I remember coming home from school one day when I was eleven to find my mother sitting in the middle of our staircase, crying. This memory is so clear because it’s one of the few times I saw her cry when I was a child. She was a single mother and we were extremely close (think Gilmore Girls). Our life wasn’t easy, or simple. But she was strong. She carried on when things got tough – like when my brother was injured in a workplace accident and spent three months in a hospital an hour away from our house. I saw her waver during those days, but never cry.
That time on the stairs, though, she was crying. And it was because a pair of con artists had stolen her life savings in a Ponzi scheme, then taken off to the Cayman Islands. Years later, she admitted this to me. Of course, she never let on at the time.
After that, it wasn’t always a given that we’d have money for rent or groceries. My mom stole bathroom tissue from the real estate agency she worked at when we ran out. But mostly, we were happy. I can’t recall not having the things I really needed. If I wanted something, she taught me to work for it. If things got hard, we worked harder. “Suck it up, buttercup,” was a constant refrain – but said with gentle love, accompanied by her beautiful smile. I may never have learned to be resilient had my mother not led the way. I may never have become a writer.
“Suck it up, buttercup. You never know what might change your life forever if you have the courage to keep going – what might sustain you when the going gets tough.”
My mother got cancer three years ago. We didn’t believe it at first. We felt like we’d been tricked. We didn’t have a family history of cancer. My mother’s lifestyle and health could only be described as exemplary. But scans told us otherwise. In the end, we had to accept the diagnosis. To my mom, I’m sure it felt like being conned a second time.
You’ll notice I often say “we” when referring to my mother. When I was planning a wedding, we were planning a wedding. When I was pregnant and nearly slipped on some ice outside a store, my mom blurted to the manager, “We are pregnant, someone needs to salt that!” We loved to laugh about this.
We were also a “we” when my mom got sick, though she definitely didn’t want it to be that way. She tried to shield her worst days from me, and her pain. But she couldn’t. One day, after she had completed endless sessions of chemo, we went on a ski trip so she could feel like herself again. But she couldn’t make it down the mountain, and had to be taken to the bottom by paramedics. After, she cried helpless tears I thought would never end. Still, she tried again the next day. And that day, she got down the mountain all by herself.
I started writing my novel Lucky a few months after my mother’s diagnosis. Lucky’s story came to me like a gift. As Lucky took shape, I’d regale my mother with her adventures. Lucky entertained us in doctor’s offices and hospital waiting rooms. She was an antidote to bad news and painful days. A great con artist, Lucky distracted us from what was really happening. My mother loved this character deeply. She read every word of my novel before she died. On her deathbed, she whispered “Go, Lucky, go,” as if Lucky were her third child.
I carry that with me.
My mother worked so hard to overcome the cancer that grifted and tricked its way into her body, and then she worked hard to try to live with it – or at the very least stop it from taking everything away from her.
Near the end, I asked her, “Are you scared?” She looked at me like that was the most ridiculous question I could ask. “No,” she replied, her tone bordering on incredulous.
I carry that with me, too.
It seems my mother was terribly unlucky in the end, doesn’t it? And yet I still believe she was the luckiest woman alive to have such bravery running through her veins – and that I was the luckiest to have had a mother like her.
My mom was an interior designer and a minister’s wife in the life she rebuilt for herself after she lost everything; Lucky is a streetwise grifter. But they both have resilience running through them, linking them together and reminding me every day that in life there are many things that can be stolen from you – your health, your money, your sense of security. The key is to be brave. Suck it up, buttercup. You never know what might change your life forever if you have the courage to keep going – what might sustain you when the going gets tough.
