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I didn’t make it to the river.  I barely made it to my porch.  I slept pretty much all day.

I am tired still.

I guess this is part of the story.  This part that isn’t funny or insightful.  This part with no answers and no snappy comebacks.

I’m tired and scared. I am mad.  I’m not as strong and funny as people tell me.  I have cancer and I’m having a bad day. A bad week. Oh what the heck, I’m having a bad month, year and decade too, as a matter of fact.

My writing has suffered as of late because I have been trying to hide all of this.  Looking back over it, I see it was like a toddler trying to hide behind a sapling.  I know.

Dan keeps telling me that the worst of the effects of the radiation are over.  But I think he is just trying to sooth me. I am so tired.  The skin on my backside where they zapped me five days a week for five weeks in a row is like old shoe leather and is cracking painfully. (When your butt hurts, your having a bad day whether you want to or not.)  Doing the laundry yesterday was a bad idea.  A hair-brained attempt to be normal that backfired on me today.  Who has to sleep all day from doing the laundry?

If you don’t mind, I am going to moan, groan, and complain today so that I can get it out of my system and get back to just being sarcastic.

Writing all this out is harder than I thought it would be.  Oh, in the beginning, when no one was reading it, it wasn’t so bad.   But when people start to tell me that I am so brave, so strong, so honest with my pain . . . Well, I have been feeling guilty about that.  I am not any of those things.

And to compound the problem, I haven’t seen a bus carrying a message for a week now!  I haven’t had a motto barring dream in all the sleeping I have done either.  This park doesn’t have any motivating trees and I can’t see my reflection in that silly creek even.   Can you believe they have signs all along that stream saying, “Danger -Creek!”  What’s the danger?  That you might stub your toe on a pebble?

I am trying to like it here, I really am.  But it’s hard. Yesterday, I was sitting on my porch at the top of this hill and I realized that I could hear my kids screaming all the way down at the playground.  I hobbled down there as fast as I could to see what was going on and as I was almost there, an old fella in a camp work shirt said, “Are you responsible for that?”   I thought it was a stupid question, being that I was the only female around that could have given birth to children in the last decade, but I didn’t tell him that.  “Yes, yes. I heard it.  I’m going to get them.”  It’s possible that he was making a joke, but you can never tell with grumpy old men.  So I left it alone and dragged my  noisy brood back up the hill.  If I had had three hands I would have pulled them all by the ear.  With only the standard two, one of them would have thought they weren’t in the same amount of trouble as the others. So I just took turns giving them “the look.”   The “how-dare-you-make-me-come-down-there” look accompanied by the “and-get-yelled-at-by-an-old-man” grimace.  They were pretty scared.

Why do they have a playground here if kids aren’t allowed to play loudly.  Kids can’t play quietly on a playground.  Not mine anyway. I hate all this quiet!

Who would have thought I would ever hate quiet?  I have had enough quiet time in the last six weeks to cure the mother of fourteen sets of twins of the need for a quiet moment!  I am bored!  I am achy and I am mad as h-e double hockey sticks.  And I can’t hide it any more.

There I said it.  And didn’t it feel good!

Please stop telling me how proud you are of me!  It’s too much pressure!   I’m just a cranky woman with a tumor in her butt.  If you had a tumor in your butt you’d do everything I’ve done to get it out too!  I’m not special.  I’m just me.

Tomorrow I hope to be in a much better mood.  Well, at least I will try to be awake.  That’s the best I can do.

Gotta’ love me.  It’s a rule.