I was sitting with some friends the other evening, sipping wine and talking life.  We came around to the topic of my metastatic breast cancer and someone asked me what some of the changes were in my world because of my diagnosis 6 months ago.  Do I do things differently and have things changed now that I am fighting for my life in a way that no 45-year-old ever expects to be doing?

They already knew the answer, of course–they are post grads and high school teachers and mothers and above all, they are human.  They get that cancer changes everything.  Their questions weren’t so much do I do things differently but what do I do differently.  And what is different about my day-to-day life as a breast cancer fighter than is different from their so-called “regular” lives?

I told them that since being re-diagnosed I have a clearer sense of what is in my control.  Take last week for example, when my 11-year-old got a bad grade on a quiz.  Of course no parent loves a failing grade and I know my child needs to improve–or else.  But I no longer take on his failure as something I must have done wrong in the child rearing phase that resulted in this mathematical 70%. I don’t do the what-can-I-do-to-fix him routine any further than the no-video games-or-play-dates-until-that-grade-rises response.  And I make sure the tutor is on the schedule for next week’s session. After that I leave it and him alone.

Kids will fail, I did when I was young–and as a woman who is not sure if she’ll be alive to see her children graduate high school, I realize with freakish clarity that they have to find responsibility and achievement on their own.  They have to learn how to do better on a quiz and more importantly, feel that it matters to do better on a quiz.  And I, for as many  learning games as I bought during my children’s youth and as much educational maneuvering as I used to do before I got sick, now realize I have no true control over whether on not they get there.  Sorry, Amy Chua, author of the book “The Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother”–but I don’t.  I may not even be here to teach them all those things I was going to teach them to make them perfect, so believing in tiger mothers is verboten to me now.  I have to believe in my kids themselves–that they have the power to rise to their highest level on their own–because I may not be here to shepherd them to it.

As a breast cancer patient I am forced to pass the torch of growing the most high-achieving children to the two people I am most worried for–my kids themselves.    They’ll either get there or they won’t–whether I’m here or not–which if I were to write it would be the full text of my book;  let’s call it “Un-Tiger Moms: Just Hoping We Survive The Kill.

Which all means, I told my BFFs, that I don’t care–or really, that I do care very much–just about different things now.  I care about living, about making it to see my kids’ college graduations (because those grades will go up or the Xbox 360 goes to the Goodwill.)  And I care about everything in life that matters–friends, family, laughs, helping, understanding, courage, heroes, hope–and fixing problems, not creating them.  The other stuff–the mistakes, the idiots, the bad mojo, the people who push their way around your day to bully you into submission, and the worries of stacking the deck in my kids’ favors are dead to me now. Those things slide back in my brain to a place I never visit anymore–maybe to the place they should have lived all along.

I beat down true fear every day–the fear that I may die sooner than my friends around me drinking cabernet. This allows me to push the other “normal” anxieties still facing my girlfriends out of my day-to-day way.  The laundry, the Ivy League track, who’ll make dinner, which child could be a concert pianist,  and what I did wrong that made my son fail his math quiz–none of that worries me anymore.  I no longer care how fast, how quick, how well–I just wonder how long I’ll get to be here to watch my kids grow and become who they will become.

That’s an ability, I told my pals as I drained my wine glass, that I don’t think you can have–or get–unless you are living with a fatal disease.

And if you ask me, the trade off isn’t worth it.