Breakfast, School Run, Chemo: The Sometimes Funny, Definitely Not Depressing, True Story of a Mum With Cancer
By Julia Watson
()
About this ebook
Mother of four girls Julia Watson thought her world was falling apart when she found out she had terminal cancer. But with humour and courage, Julia faces the greatest challenge of her life – and in the process becomes the person she'd always wanted to be.
A survivor of child abuse, brought up by a mother with mental illness, Julia was no stranger to adversity. After her daughter Georgie was born with Down syndrome, she thought she'd faced it all. But when doctors offer her the chance of risky but potentially life-saving surgery, Julia faces her toughest situation yet.
Follow Julia and her family, as she writes her way through the crisis, chases her dreams, gets her dancing shoes on and discovers the lighter side of life with a colostomy bag.
This is a candid, entertaining look at life with cancer and living each day with humour and hope.
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Breakfast, School Run, Chemo - Julia Watson
Published by Nero,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia
enquiries@blackincbooks.com
www.nerobooks.com
Copyright © Julia Watson 2015
Julia Watson asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Watson, Julia, author.
Breakfast, school run, chemo : the sometimes funny, definitely not depressing, true story of a mum with cancer / Julia Watson.
9781863957830 (paperback)
9781925203615 (ebook)
Cancer—Patients—Biography.
Women—Victoria—Biography.
362.1969940092
Cover artwork: Belinda Marshall
Photograph (back cover): Dale Taylor Photography
Cover and text design by Jen Clark Design
To my four fairies and my fella, with all my love
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
This is not ‘the thing’
The dance
No-one gets out of here alive
Beautiful in our eyes
Before normal walked away
But you look so well!
Saturation point
You’ve come a long way, baby
This is what I’m fighting for
The calm before the storm
By my side
Happily ever after
Choose your own adventure
Learning to fly
Ten things not to say to someone with cancer
Once more, with feeling
The ghosts of Christmas past
A friend in need
Julia decides not to die
The one who made me a mother
Will the real reality please stand up?
The impossible choice
No guts, no glory
Ten things to do for someone with cancer
Forty, not out
Que sera sera
Meet Jan Brady
One more normal day
Just keep swimming
For dear life
Farewell, future focus
All on red
Picture Section
What makes a mother?
How it feels to be me
Let me sing you the song of my people
A week of lasts
Dear sixteen-year-old me
A brand new day
For Deb
Still here
Hope the Wonderpug
Every fifteen minutes
For as long as I live …
Keep calm and have chemo
Come, tell me how it is …
The hope that never was
Walking the line
The next thing on my list
Worth living
The glorification of busy
How to save your own life
The price of fame
On the edge of the abyss
A penny for your positivity
Dear Mum
The unbearable heaviness of being
That long-forgotten feeling
The sisterhood of the travelling beanies
Bittersweet symphony
The sun will come up, tomorrow
This is not how the story ends
Acknowledgements
Bowel cancer screening
FOREWORD
by Catherine Deveny
Julia Watson is not the first person to get cancer.
Or the first woman to write.
Or the first mother to author a book.
Or the first suburban renegade to have a story worth telling.
Brilliance is simply getting it done.
Julia Watson is brilliant because she did it. She navigated the obstacles of procrastination, self-doubt, distraction, fear of rejection, desire to please, imposter syndrome, feelings of being unworthy. She ignored the social construct of what a good mother, a good wife or a good woman does or is. She walked past the pile of washing and the dishwasher that needed to be packed and instead sat and wrote.
Jules navigated all the social rumble strips, emotional cattle prods and ‘WRONG WAY GO BACK’ signs, chose a detour off the main road and took the risk she knew she would regret if she didn’t. She forged her own path and sang from her heart. The handful of friends she shared her journey with has multiplied into tens of thousands of fans who hang on every word she writes.
So we know what makes Julia brilliant. What makes this book brilliant is Julia’s talent, courage and irreverence. Most people can’t get past the dreaming of the dream to the doing of the dream. As soon as they encounter a doubt, a distraction or an obstacle, they take it as a sign they should stop. A message they don’t have what it takes. A warning that it’s time to ‘pipe down, princess’ because you’ve gotten a bit too big for your boots and you’re being a bit of a show-off.
Julia’s drive to share her story and connect is so strong we are able to enjoy and marvel Julia’s immense talent as a writer, a storyteller and a brave warrior. Straight from her strong beating heart and her irreverent spirit onto the pages of this book.
Aren’t we lucky?
Go get ’em tiger!
