My life is changing quickly and dramatically

this week and as if sending a child to kindergarden and finishing cancer treatment wasn't enough change for me, Google changed the way that they operate Blogger accounts during this same week that I changed my email address and so I couldn't log in to my old account to get the instructions that Google sent there.

So there it is.

I had no choice but to start this new blog, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Part 2

because I really wanted to write tonight, so I stopped cursing after about 15 minutes and just moved on.

I had been thinking about whether I wanted to keep blogging or not when my treatment finishes or if this blog was done and now Goggle has nudged me to make the decision. I'm still blogging, but times have changed baby, a new chapter has begun.
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Summer ended quickly. I was swimming with the kids last week and it was still in the mid-eighties most of the week and then Monday, Labor Day, the air started to smell like fall and Tuesday morning when I walked George to school, we could feel a cool breeze against our short sleeves.

And I thought I would be teary, walking out our door, past two more houses on Union Avenue and then crossing the street to Myers Elementary School, but I wasn't. George was wearing his new Spiderman backpack and he was bouncing down the street, smiling and beaming. All of the work I had done to prep him for the morning...it worked. Because of George's expressive language delays, it's hard for me to always know how much he understands in any given situation, but when we walked up to the front door of Myers and he took Mrs. Beck, his new teacher's hand, without so much as a whine or a "Mommmy!", and walked in the door with her, I knew that he got that kindergarden was starting today and he felt ready and okay.

The tears came for me a few hours later, the sudden longing for him hard for me to bear. Wondering how he was doing, if he was okay. Imagining how he felt at his new school. Then I let myself really go into the emotion, into the realization of this change in our life, of the milestone we had reached. How I easily I can remember what it felt like to hold him as a baby, how hard it was for me to separate from him then.

I thought about how these years that were his early childhood were so different from anything I could have imagined and about the heartbreak, confusion and fear that came with discovering his delays. And I felt a kind of letting go of those emotions, a kind of crying them out of my body, because the boy I walked to kindergarden did not inspire fear in me at all; he inspired me with a kind of incredible optimism and faith and of course indescribable love.
***
June lost Bunny sometime during the summer and she seemed not to notice. She was busy with camp and swimming and riding her bike with training wheels and she's into more sophisticated things now, mermaids and fairies and the Disney princesses, anyway.

June turned 4 on Sunday and the week before we moved her out of her crib and into her big girl car bed which used to be George's. We had been talking about it for months, about how her crib would go to Uncle Jon's baby and how big kids sleep in big kid beds.

But she doesn't like sleeping in it yet. She comes in our bed at 2 or 3 or 5AM and she nuzzles against me and cries like a little cat until she falls back asleep.

And she doesn't like people making a big deal about George going to kindergarden. And she doesn't like hat she can't go into Myers with George. And she doesn't like me going out in the morning to do an errand (radiation at Fox Chase) without taking her. It's a lot of stuff she doesn't like right now.

Then today in the car when I got her from school (which she likes very much), she started talking about Bunny and how she missed her and how she lost her and how she wanted Bunny back.

And the loss of Bunny, meaning the loss of Bunny for June and the loss of June having Bunny for me (meaning June as a baby) was too much loss on top of just two days ago feeling the visceral change of George from a little kid to an elementary kid and me nearing the end of radiation having so many feelings surfacing about all of the losses I've felt over the last six months

and I just looked at June and showed her my tears and I said, "I'm sorry I let you loss Bunny." And crying I took her hand and tried to hold her

but she pushed against me, surprised and thinking me a little pathetic, I think, and said, "Bunny will just hop back."

I nodded in agreement, pulled myself together as much I could using an old McDonald's napkine full of George's gum to blow my nose and wipe my eyes, and then June and I drove to Modell's sporting goods store to buy June shin guards (Shin Guards, hello, she's 4!) since she's starting on a soccer team (more change for us, and hell change is good) later this week.
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and I just want to interrupt all this to say I know there are big things going on in the world and Obama inspires me every day more because of how he is trying to make change happen in the face of blithering morons and I watch and fall asleep to Anderson Cooper in Afghanistan every night, I just wanted to take a moment to say I am aware of the greater world, I am, I'm just sort of very full with what is here, right here, on my plate--
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and besides crying when I've felt it and really needed to cry this week, I've had something else going on that has helped me to stay present and grounded: I've just kind of let myself feel happy and not worry about lots of things that I might have, say a year ago, worried a lot about (like, in just over a week I have to lead six children's services for rosh hashana and really at this point none of them are planned).

because even though i am sort of exhausted and unhinged, i'm kind of incredibly happy, too. George has had a really great start in kindergarden! He is in the right class and that is such a blessing.

and my treatment is almost over! and i know there are lots of feelings about my experience with cancer that i have yet to unpack, but when i think i only have 4 more treatments at fox chase, i am full of anticipation and relief.
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and last night, speaking of change and loss and new things and a new blog and a new year coming whether i;m ready or not, i was taking my scarf off and i sort of rubbed the back of my head

and i felt a little bit of hair back there.

it is just fuzz, just like you know, would be on a baby.

like the fuzz George had or June

or that my mom said I had because I was a bald baby until I was a year old.

and it's funny now to think how much I acted liek June acted about not missing Bunny when really today in the cool September air I cried a little because I've missed my hair so much.