My Secret Life/I [heart] My Day Care

There are a few key people in my life who do not know that GH is sick. Friends and family know, obviously. My coworkers know. The Internet knows. But somehow, some way, there are scattered people here and there who I interact with fairly frequently who are out of the loop.

My upstairs neighbor is one of them. We live in a two-family house; our condo is the first floor, our neighbor's is the second floor, and we share the basement. Our neighbor is awesome. He's a single lawyer, super friendly. We take in each others' mail and feed each others' cats when we travel, get together socially occasionally, and have never had a bit of trouble making joint decisions about the house. As far as he knows, GH and I are a happy, healthy, thirty-something working couple with twins. All that is true except for the healthy part, but that's a big part. It's one of those things that has just never come up. It's serious enough that I don't want to mention it in casual conversation ("The other day when we were at chemo . . . "), but neither GH nor I wants cancer to be the defining part of our life so I don't want to have a big pow-wow about it either.

Mr. Upstairs is such a nice guy; I'm sure if he knew he'd go out of his way to help us in any way possible. But the thing is, I like the fact that he doesn't know. I like the fact that when I interact with him, I can pretend that GH is well. It's very freeing somehow.

Our day care providers fell into this category, too, until yesterday. Again, it's one of those things that just hadn't come up. But yesterday GH was on pickup duty and he was going to be late because he had to stop at the pharmacy and pick up some meds on his way home from chemo. So he called to tell the day care people that he would be late, would that be OK? He just said that he'd been at the doctor, but when he did arrive to pick up the kids he said he'd been at chemo.

This morning, when I dropped Maddie and Riley off, one of the women at the day care asked how GH was doing. Her English is not great--her first language is Spanish--and she wanted to be sure she'd heard right, that he has cancer. I told her yes. I didn't get into the details of how serious it is and how sick he is, but I did say he'd been sick for a long time and was not doing very well right now.

I've always loved our day care, and they didn't let me down this time. Her first response was, "If you ever need any help with the kids, any time, any day, at night, on the weekend, you just call." It was so sweet. She loves, loves, loves the twins, and I know her offer was sincere. I jokingly say to people that my only concern about my day care is that someday they just aren't going to let me take Maddie and Riley home--they're going to decide to keep them! I'm happy to "worry" about that.

Speaking of Maddie and Riley, here is a picture of them at the park, swinging for the first time. A bucket swing full of twins!