What My Kids Understand About Mommy's Cancer

My oldest asked me last week if the medicine was working. Not "are you feeling better" — she's eight, she doesn't ask that kind of soft, adult-shaped question yet. She asked it the way she asks if her tower of blocks worked, if the recipe worked, if the plan worked. A yes-or-no question about a system doing what it's supposed to do.

I said yes. I don't actually know that yet. But I said yes, because eight is still too young for scanxiety, and because some lies are just love wearing a disguise.

How much do they know?

Here's the honest answer: I don't fully know, either. I know what I've told them, which is some version of "Mommy has something in her body that's not supposed to be there, and the doctors are giving her medicine to make it go away, and the medicine makes Mommy really tired and makes her hair fall out, but it's working on getting the bad thing out." I know what they've overheard, which is more than I'd like, because kids are always listening, especially at the exact moments you assume they're not.

What I don't know is what they've built out of those pieces. Eight- and seven-year-olds are meaning-making machines running on incomplete data, same as the rest of us, except they haven't learned yet to hide the conclusions they land on. So sometimes it comes out sideways. My son, who's seven, points at my port scar and says "boo-boo" and pats it very gently, like it's something that needs protecting rather than something that already did its job protecting me. My daughter drew a picture of our family a few weeks ago and gave me a bald head in it, before I'd actually lost my hair, like she was preparing herself for a version of me that hadn't arrived yet.

That one got me. That one still gets me.

The version control problem of childhood memory

In software, when you're building something a child will use for years, you think hard about backward compatibility — will this still make sense when the assumptions change? I keep thinking about that with my kids. Whatever memory of this year gets encoded in them, it's going to run in the background for the rest of their lives, and I don't get to choose exactly what version installs.

My daughter will remember something about this year. I don't get to pick whether what she remembers is "Mommy was sick and scared and it was awful" or "Mommy was sick and we still made cookies on Tuesdays and it was hard but we were okay." I can influence it. I can't control it. That's a strange kind of powerlessness — knowing you're writing to a permanent record you'll never get to proofread.

So I've stopped trying to manage the narrative perfectly and started trying to just be honest and present inside it. Not performing okay-ness I don't feel. Not performing catastrophe I don't feel either. Just letting them see a mom who gets tired, who sometimes cries, who still shows up for bath time even when showing up costs more than it used to.

What they've taught me instead

Here's the thing nobody warns you about: your kids don't just receive information about your cancer. They hand some back.

My son has started bringing me his favorite blanket on days I'm in bed more than usual, without being asked, without me saying anything about how I feel. Seven years old, and he's already reading a room better than most adults I know. My daughter has taken to narrating her stuffed animals through elaborate "doctor visits," complete with a very serious teddy bear oncologist who tells the patient, every single time, "you are going to be okay, I promise, the medicine is strong." I don't know where eight-year-olds learn to script hope like that. I don't know if she learned it from me or if she's teaching it back to me.

Either way, I've started listening to her stuffed animal doctor. He's more confident than my real one, and honestly, some days I need that more than accuracy.

What I actually want them to understand

Not the biology. Not the staging, not the chemo names, not any of the vocabulary I've had to learn this year against my will. I don't need my kids to understand Hodgkin lymphoma.

I need them to understand something closer to this: that people you love can be sick and scared and still be fully, completely your person. That a hard year doesn't erase all the ordinary good in it — the cookies, the bath time, the blanket brought without asking. That asking "did the medicine work" is a fair question to ask about anything that scares you, and that it's okay if the honest answer, for a while, is "we don't know yet, but we're going to keep showing up either way."

If that's the only thing that survives from this year into whoever they become — that showing up is what love does when certainty isn't available — I'll take it. I'll take it and call this year worth something, even the parts I'd trade to undo.

💜 Kayla