The group that helped me have the courage to create our familyThis story isn't about the kids or even really about me, but in significant ways it is related to our family. This is a story about a beautiful, talented friend of mine and the incredible group that brought us together and the way she inspires me to have courage and take risks and live life to its fullest. I wish everyone I know could read her book.
A Survivor's Heart (published on TheNextFamily):
When I pulled into the driveway and saw the package sitting by the garage door, I starting unhooking my seatbelt before I’d even stopped the car. I had been waiting for this package all week, since the day I got the email from Amazon telling me it had shipped. And as I stand now at my kitchen counter flipping through pages like some sort of restless child, I want to go door to door and start passing out books. I turn to the first page and read a blurb from Pam Houston about Katherine’s humor and her survivor’s heart, and I smile. On the back cover is a picture of Katherine with her daughter, Katherine’s pale nose and chin resting on Josies’s dimpled brown cheek. Josie’s hair is up in braids, and Katherine’s long straight hair hangs below her shoulders.
The first time I met Katherine her hair was just a few inches long. It was a curly mop that accentuated her big green eyes. We stood on a gravel parking area near the compound of cottages our writing group had rented for the week in Pt. Reyes, California. Our writing community had been around for nearly five years, but Katherine had joined us online the year before and she was joining us for an in-person workshop for the first time. A few months earlier she had emailed us all about her clean scan and the anniversary of her mastectomy. She told us all to have a drink for her on that day. “One might wonder if that's a day to celebrate?,” she said and then answered herself. “Hmmm. Sure!”
Read the rest of this essay here.
Katherine Malmo’s book, Who in This Room: The Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition, is now available anywhere books are sold. In 2005 Katherine was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer and spent a year in treatment. These days she is cancer-free and blogs about her family, adoption, race, health and living a low-toxin life at HystericalMommyNetwork.
1 comment:
You are the bestest and I love that first pic of the group on the beach. Oh, those were the days, no?
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