the other night, when my son had his first-ever concert, wearing his first-ever necktie (that wasn’t decorated with insects or dogs, I mean), my mother was the bold soul who volunteered, when the rest of us felt too shy, to venture all the way down the aisle of the school auditorium to take a picture of him (back row, second chair, half-hidden behind the cello). Oh, and she’s already solved about five little spiritual dilemmas I’d been having.</p>
<p>What I mean is she is well. She’s been on this last round of chemo for over a year, her hair is thinning, she tires early, and she’s still on all kinds of medications and protocols, but she has a kind of vibrancy and acuity I haven’t seen in her in two and a half years. It’s not as if we think she’s been granted a reprieve. It’s just that, these days, there’s a lot of there there, as Gertrude Stein might put it, and I am extravagantly, wantonly grateful.</p>
<p>Yesterday we were talking about cancer (as we do - not ad nauseam, but pretty regularly…as a matter of fact, to combat the oppressive, airless effect of so many people who, in a attempt at courtesy or decorousness, do not inquire, I’ll sometimes pipe up out of the blue, “So. How’s cancer going?”), and my mother remarked that if she had it to do over, if she had it to choose, she wouldn’t want it any other way.</p>
<p>“You mean,” I said slowly, “if you could undo the cancer, if you could opt never to have gotten it in the first place, you wouldn’t?” I felt a kind of wild incredulity, halfway between indignation and elation. Coming from anyone but my mother, the claim would have struck me as a defense, a stance a person might adopt in order to make things manageable.</p>
<p>“Right.” She could see I half-got it. Gamely, she went on. “I really believe I could never simulate the awareness that’s come from it.” Others, she acknowledged, might be able to attain that level of awareness, awakeness, through other means. Meditation, prayer. Hiking. Yoga. She was clear that would never have been the case with her. (Perhaps my mother’s case is similar to that of my daughter, who at age five, replying to the suggestion she might like to sign up for a yoga class, explained, “Oh no, I tried that. Yoga’s too calm and peaceful for me.”)</p>
<p>“It’s enlarged me,” my mother said simply.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should have felt stunned and angry. In a way, she seemed to be saying she’d choose cancer over me, over my father, my brother, my sister, all of us. I didn’t feel angry, though. Instead my heart beat in exclamation points all over my chest, and I was kind of grinning, amazed yet again by this woman and the way she mothers, by all the ways she mothers. “It’s certainly enlarged my marriage,” she added. What she was really saying was that the experience of having cancer had made her more: more with us for as long as she is with us, more in the world for as long as she is in the world. How, she was saying, could she wish to undo that? How could she wish for anything less.