My Life in Pink

Because sometimes, even at 3:30 in the morning, I am a good mom. I can wake, in the middle of the night, and remember to be the Easter bunny.  I can make the baskets and fill the plastic eggs.  Literally, (God I hate that word) in the middle of the night.  Maybe it's not the middle.  What constitutes the middle? Course, if I was truly a good mom, I wouldn't need to "wake in the middle of the night."  The Easter bunny shit would have already been done.  So in reality, I'm a crappy mom.  A crappy Christian mom.  Damn it.  Ah, Jesus Christ. All kidding aside, this week was sad.  Haunting.  Surreal. There are no words.  No way to describe the...the... I am not a religious person.  And I know that statement pains my mother and likely my father-in-law.  Hell, I am slowly dying and I still haven't found God.  And that's saying something.  (I'm saying something, but probably nothing good). But if you're reading the news or watching it, you know

Today would be my grandmother's 98th birthday.  No, I wrote that wrong.  Today IS my grandmother's 98th birthday. My family and I have done the math.  We believe she was 33 years old. As I heard it, second hand, my grandmother had a nurse for a neighbor.  My grandparents were living in Royal Oak, MI.  Again, be it lore, or fact, my grandmother shared with her neighbor her lump.  Days, months later?, none of my father or his siblings truly knows, my grandmother woke in the hospital without her breast. And that was that.  Life in the '50's.  They took her breast and gave her life. As I've heard it, and family keeps secrets, no one knew except my grandfather.  My father, the oldest, and his three younger sisters never knew until sometime in the 80's or 90's when one of those sisters had a mastectomy after years of numerous, questionable biopsies.  I've done the math.  While my aunt's mastectomy may have been in her 40's, her bad biopsies wer