19. Where are we now?

Today marks 6 months since I was officially deemed “cancer free”. The next few posts have been written in bits and pieces over the past 6 months as the world has turned upside down in more ways than one. Currently, it’s mid-June. We are still mostly in quarantine doing what we can to avoid Covid-19, I am working from home, Charlotte is out of school, all practicing social distancing as much as we can. We are watching, listening, learning, and trying to speak up as this country once again battles its racial and social justice demons.

Interestingly, Facebook informed me that three years ago today, Mason and I announced we were pregnant with Charlotte. We also got engaged seven years ago today. Time is strange and it moves too fast.

Maybe it’s the title of this blog making me keenly aware of things that fit the mold, or maybe it’s because I’ve been quarantined with a toddler for the past three months and watched Frozen 2 about 100 times, but I keep thinking about the phrase that is often repeated in the movie “just do the next right thing”. It’s a prevalent theme in the movie and even has a song devoted to it. But it’s also how we’ve been living our lives since my diagnosis, and especially in recent months since we can only make decisions based on the information we have at the time. It’s not that we don’t make plans for the future – we do. But because we have lived through the unexpected, dealt with a life-altering diagnosis, and come out on the other side, we also know that plans change and you have to change with them or you are going to be dealing with a lot of unhappiness in your life. I have personally found that focusing on “the next right thing” has been the most helpful way to move forward. I’m absolutely still in the anger phase, but I can feel myself channeling that anger into action, into decisions, into next steps. Time will tell where we go from here.