Robbed of Choice ( B4 Peace June)

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forpeace6Excerpt Taken directly from Kozo’s page for May B4Peace Challenge:

This month I challenge you to explore how to have peace in relationships or how to have peace at home.
Turn your blog into a relationship advice column. What are the 5 things that make a peaceful relationship? What are the 4 things we can do to become a better partner?
Post a piece of art, a photo, or a video that epitomizes a perfect relationship. Feel free to explain why. (This does not have to be a human relationship.)
Write a letter to the opposite sex or your partner explaining why you love them, but what they need to do for you to keep loving them. This can be a letter to an actual person or to an entire community of people.
Publish a story, poem, song, or video about struggle in relationships and what you learned from this struggle that brought peace into your world.
Publish a post on the greatest love story ever that will inspire us to be more loving.
Rant about what really frustrates you about the opposite sex, relationships, or your partners. (Maybe if we know what is wrong, we can fix it.)
Post anything about the intersection of relationships and peace.

Dear Cancer:

Fuck you. There. I finally said it. Fuck. You.

Cancer has stressed and strained my relationship. Not so much the illness part. I love him through health and illness. Our love is strong regardless of circumstance. He is my best friend. We will be together always no matter what life throws at us.  But I had to sit back and watch you rip my love apart. You took my strapping young healthy man and torn him down. I used to watch him be a work horse. He loved it. The short time he worked demolition he used to come home with bruised knuckles and shoulders with a light shinning in his eyes telling me how he had to punch out a wall that needed to be torn down or how him and his homies from work  took turns shouldering the wall down.

He loves to work. He loves to labor and sweat and create. Since the day  I met him he was always running off to build or fix things. When we started living together he would go outside to visit a friend in his nice clothes and when he came home he would look like a scared puppy because he was covered in grease from working on a car. His new nice clothes ruined. I couldn’t even get upset about his ruined clothes because his soul was revived. It’s what he loves to do. He didn’t smoke or drink and sure he ate alot of unhealthy food but he was fit and active and always quick to lend a helping hand.

So when he got sick there wasn’t even a transition. One day he was at work. The next day he was in the hospital. He didn’t get to say goodbye to his passions.

Even now a year and half off of treatments and he’s not back to his regular health and stamina. Day by day I have to watch him with longing in his eyes as he stays on the side lines.

That’s what keeps my heart from being peaceful.

You took away my love’s soul. Day by day he wants to go back to work. To be out in the world earning. He wants us to be a proper couple, no longer engaged but married without worrying about the repercussions and being eligible for health insurance or this or that program. He wants to support us and our passions and be free of the chains of “family” and have our little life together. To be out of my mother’s house and have our privacy. To be working up grown adults.I want that too. For both of us to contribute to our little household. It wont be much. But it would be ours to call our own.

Time and time again we cannot reach that goal. Just the other day having a heart to heart the hubby told me how badly he wants to work, to provide, to be happy.  BUt we both know it’s not possible…yet.

So. Fuck You Cancer. For taking that away from him. From us. If you were not in the picture I would of graduated with my bachelors and be well on my way for my Masters Degree and be off living in a cozy apartment with my love and my dog. Yet, here we are just me working a part time retail job. Everything on hold. At a stand still. In a hostile negative environment.

People ask me all the time how I can smoke, having seen the hubby fight through Cancer. Truth is, it was him, the cancer patient, that convinced me to pick up the habit again. I quit for nearly a year. I was smoke free way before he got sick. And it wasn’t until he was almost complete with treatment did i pick it up again. The hubby told me we all get a vice. And you can’t let fear or society or people’s judgement hinder your desires no matter what it is. He told me look at him… never smoked, never drank, never experimented. He got Cancer without the satisfaction of knowing he lived and tried it.  He told me to go ahead if it’s what I wanted to do. I can get cancer with or without the smoking. He told me i deserve a vice. Most importantly he told me I deserved to choose.

That’s what Cancer robbed from us. A Choice.

Without that choice it hinders and obstructs our desires and goals and happiness. It limits the peace we can achieve.

But, that’s why i love the hubby. He puts a smile on his face and does what the doctors tell him to do and he tries. He tries his very best. Friends and family don’t see the daily struggle because he puts on his brave face and puts himself out there. Time and time again.

He’s not a fighter. He’s a warrior. He’s my hero. My love.

Because of him, i’ll know eventually he’ll storm his way onto the other side, the healthy side of Cancer. We’ll get our choice back. We’ll get our happiness back. And when we do, we’ll have Peace. Until then, we never stop fighting for it.

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