One year here

Last year for Mother’s Day, my kids sent me on a one-way first-class ticket to Hawaii. My prognosis had been terrible. I wasn’t expected to live very long, three years at the outside. As that dang tumor progressed, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to one year, to be honest. I felt like I was being smothered from deep inside my head, and it turns out, that tumor was pressing on the vein that supplies blood to all of the brain, so that’s pretty much what was happening.

This year for Mother’s Day, I worked in the morning, and it was a beautiful gorgeous day in paradise. I played with ducklings, I fiddled around in the greenhouse, I weeded the in the garden. I played with bread in the kitchen. I remember feeling like I’d arrived home when I got here last year, and as I spent the day doing all the things I love to do, that feeling remains. I really am living my best life in paradise. I’m so lucky.

In the early afternoon, I decided I was tired and took the girls down the road to South Point, the southern most point in the US. It is gorgeous down there, but was super windy. I didn’t get into the water, but the girls had a blast. They are really learning about how to ride the waves and time the current, and for the first time, there was no vomit on the way home from drinking too much salt water. That is such a hard thing to teach them — why would they drink from a bowl when the entire ocean is RIGHT THERE?

Last year on Mother’s Day, I had done Green Sands beach for the first time, and the ride was so painful to my head from all the bouncing around on the back of the truck. I thought about repeating the trip yesterday to see the contrast — this year, I have no pain at all in my head. But I opted for the more relaxing afternoon, just playing with the girls at the beach. Sometimes I can barely remember what the pain was like, and sometimes, I don’t want to think about it very much.