And what have you done?
A half a century over.
But a new one’s just begun!

This day is too big of a deal in my world to just blow off getting things off my chest. My 50th birthday. All I wanted was to be able to sit at a beach where it was warm enough to be outside and hear the ocean, so we’re in Southern California, in the fourth house away from the actual surf… and police kicked us off the sand just before I started this because it’s a King Tide, and flooding a few houses down.

Only I could plan a vacation where we end up with breaking news when all I wanted to do was let the waves wash away the last few years and look forward. Sigh.

It’s funny to see “recently published” and it’s pre-pandemic, but in this week that many people lose track of all time, I have decided that all is forgiven. Even that I keep paying a couple of lattes a year for a blog I haven’t had the heart to update in four years.

I can give you the attempt at quick hits:

Mom died two days after my last post. I left her side for the first time in days to get some fresh clothes, hug my boys & take a meeting for a new job. Eric called to say things seemed to be changing, so I cut the meeting short and got back on the road from Kirkland. She died before I got anywhere near Olympia. I was angry for a while, I had been trying so hard to take this weight off of the rest of my family… hell, I’ll be honest, I’m still a little mad. Maybe this was what my brother needed, so I take solace in that, but still, I was the main one giving her morphine, the only thing she ingested for 13 days. And it felt like she snuck out the back door.

That Christmas (2019), we spend the actual Christmas day with my Dad for the first time in my kid’s lifetime. And my kid & I took their February break to look at colleges in the LA area and spend a little time with my brother.

The next month I would have a job interview and get hired for the first job I think I’ve had since news where I was going TOWARDS something new, not away from a bad situation. I was a full-time employee at Microsoft from April 2020-May 2021. A lot of things happened, I went through 6 managers in a short period of time, not by my own choice. I was hired to do Exec Comms, and the person I was supporting changed roles and didn’t have space for me on the new team with sudden job cuts (note: this was all during COVID) and the new person and I, uh, the opposite of clicked. I keep reminding myself that everyone is fighting their own battles, to excuse how I feel like I was treated, but take a HUGE responsibility for how I reacted. By the time we parted ways, I was ready to spend the summer watching my kid graduate high school, etc. And so I did.

In the meantime, COVID hit. My husband, kid & I were all quarantined at home. Not sure if COVID was good or bad for my social anxiety. I can just tell you that none of the three of us tested positive until 2022, we stayed on top of distancing, hand washing, and all of our stuff.

In May 2020, Fenway turned 13, and just days later, my brave boy’s too big heart gave out. We were devastated. That dog was pure fluff and love and he got us through some dark times.

In April 2020, my dad had his first lung cancer surgery. He said they got it all, no need for additional treatment. But it was COVID, so who knows if the follow ups were all they should have been?

Likely not, because we spent my birthday in 2021 with them, and around that time (I have blocked this and don’t feel like looking it up) they found the lung cancer moved to his rib near the site of the surgery. Likely spread from the original surgery. He had another surgery, did chemo, but handled things the opposite of Mom. Dad said he’d had a good life, and decided he was done. He called me the day before Mother’s Day and it was clear he was saying goodbye. I told him that he better not die on Mother’s Day or all of the therapy I would need would be his fault… and asked him to hold out until the next weekend so the kid (who I was picking up from college on Monday) could come say goodbye. A-hole didn’t even hold on until I was at the airport. Since if you’ve read this blog before, you know that everything always has a song – I found my song for Dad’s cancer while driving back & forth between Snoqualmie and Oakland, Oregon. It was one that Kenny Loggins wrote for his own dad when he was going in for a life-or-death surgery, “This Is It.” The beginning of the chorus does it for me:

• You think that maybe it’s over? Only if you want it to be!
• Are you gonna wait for a sign, your miracle?
• Stand up and fight!

The other biggest change was my kid. We didn’t get to do all of the college visits we wanted to do (THANKS PANDEMIC!) and their last normal day of high school was in March of 2020. They didn’t get to take SATs (although they’d aced every single PSAT) and applied to a bunch of schools, but decided to go to University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, despite the racial tensions after the murder of George Floyd the other side of town. Since my child is never warm enough (ADHD meds + Cross Country running = ZERO body fat) I said we weren’t going to send them any cash until we’d at least visited the campus… I was pushing more than a bit for my parent’s alma mater, Oregon State where they got into the Honors program… so we were staying in a hotel with a curfew in April of 2021 when the George Floyd verdict came down. And my kid told me they were asking a dude to Prom. They didn’t end up having Prom but learning that my kid was bisexual was not awful, just a reframing. It’s been harder for me since they came out as non-binary in spring of their freshman year at UMN to remember gender-neutral pronouns and that they want to be called Sage. Choosing a child’s name is sacred to me, and we put a lot of thought into Sullivan Andrew, which has a lot of gender neutral potential IMHO, but it’s not about me. We didn’t say anything to my Dad (you can guess how that would have gone from a few posts ago) since I think it would have just caused pain. The kid is now a junior at Minnesota, and just switch from Chemical Engineering to a straight Chemistry major. It’s been tough for them to be so far away and was hard to make friends since they had to wear a freaking mask even in the hallways of their freshman dorm, but I’m super proud of the young adult they are becoming.

Oh- almost forgot – we also sold our house of 17 years in Snoqualmie and moved to Carnation. That was within the last few months, we had the old house up for sale in 2022… right when interest rates jumped so no luck. Now we are just getting settled in with our “pandemic puppy,” aka puppy for dog people who didn’t have a dog, that we brought home in February of 2021. He’s on Instagram as @LordCoopervonPuppington, but I am awful about updating. Where Fen was love and fluff, this dog is joy and fluff. And it’s a reason for my kid to come home on holidays to see me.

Health-wise, we’re all good. I’m still in Perimenopause… hoping the third time is a charm. My cycle is a mess, sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly. It’s been hell on a lot of things.

The pandemic pushed me further into pill-bug mode. The Microsoft job rocked my confidence in so many ways. I’ve reached the point where cancer doesn’t feel like it defines every day, but I still had another scare in these last 4 years, still dead scar tissue.

And I’m celebrating my second birthday as an orphan. I mean, I’m turning 50, so it’s not as shocking as it could be, but not being able to tell Mom things, or try and poke my dad out of his entitled-old-white-man-who-I-still-loved-more-than-almost-anything ways, it’s hard. Too many of my friends have dealt with major health issues, the loss of their own loved ones… this year we lost one of my closest friends from high school, and I am still devastated. Tricia Moen didn’t get to be 40. Mom didn’t get to be 70, and dad didn’t get to be 80. Kris Shelton Purrier didn’t get to be 50. And I’m still here.

I’ve got another 38 years on this 50-year survivor goal of mine, and I’m trying to make sure that I’m happy. I send dumb memes/videos to people I haven’t seen in decades because it makes me think of them.

Back in high school I had a recurring nightmare that I was brutally murdered, and no one noticed that I was even gone. It’s fair to assume my husband and kid would notice if nothing else, but sometimes I think it’s still a fear of mine. That I didn’t do enough that anything I do really matters.

But at 50, I’d tell John Lennon (you know, if he changed his Happy Christmas song to make it about my half-century mark), that what I have done is live the best life I’ve known how to live. I try to show love, and not take everything on myself.

And most of all, I continue to survive. #FuckCancer, y’all. And Happy New Year!

Sun, sand, surf, Sidekick & Sage – and a ninja – 12/28/23