November 5, 2024 | Rome, Italy

Chemo girls

By |2024-10-28T20:36:08+01:00October 26th, 2024|First Person, Home|
A world full of people who don't have cancer but are unhappy anyway.

I’ve been quiet in recent years. Like a mouse. Breast cancer and chem can do that. Zap your zeal on the spot and keep it zapped for months at a time, then years. When you wonder what hit you it usually totes up to mortality in the mirror. If this is too grim, not to worry. I won’t go on. In fact, my words today are about women nearly half my age, an admission that puts me squarely into middle age. So be it.

For the record, my family, read partner, now calls Paris home (which it has been since the pandemic). We live on a side street, which is fortunate. Cars seem to own the planet now, their population must be in the millions, about neck in neck with the Chinese.

Now then, on to the people, Mary and Louise, I’ll call them. Both are in their mid-thirties, Mary here in Paris and Louise, the daughter of a friend, in New York. What they have in common is melancholy, though neither one, I must add, is sick. At least not tumor sick.

An increasing number of women seem to want back into what some might label a postwar or 1950s lifestyle.

Instead, they’re lost, two girls in search of a future that won’t show up.

I know Mary better. She works from home in IT and until recently had a French-Vietnamese boyfriend she truly adored. They would make a life together, she told me. Tons of kids and all. Until he dumped her, no warning, as if she represented unwanted punctuation in a sentence gone awry. A Kiwi by birth, Auckland to be precise, she now wants to do her own dumping, Paris left behind for the more familiar confines of home. All well and good until I ask her what exactly she wants.

To be a “trad-wife,” she says, social media code for a throwback wife who cares for house, home, and family, Dad and husband off at work, bringing home the old school bacon.

She’s not alone.  An increasing number of women seem to want back into what some might label a postwar or 1950s lifestyle, far from the rat race of hard-to-get jobs and a meager income. And sometime very solitary, single times. Mary has been in her Paris flat for three years, which was fair enough when she was partnered but which now seems entirely unfair and very lonely.

Be careful of using geography as a balm, I tell her. New Zealand might be home but it alone will not fix things. She agrees, up to a point. Her large family is there and her mother knows sons who might be future husbands. How times change, I think aloud to myself, the product of a work-first, no male support half-feminist upbringing. No need to rely on a husband, my mother would whisper, all this as my father fell back on “My Fair Lady” virtues in which a Henry Higgins would always be around to save the charwoman.

That’s the Mary side of the story. She sits in front of her screen, building websites, sending emojis to friend, and crying at night, or so she says.

And Louise?

A variation on the same theme. She is in her “late” mid-thrties, in Brooklyn, partnered up with a nice enough guy who has an online furniture selling business. They’ve been together for two years and he seems crazy about her, a line lifted straight from her latest text.

Except, well, um, she’s adrift. Who is she, she asks me, by way of asking herself. Where’s the applause she half-expected from the world, a world whose many troubles trouble her. Ukraine, Gaza, death, destruction, misery… it’s a long and painful list.

Part of the problem is that she’s an aspiring screenwriter who has yet to sell anything but bits of text for TV ads. She’s been working hard since age twenty and what does she have to show? Nothing.

Unlike Mary, marriage and kids are no way out. She’d feel as if she’d deserted her calling. Never mind that her boyfriend her is a “rock” and a source of moral support.

Still, she’s unhappy. Where’s the gig that would make her rich and famous? That line makes me want to say, And where is my health?

Life doesn’t work that way, I tell her.

Esteem yourself, I tell her.

But she mopes.

Occasionally I feel like getting Mary and Louise together to come with me to a chemo session. It’s a “count your blessings” sort of thing.

Mary and Louise seem to me citizens of a generation that is sure of all and nothing at once, and now, nearing their own middle age, asking questions perhaps better suited to high school and college. The lostness seems like the product of thinking life would at some point throw you a line if not anchor, which it rarely does. All too often, female or male, you’re on your own. And in many cases there is no loving family to send you solace, let alone take you back in.

Why all this fuss about two women neither broke nor homeless?

In part because I’m sick, and when you’re sick you maybe feel that you can make the healthy feel better, before they too have to face the ugly music of illness.

But with Mary and Louise I fail.

I offer words of encouragement but sense they don’t get through, as if melancholy were, well, the Great Wall of China, a required fortress in its own right. Call it melancholy as default. It’s the emoji all know to hide behind if not exalt.

Occasionally I feel like getting Mary and Louise together to come with me to a chemo session. It’s a “count your blessings” sort of thing. But soon I relent and let the poison try to cure me. You can listen but you can’t fix, I say to myself. And hope for the best.

About the Author:

Cristina Polli is a Lazio-based food and culture writer who contributes occasionally. Her work is translated from the Italian.tt