Chocolate Chip Cookies and Making the World Right

Man, I yearn for the days when I began this blog and I could write anything about my children without it impacting them. Those days are gone of course. My babies are adult sized people with lives of their own. Today is one of those days however when I hurt for my babies. I wrote out a brief history of the last several years of our life in an email to somebody today---to give them a bit of background on what the boys have gone through. Sometimes I feel as though I'm being dramatic when I write it all out. I mean....we ALL go through these events...one way or another...but I figure if someone is working with my kids they should know about what could be affecting them so I went ahead and did it. This is what I wrote:

I may have been a bit vague when I talked about family situations.  It's good for you all to know where we've been though. In 2008, when Leo was still 8, we lost my father to Alzheimer's. It was of course a long and difficult path and although my parents lived on their own we were more or less their caretakers. During that period my sister, who the boys were very close to, although she lived in SC, was diagnosed with bile duct cancer. In late 2008 she moved in with us and we cared for her until she died at home with us in February 2009. My mother, who was living alone and confined to a wheelchair then began a downward spiral and it was a pretty difficult year of caretaking until she died in February of 2010. In February of 2010, immediately after my sister died, my husband Ernie's prostate cancer returned and metastasized into his bones. He is now Stage IV but has been in remission since he finished treatment in 2010. He continues to do well and lives a perfectly normal life. We try to keep a balance of being realistic about the fact that he has cancer, but also letting them know that it is not a terrible one as their Aunt Judi had, and that he will live a long time. It's hard to really know how the boys see it. I'm not really entirely sure.

The boys have been pretty extraordinary through this all but I know it has affected in them in ways they don't really know, much less us.

I was really struck by that last line when I reread it. I know my boys are incredibly lucky in many ways; they are loved, they are healthy, they are indulged no doubt and encouraged...our house may be ramshackle but they have a good home and don't have to worry about hunger or safety. But I hate that they have been impacted by grief so early in their lives. And when I  see the grief still there in them my heart just breaks.

My beautiful, beautiful sweet peas.

I cooked dinner last night. I made my standard sesame noodles but I made them with some fresh Chinese wheat noodles I'd picked up at Green Onion. I added chopped baby Swiss chard and asparagus and served it with a couple of nuggets of pork belly that I crisped in a pan....kinda like little pork croutons. Porktons if you will. It still seemed like a night in which we needed a bit of a treat though so I asked Ernie to make chocolate chip cookies. He agreed and Owen helped him...and made sure to do the traditional bringing around of the vanilla bottle for everybody to sniff. Leo pronounced them delicious and just for a moment all was right with our little world.