Early mornings and late nights hit the hardest. I think it’s the darkness… just longing for the light to bring another day.
Will finally woke up around 6pm when Jason got home. The chills were gone but he was drenched in sweat. He didn’t want to rest. He wanted his daddy to take him to the river to check on a beaver dam he and Cooper had “handled” the day before. 
Just boys being boys. Grant us grace.
I was exhausted and stayed home with Charlie. Wildlife adventures are not our ministry.
When he got back, he casually asked if I was sleeping in my bed that night. I knew what that meant. That was his 15-year-old, “too cool for school” way of saying he was scared and wanted his mama close.I told him I was planning to sleep upstairs in his room. He said, “Oh… ok.” Cool as a cucumber… like he wasn’t relieved.
After he fell asleep, I laid there wide awake with my thoughts running wild.
It’s strange what a pediatric disease diagnosis does to your mind.
Last Thursday on the way to clinic, I was driving down 6th Avenue. I had the green light at the next intersection. As I approached, I saw movement from the side. In a split second I hit the brakes. A car ran the red light at full speed and had to swerve around my front end to avoid t-boning into my drivers side.
It reminded me how fast life can change. One second. One decision. One blink… and everything can be different.I thanked God out loud for sparing our family more heartache and reminded Will none of us are promised tomorrow.
But quietly… deep in my soul… I asked Him something else.I asked that if His ultimate plan was to take Will… please let me go first So Will wouldn’t be as scared if he ever found himself lying there at the end of his fight.
That probably sounds crazy. I know it does. But this is the reality of loving a child who is facing his own mortality.
And then comes the guilt.
Because while one child is fighting for his life… I have another child who still needs her mama just as much.
There is no handbook for how to split your heart in two. No way to be at every appointment and every cheer tryout. No way to sit beside one hospital bed and not feel like you’re failing the child who is at home trying to be brave too.
Cancer doesn’t just stretch your faith.
It stretches your spirituality, your motherhood, your marriage, and your mind until you don’t even recognize the person you used to be.
Parents like us don’t just pray for healing. We pray to carry their fear, to take their pain, and to trade places if we could Because the cruelest part isn’t just watching your child fight for their life…
It’s realizing you can’t save them from the fear and you can’t be in two places at once.
So you learn to live with a heart that is constantly torn… loving one child who you feel withering away and loving the other who is blossoming while silently begging God to somehow make you enough for both.
Will had no nausea this morning and just bellowing that he couldn’t eat after midnight and is now starving!! Some things will never change… 
