I had cancer 3 times and I have 6 kids. Here's what I've learned about love
Nothing changed my take on true love as radically as when I discovered I had cancer
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}At 7:53 am on Feb. 14, after 23 hours of pitocin-induced labor, I gave birth to a 9-pound, 5-ounce pot roast of a baby boy. With a lusty cry – more mine than his – I began my foray into motherhood. And with it, my radical exit from anything remotely romantic on Valentine's Day.
In the nearly three decades since, I’ve added five more children to my docket, including stepchildren and foster-adopt children. As a result, my Valentine’s Days have been marked by birthday candles and kids’ valentines boxes far more often than any romantic escapades.
Even so, I don’t mind all that much. My views on love aren’t the same as they once were. I’m no longer the teenage girl who dreamed of happily-ever-after and a relationship dripping with romance and rose petals.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Michele Cushatt and her family
While marriage and mothering have certainly matured my views on love, nothing changed my take on true love as radically as when I discovered I had cancer. Not once, but three times.
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I was 39 years old the first time a doctor told me I had squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue – cancer of the tongue. I didn’t know such a thing existed, let alone for a healthy mom who didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and spent her free time training for 10K’s and triathlons.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}How could this happen to me?
And yet it did. Once in my 30s, twice in my 40s, the last time of which nearly took me down for good. By the time I made it through multiple surgeries and a grueling treatment regimen, two-thirds of my tongue had been removed as well as numerous lymph nodes and glands.
My body sported various skin grafts, as well as radiation burns from nose to chest, inside and out, a feeding tube, a tracheostomy, and a spirit that was utterly crushed.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Although love may break your heart, love will also heal it.
Saving my life required me to almost lose it. In the process, however, I learned a few hard but worthy lessons on the heart of true love, the kind of love that endures and secures, even when your world is falling apart.
Lesson 1: Love is Risky
The reason Hollywood rom-coms rake in millions is that we want love to be easy and to come with a happy ending. But love in real life looks less like a rom-com and more like a thriller (hopefully without the murder).
Sometimes love looks like seeing the good in your partner in spite of their momentary bad behavior. Or adopting three kids with a hard history when you’re almost finished raising the first three. And sometimes love looks like writing letters to your children and their future spouses, knowing you might not be around to experience their weddings.
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Love isn’t a movie, and old age and happy endings aren’t guaranteed. But real love shows up in spite of the possibility of loss, where the fear overwhelms, and dares to shine its light, right there in the dark.
Lesson 2: Love is Hard Work
Like gardening, love is a process of planting, protecting, nurturing, weeding, and if you’re lucky, harvesting. It’s back-breaking, sweat-inducing, never-ending work, regardless of the weather. But you do it anyway because tomorrow’s possibility depends on today’s planting. So you keep toiling, in the dogged hope you will someday see a pepper or eggplant peeking out from the earth.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Author Michele Cushatt
Some seasons produce little results. Others, you have more zucchini than you know what to do with. Either way, harvest requires getting your hands dirty. It’s messy and sweaty. But whether you’re around to see the results or not, the process of cultivating is its own reward.
Lesson 3: Love is Vulnerable
Nothing will cut you open quite like love. When I hovered between life and death, my illness exposed the rawest parts of myself, revealing weaknesses and vulnerabilities I’d rather have kept hidden. And yet, in that place of my vulnerability and humiliation, I discovered a new depth of love. This is a love that is inaccessible for those who want to wall up and self-protect.
But for those with the courage to reveal their true self, love offers the possibility of the greatest gift of all – of being seen, known, and loved, as you are. Rather than a flippant "I love you’, love finds its true power in offerings of "I’m sorry" and "I forgive you." It is in owning wrongs and absolving them that love endures.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A counselor once told me, "Whatever is wounded in relationship can only be healed in relationship." Love will break your heart, that is a fact.
One day, you too might have to face a diagnosis and a future without those you love, including the pot-roast baby who is now a 26-year-old man. The prospect feels unbearable, and yet the only way to avoid love’s pain is to avoid all love.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}In spite of that bad news, we mustn’t forget the even better news: Although Love may break your heart, Love will also heal it.
Love is the salve that soothes the wound, the glue that brings the pieces back into a whole, and the healing that cures even the direst circumstance. Not because it changes reality, but because it ensures we are not alone in it.