Love Dev x
You become. ‘It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.’
The Velveteen Rabbit
INTRODUCTION
I didn’t set out to write a book about cancer. Back in 2013, before I was diagnosed, I had been giving a lot of thought to the direction I wanted my life to take. I had four beautiful daughters, a loving husband and a lovely home, but I was seeking more. I wanted more than a career. I wanted an opportunity to make some sort of mark on the world.
An idea began to take root. I was studying a Diploma in Community Development and I knew that I wanted to work with refugees and asylum seekers, right at the coalface. I had also started writing – guest pieces on other people’s blogs and a few articles for Essential Baby. I really enjoyed the writing, but I also loved the feedback I was getting from readers. Community work or writing? Well, why not both? Perhaps I could use my writing to share the stories of people in disadvantaged positions in society.
I have always had a strong sense of justice and a belief in everyone’s equal right to be afforded it. I knew if I was going to write about people’s stories, their lives and what mattered to them, I had to do it with honesty, respect and courage. I wanted to be able to look into the eyes of an Afghani mother as she gifted me with the story of the trauma her family went through at the hands of the Taliban and say, ‘The lives of you and your family are just as important as mine. I’m glad you’re here.’ I wanted to kneel beside someone that calls the cold streets of a big city their home and say, ‘I know how you came to be here. I know that with only a tiny twist in my own tale, one different corner turned, I could have been here too. You are important, you matter, every bit as much as someone who looks down at you from their pedestal and doesn’t even try to understand.’
I didn’t just want to interview people, trot out a tale and hope that people were moved by it. I wanted to challenge people and make them think. I wanted to write the stories of the marginalised so that anyone who read them couldn’t shrink away from their truth, but would have to think about how a different fall of the cards could have put them in the same position as those that they may have been judging.
I knew I would need to be brave enough to go against the grain and stand by what I believed in. I didn’t quite feel ready yet – but I wanted to get there.
Towards the end of the year, I saw a writing masterclass advertised on writer and comedian Catherine Deveny’s Facebook page. I’d long been an admirer of Catherine: her authenticity, her ‘non-fuck-giver’ stance, her humour and her absolute determination to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Her sheer throw-it-all-out-there transparency was exactly what I aspired to and I hoped that by going to her class a little bit of it would rub off on me. I booked in for the February masterclass.
Then, in December 2013, I was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer. The resulting grief, fear and pain and the management of my cancer consumed me. In the wake of the diagnosis, I felt like everything was lost – especially my creativity. I felt like I wasn’t a person anymore: I was cancer.
When the day of the masterclass came round I didn’t really think that I would go, but the idea of hanging out with Catherine for a whole day won out.
At the start of the workshop, we had to introduce ourselves to the person next to us and tell them why we were there. We were then supposed to introduce our partner to the rest of the group. I struggled with how to bring up the elephant in the room. From memory, I told the man sitting beside me that I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer but I wanted to believe that I was more than that and there was still a life for me outside of it. I also said I hoped I could think of something to write about that had nothing to do with cancer. Poor guy!
That day was the turning point for my writing career. We all wrote a piece during the class, and Catherine generously offered to share these pieces on her website if we could send them to her by 10 pm. I wrote mine about growing up with a mother with mental illness, tidied it up that evening and got it to Catherine on time. When it was uploaded, I shared it on my own Facebook page as well. There was such an enormous reaction to it that it was picked up by Essential Baby and published on their website.
The piece was, by its very nature, raw and honest. After all, I hadn’t expected it to be widely read. When I started to get feedback on that article, I really understood the power of writing something that comes from the heart, from your own experience. Many people wrote to me saying that they had had a similar experience and that in describing my pain, I had also given voice to their own experiences.
After that, there was no going back. Most of what I wrote in 2014 was controversial in some way. When I read articles crucifying a mother who had accidentally, and tragically, left her baby in the car, I saw red. I fired off an article to Essential Baby about a day when, exhausted and sleep-deprived, I had left my third child in the car for twenty minutes, having completely forgotten she was there. Only the fact that it was winter prevented me from paying the ultimate price. When it was published I expected a hell of a backlash, but what I got was more than 800 comments from other women who had lived with the guilt of doing something similar. They thanked me for being brave enough to share my story and giving them the chance to do the same.
It’s a real scourge of modern life, this constant quest for perfection, this need to feel that we are not failing in the eyes of others. Everyone wants to be accepted and loved for who they are, but we’re all so afraid to admit that we are human and flawed.
