Heart Warmer Story

Thought I'd share this story which to me means - don't sweat the small stuff.

The important thing about yelling
living.msn.com/family-parenting/mom-to-mom/article?cp-documentid=259399467

"In the midst of my highly distracted life, I started a new practice that was quite different from the way I behaved up until that point. I became a yeller. It wasn’t often, but it was extreme—like an overloaded balloon that suddenly pops and makes everyone in earshot startle with fear.

-snip-

Inevitably, I had to fall apart somewhere. So I fell apart behind closed doors in the company of the people who meant the most to me.

Until one fateful day.

My oldest daughter had gotten on a stool and was reaching for something in the pantry when she accidently dumped an entire bag of rice on the floor. As a million tiny grains pelleted the floor like rain, my child’s eyes welled up with tears. And that’s when I saw it—the fear in her eyes as she braced herself for her mother’s tirade.

She’s scared of me, I thought with the most painful realization imaginable. My six-year-old child is scared of my reaction to her innocent mistake."

A great story with a great message.

I would be willing to bet a good bit that, since we were Dx'd, most (maybe all?) of us here have had at one time or another at least one yelling moment, or maybe even a number of them, with the yelling directed toward nearby loved ones. And I bet we felt really lousy about it afterwards, especially seeing the look of hurt it caused on the faces of those loved ones.

But if there was ever an understandable cause for losing it and venting harshly on anybody within earshot, even those dearest to us, the pressure of having to live under and deal with the knowledge that one has a potentially life-threatening cancer would surely be it.

Maybe "emotional explosion" would be a good term for it. Personally, I've never blown up on either of my two sons since Dx, mainly because they have both been so incredibly helpful to me (driving me to and from original biopsy, driving me to and from RT when it was starting to wear me out, taking care of the house when I didn't feel like it, etc. Such great kids).

But there have indeed been times when I really had to bite my tongue and control a rising anger, especially when presumably well-meaning but ignorant relatives would sometimes tell me that I had "the good cancer" or something foolish like that. Yelling under circumstances like that, while not a good thing, would have been easily understandable.

In fact, maybe it would be useful to start a thread "Have you ever had an emotional explosion since DX, what came of it and what did you learn?" or something like that. It might even be a good place to vent, especially so considering the subject of the thread.

I think I'll do that and let's see what people have to say about that.