I have already talked on here about how hard it is for me to make long term plans; how a fire can uproot your head and how a young child being sick rearranges your reality and makes life a blur around you for years. I have talked a bit on the paranoia and trauma to all of us as well as the fact that we made it though pretty okay financially. I have already talked about the fact that I am still back there where it all started and am only now discovering ‘who I am’.
But I did not sit idle as all this happened. I still had to get us to survive and here is the start of that story – and a plan of where this blog is going.
After the fire in 2002, I was unhappy with where I was at in life so I took the time to think about it. It had brought all the small glints of problems to the forefront and I decided to act on the changes. I started divorce proceedings with my then husband (we were just much better friends than spouses) and went back to finish college at the age of 24. I was in the second semester of a Biology major with a minor in Mycology, when Skeeter got sick. I struggled to stay on top of my school work but honestly, organic chem and chemo don’t mix.
I was income for my kids – outside of school loans – so I had to keep trying to keep part time jobs for money while doing school for the insurance and to have some sort of future when this all finished. I took a semester off of the hardcore science and booked some easy theatre classes to help me recover my grades (as best I could) for the hardest part of his treatment. Luckily, I fell in love with the school work and best of all, with the costume shop that became home and teachers that cared. I bet if I had gotten to know the science teachers, they would have also cared but the path to get into their good graces was too long for me and their classes had no flexibility for attendance and sick kids (which I *do* understand).
After other problems and many trials (including surgery for an abdominal hernia for me just weeks before the end of the semester, which I may get into later on), I managed to graduate with a BA in Costume Technology a few weeks before Skeeter finished treatment for leukemia. Not too shabby, I think. There was a move to MN in there where I spent most of a year building Muppets… but I ended up back in Madison, doing my own thing.
I am currently the proprietress of a Alt.Kilt: A custom built kilt company. I have been doing this solely for the past year and on and off before that since the winter of 2006 when I realized that I could sew a kilt for a friend. I have grown this business from scratch and am very proud of it.
I kept thinking on how to intersect the themes of childhood cancer and my current life and business. I don’t want this to be a plug for my company – and it is not – but I want this to be a blog about surviving, life, recovery and my family. I can’t talk about anything as a stand along subject because it is all intertwined and related. I am still the mom of a cancer kid and that shapes my reality just as much as being a proprietress of my own business does. I want this space to be able to cover all those things about me and my family that may be helpful to others and to myself. I don’t want things to be hidden away as unimportant or ’something people don’t talk about’.
Welcome to my home… I hope you find it interesting.
