08/11/2026
Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out when I became so angry.
Not just angry about one thing. Angry in this deep, exhausted way that seems to sit right under my skin all the time. I can have a perfectly normal day and still feel it there. I can be making dinner, folding clothes, driving somewhere, listening to Brynlee laugh from the other room, and suddenly I can feel this ache in my chest that I don’t even know what to do with.
I think a lot of it is resentment.
And that is such an ugly word to admit when you are also so unbelievably grateful.
I am grateful that Brynlee is here. I am grateful that she is in remission. I am grateful for every ordinary thing I used to take for granted. Watching her play. Hearing her talk. Seeing her excited for school. Listening to her laugh. Watching her be a little girl again.
But somewhere along the way I realized that gratitude did not erase what happened to us.
It did not give me back the mother I was before cancer.
Before all of this, I worried about my kids the way mothers do. I thought about accidents. I worried when they were sick. I wondered if they were happy or if I was doing enough. But there was still this quiet belief underneath all of it that our lives were basically safe. That really terrible things happened somewhere else. That if something was wrong, a doctor would figure it out, we would fix it, and life would keep going.
Then cancer walked into my house through my daughter.
And once you have watched the worst thing you can imagine happen to your own child, you cannot make your brain forget that it is possible.
That is the part I struggle to explain.
I can look at Brynlee now and see a happy little girl, but I can also remember what it felt like to be terrified of losing her. I can hear her complain about something completely innocent and feel my stomach drop before I even have time to think. I can tell myself a hundred times that she is okay and still have that little voice in the back of my head asking, “But what if she isn’t?”
I hate that voice.
I hate that I know exactly how quickly normal can disappear.
I hate that there was a time I did not know what medulloblastoma was, and now I could probably explain more about childhood brain cancer than I ever wanted to know in my entire life.
I hate that I can never go back to being the mother who hears a headache and just thinks, headache.
There is always another thought behind it now.
And it is exhausting.
It is exhausting to love someone this much and also know, in the most real way possible, how badly the world can hurt them.
I think that is where so much of my resentment lives.
It lives in the life I had before I knew any of this.
It lives in the fact that my daughter had to lose pieces of her childhood to hospitals, treatments, scans and fear.
It lives in every part of me that still feels like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop even on the happiest days.
It lives in the fact that life did not stop needing things from me just because I was traumatized.
There were still children who needed me. Still meals. Still schedules. Still school. Still appointments. Still laundry. Still decisions. Still a million tiny things that somehow needed to get done even when I felt like I could barely hold myself together.
And sometimes I get so tired of being the person who has to keep everything moving.
That is probably the hardest thing for me to admit.
There are days when I feel like I am carrying the emotional weight of what happened to Brynlee while also carrying all the regular weight of motherhood, and I am just tired.
Tired of remembering everything.
Tired of worrying about everything.
Tired of thinking ten steps ahead.
Tired of being scared.
Tired of trying to look normal when my mind still doesn’t always feel normal.
And then the guilt comes, because how dare I feel anything except grateful when my daughter survived?
But I have slowly realized that those things are not opposites.
I can be grateful that she survived and furious that she ever had to.
I can be thankful for remission and still hate the fear that came with it.
I can love this life because my children are in it and still hate what parts of this life have done to me.
I can look at Brynlee and feel so much love that it hurts, while also grieving the version of motherhood I lost when cancer taught me that loving your child with everything you have does not make them untouchable.
That knowledge changes you.
It changes the way you sleep.
It changes the way you hear certain words.
It changes the way you sit in waiting rooms.
It changes the way you look at a normal fever, a headache, a tired afternoon.
It changes the way you imagine the future.
And some days I resent that more than I know how to say.
I resent that fear follows joy now.
I resent that even the happiest moments can come with this quiet plea in my head.
Please let me keep her.
Please let this stay good.
Please let us have more time.
I hate that those thoughts exist at all.
I hate that childhood cancer has made me angry at a world that somehow keeps moving while children are still being diagnosed, still being treated, still dying, and families are still being forced to live through the exact nightmare I would not wish on anyone.
I hate how little people realize what childhood cancer leaves behind.
Because remission is beautiful, but remission is not a magic eraser.
It does not erase what your child went through.
It does not erase what you saw.
It does not erase the fear.
It does not erase the anger.
Sometimes it just means the crisis becomes quieter.
And now you are left trying to figure out how to live with everything that remains.
I wish I could say I have figured that part out.
I haven’t.
Some days I am hopeful. Some days I am grateful beyond words. Some days I feel almost like myself again.
And some days I am angry that this is my life.
I am angry that cancer touched my baby.
I am angry that it changed me.
I am angry that I am scared of things I never used to think twice about.
I am angry that I can never unknow what I know now.
And underneath every ounce of that anger is the same thing.
Love.
The kind of love that makes fear unbearable because there is nothing in this world I want more than to watch my children grow up.
So I keep going.
Not because I have made peace with any of this.
Not because I am always strong.
Not because remission somehow fixed me.
I keep going because Brynlee is here.
And I will spend the rest of my life being grateful for that.
Even on the days when I am still furious about everything it took to get here.