My cancer is, of course, a tragedy. It will take me from the lives of my loved ones well before nature intended. But it also gave me a gift. Somewhere in the last eighteen months I caught something that I wouldn’t trade for anything – I caught the Real. I wanted people to know who I was before I died, and the more I showed it to them the more it drew people to me. So I kept on writing in my own uncompromising way, because the Real is something I want everyone to catch. There is enormous power in what I have learnt from having cancer. We have no time to waste in being our truest selves. I wanted to share that lesson with everyone.
One of the hardest decisions I ever made was to share my experience as a victim of childhood sexual abuse. None of my newfound ability to be brave and Real and put it all out there had prepared me for the physical reaction I had when I pressed ‘send’ on the story of that part of my life. It was terrifying. I knew, however, that this was one of the most important things that I would write. The raw pain of this experience is shared by many and maybe, once again, my voice could be their voice.
There was an enormous and very heartwarming reaction to my story. For days I read comments from people who had been there too, and I felt the heavy weight of their trauma find a place next to mine.
One person I didn’t hear from was my friend Anthony. In the days before sending the article off, I had shared with him my anxiety about making this part of my life public. Now I really wanted to know what he thought of the finished piece, but I was shocked at his response. He said that he thought the article was well written but clinical. I was hurt and furious. Frankly, I went off at him. I demanded to know what the fuck he wanted from me – I had given everything of myself. He said he didn’t think I had. He thought, in order to really get through to people, I had to give even more, tell more of my story and expose more of my pain. Only by making people feel things as deeply as if it had actually happened to them would I be helping to bring about positive change.
When I read the article again the next day, I saw that he was right. No matter how honest I had tried to be, I had still held some of myself in reserve.
When I started writing about my cancer, this lesson stayed with me. I initially set up my blog, fivefairiesandafella.com, purely to process my feelings about cancer and talk myself through the roadblocks – everything that was in the way of me being able to experience a happy life again, within my new and permanent limitations. Sharing my blog posts on Facebook with my friends and family was also a way to give them an understanding of what I was experiencing. There were some things that I could write about but would never have been able to say with the same clarity – I would have been in floods of tears.
So, because it was for me and it wasn’t contrived, I didn’t hold back. The words that you will read in this book are literally my soul on the page.
When I realised that my blog was being widely shared and a lot of people were reading it, I nearly slipped back into censoring myself. It’s a natural reaction that comes into play when you realise you are sharing the darkest parts of your life with a huge audience. There was a whole heap of joy and happiness and celebration of life in my posts, but there was also a darker side. Should I really share all of it? Surely I couldn’t talk about my nightmare of hovering above my own funeral, watching my small daughters sob over my coffin? Could I really write about my terror of knowing that one day I will be in palliative care and I will watch my children walk out the door, knowing I won’t see them again. What if my writing traumatised people who read it? I wanted to protect them, even though I had to live with all these things myself.
But the internet unites us. I received a lot of feedback on my blog posts and I knew I was gathering a big readership. Some of my readers had cancer themselves and were living with this horror as well. Some had relatives with cancer, and told me they understood more about what their loved ones were going through by reading about my experience. Others valued the lessons they learnt alongside me – living each day with purpose, not getting too caught up in what the future might bring, discovering that being yourself and really owning it is the most powerful and liberating thing you can do, no matter what stage in life you are at.
Overwhelmingly, people thanked me for my honesty and for not being afraid to be broken as well as strong – for the Real.
What you read here is for all of you – from my heart.
Catch the Real.
This is not ‘the thing’
All my life, I have believed that something terrible would happen to me – and that if it did, I deserved it. What this thing would be, I never knew, but it has haunted me since my childhood.
Growing up, I was not a very happy person. All seemed well in my life until early primary school, when years of sexual abuse meant that a happy six-year-old gave way to a sullen child who never knew where she fit. Most adults didn’t know what box to place me in either. That child turned into a rebellious teenager, moody and negative. I was a girl who never thought she deserved very much in life, and pretty much never got it.
At twenty-one, I moved to England and got married. It was the beginning of a few happy years for me. My husband and I, though volatile, were very much in love. We travelled extensively and lived in an exclusive part of central London, our accommodation paid for by my husband’s employer. It was a heady time: we could go to Paris and Amsterdam on weekends, eat out any time we wanted, and every night was spent in the pub. The trouble started a few years in, when I asked to have a baby. This was something we had both said we wanted but my husband had changed his mind and he would never change it back again. That was the beginning of the end. I existed in bitter resentment at the goalposts being moved to such a drastically different position on the field,