Five years old

The birthday sign Annie used to bring out for every birthday.

Well, even though I was raised to keep my horn to myself and NOT toot it, I am kind of impressed with, well, me. This week marks the fifth year of posting a weekly essay on this Substack platform, with only a handful of missed weeks. I think even my parents would be okay with my saying to myself, “Good job, Cindy!”

This all started out as a way to stay accountable to my writing practice after four years of caregiving had brought that practice to a standstill. As grateful as I am that we were able to provide the kind of care my dad needed (but also didn’t necessarily want, hence the book) it required giving large chunks of our lives over to that care. I am famously undisciplined, so I knew I needed some help with such an ambitious (for me) endeavor. This platform was relatively new and not the free-for-all it has become. I mean, everyone has a Substack now! But it was an easily manageable platform and I figured I could handle 750 words a week.

And I did. In my self-congratulatory post three years ago, I imagined the first two years’ word count as something close to a whole book. I must have a whole book by now, but the content looks a bit different than when I started out. As I’ve been reflecting on this milestone, it occurs to me the last five years have been a lot. To recap:

Dad died
Annie was diagnosed with breast cancer
Luca was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis
Granddaughter Aria was born 3 months early
Annie died from breast cancer
I was diagnosed with breast cancer and also had a total hysterectomy.
Lost more friends than I care to count to cancer or other illnesses.

OK…that’s enough.

But here I am—still standing. Seems like I should be a puddle on the floor by now, doesn’t it? What could possibly have kept me going through all of that sturm und drang? (My dad always used to say that.) Turns out, lots of things showed up to keep me upright, like:

Granddaughter Aria thrived (All the grandchildren thriving is plenty)
Got to visit the Arizona family a few times
Published two books
Was accepted into a couple of anthologies
Appeared on a few radio shows and an AARP webinar
Was invited to present at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop and . . .
Maintained a 5-year-long commitment to writing regularly on this platform.

Birthdays and anniversaries are checkpoints along our journeys that give structure or impose stricture on us as we bend and sway in the vagaries of life. I have both dreaded and welcomed such milestones, but whatever the reaction, I did move a little further down the path.

And that’s how life is, I guess. None of those things in the first list were anything I would have ever wanted in my life, much less imagined would show up in it. But the same life provided the things in the second list. It is very clear that life is not fair.

I guess the word I might use to describe my life in the past five years is bearable. It’s the word Annie used in the title of a guest post she wrote for me here on Silver Linings. She wrote with candor and humor about what her own life had brought her and how she just had to keep going. Which she did with the strength and courage of a human much more wise and evolved than I’ll ever be. Through the lens of enormous grief, I now know that not only is life not fair, it was never really advertised as such. Applying that understanding to who I am now and where I hope to be heading relieves me of some of those previous expectations of fairness. When bad things happen, I’m still sad and unhappy, but I remain upright. Ready for the next thing.

Good or bad.

I’m going to pretend this was my 5th birthday :)

Buy me a coffee! (I’m okay with a glass of wine, too!)