What cancer has taught me (with jokes)

My mother-in-law's raspberry cupcakes

Ever the student, I have learnt a lot from this (fingers crossed) minor encounter with cancer.

It's to do with how I cope best – through silence, telling almost no one, yoga, exercise, practicality, being Dutch about the whole thing, cutting out any white noise that derails me, being more ruthlessly focused than I normally let people know I am, looking at the positive and the concrete over the chimerical and the negative.

And jokes.

The negative is, of course, there, I don't deny it, lurking about in an anti-matterish sort of way, but, in my life, I have welcomed in far too much of that, felt I had to be negativity's caretaker. And that is linked to allowing myself to be bullied, and miserable. I'll take Newtonian over Quantum mechanics for the time being. The sub-molecular level will have to wait.

What I've learnt is… that a well-timed joke has a therapeutic power as great as a surgeon's blade.

I'll never not be my intense self, but sending myself (and a few others) up is probably more entertaining than my long screeds of introspection and self-analysis. 

Sorry about those, and thank you for putting up with them. Here's another one.

Transmuting Wendy-the-Bully into comedy gold for cancer is one of the best jokes I have ever told (still fundraising, we're currently at £3100+, thank you to every one of you, my heartfelt thanks, here's the link...) – and I now recall that Wendy and I met because of another of my Hilarious Jokes.

That poor woman loathed me from the very first time we met (I feel her pain), which was long before I was at Cambridge as a lecturer. I was a post-doc British Academy research fellow at Queen Mary College London, and was an examiner on a paper, I believe on Proust. She was the external examiner.

In the examiners' meeting, I deliberately cracked a joke, because we were all tired and tense and nervous. Wish I could remember what flip remark I made – apparently it was a killer.

Everyone fell about laughing, and the mood lightened. Except Wendy. She was not slain by my wit. She gave me a sour lemon look that was intended to kill me on the spot. It puzzled me, but it did its job. I shut up. I think, for Wendy, my cracking a joke constituted a Direct Attack on the Establishment, the Examination Process, Her Authority. All that sailed in her and what she stood for would necessarily be corroded and ruined by my Younger Woman's levity. How dare I? 

Actually, I wasn't that young. I must have been 30 or so at the time, I wasn't exactly an upstart. Academic rates of promotion will have you pretty much in your grave before you earn a salary comparable to your qualifications. I think it's because part of the kit is growing a grey beard, and I could only manage blue stockings at the time. That's all changed.

I knew, from sourlemongate onwards, I would have problems if I ever encountered her again. Sure enough, at every encounter we ever had in Cambridge, she went out of her way to make things really, really hard for me. I mean, to the point where it was actually funny, looked at from a certain angle, until she finally seemed to have the last laugh, and I resigned. I can only hope she chuckled into her All-Bran that day, and danced about her kitchen. Free! Free of the radical!

That wasn't the problem, though (well, it was quite a big problem, because I didn't have a job anymore. But I digress).

The problem was that I then carried her around, like a tiny Wendy-me, lurking in my body, for years and years afterwards, because I already believed the things she thought about me. I was, indeed, superficial, lazy, a slacker, pretentious, self-seeking, fat, unfashionable, unkind, ugly, stupid, aggressive and competitive (NOTE: some of that stuff is true, but I'm not going to tell you which bits).

Why do you think the blonde girl felt she needed a phd in the first place?

A phd on self-justification?

It was easy for Wendy to prey on me – I welcomed her in. For an intelligent woman, that was a remarkably dumb blonde thing to do.

*

This week I took chicken soup from Platters on the Finchley Road to a friend, also post-op. I was given Platters' chicken soup by a wonderful friend a fortnight ago, and now understand that it is the Jewish equivalent of Asterix's magic potion. 

My friend and I talked and laughed (not too hard, we didn't want to bust her stitches). Then she looked me in the eye and said, "You know, what got me through was that I have this… voice I've made up in my head; it's partly my mother's voice, and partly mine, and I would talk to myself, going through… you know… and comfort myself… You must think I sound mad…". I was staring at her, transfixed. 

I walked through a door this week, and closed it behind me. I understood, once and for all, this week, that the only thing I failed at when I was a child and adolescent was to absorb my mother's soothing, comforting voice. It was no one's fault. I blame no one for it. She did the best she possibly could. It's just what happened. I went into adult life, not so much with a thin skin, as without a way to comfort myself. I hadn't learnt to love myself unconditionally.

It has simply taken me until now, nearly thirteen years into motherhood, and with the help of so many others, to grow my own 'inner mother', who can take care of me when times are tough, and help me to keep the Motherload safely at bay, and allow me to look after others without hurting myself.

I was often called, hilariously, an 'eternal student' when doing my phd, and later, when living in a college set as a lecturer. When I was finishing my doctorate, I remember reeling down the road in North Oxford, with a voice in my head saying over and over, "The answer's love, now what's the question?". I think I apologised to a lamp post for bumping into it. 

I've finally reached the punchline to the joke. Who loves ya, baby?