Mamma Mia.

“Mom, what is this?”

I’ve been home for .3 seconds and all I really want is to strip the day away, slap on my running shoes and lose myself in my headphones and the dark. But the annoyance is dripping from my son’s voice the way that thick molasses falls into the bowl at Christmastime and one thing is painfully clear.

The only thing I’ll be running away from is whatever “this” is.

“What’s wrong now?”

For months I have been trying, desperately, to establish some personal boundaries within the house where for 10 years we have had almost none. Flowers? Jewelry? Give me an uninterrupted shower and my heart is yours for eternity.

“I want to know what this is.”

Midway through scrubbing the makeup that I loathe and hungrily eyeing the hair clip that will toss my overdue-for-a-trip-to-see-Auburn unruly locks into an out-of-the-way pile atop my head, I peek at the irritable object beside me.

“How about you read it to me?”

Flashing red lights and sirens would have been helpful at any point … NOW.

“It says ‘we wish to inform you that there is no evidence of cancer on your recent mammogram examination.’ What does that mean? And what’s a mammogram?”

And there it is. The reason for the irritation, which is actually more about the fear that something could happen because it’s happened before and what would they do then if I was suddenly, unavoidably, unexplainably … gone.

“What do you think it means?”

“It says there’s no cancer.”

“No cancer. Which means I’m fine.”

Undeniably, I am more jittery about my health than I was six years ago because I know what they know. That everything could be perfectly normal and then it’s not and things are lost that can never be replaced. And there’s a part of me that is scared that something will happen that I cannot fix and that they will be hurt again. I have all of the obligatory appointments, but this year has added a few surprises. Family echocardiograms (our hearts are beating just fine, thank you), a trip to a retinal eye cancer specialist (nothing like a “let’s rule out a potential melanoma” to send you hurtling over the edge on a Friday afternoon) and the mapping of a revised will and testament. And cancer is a more than a word to us – it has been an unwelcome guest in my father’s life for nearly a decade.

Which brings us back to “this.”

“Sweetheart, remember last week when I had to leave earlier than normal in the morning and we had to rush because I couldn’t be late for the doctor? Well, every year I go and a doctor takes pictures to see if anything has changed. And nothing has – everything’s fine. But it’s really important to check so that if there is something wrong, you can catch it early and try to fix it.”

“How do they do it?”

“They squish them in a machine … like pancakes.”

“They aren’t flat anymore. How did they get bounce back up again?”

I don’t know how … they just did.