Healthy Mom Healthy Me

My dear friend, Joan, messaged me on Facebook a few months ago and said a good friend of hers was recently told she had a brain tumor. This young woman is in the prime of her life with a successful career as a healthcare CEO and two small children. Joan remembered that I drew a simple picture of my husband, Marty, when he was ill with stage VI cancer that helped me, our girls, family and friends to focus on his good health. It was a large stick figure filled with yellow crayon, outlined in blue, a big red heart on the chest and a huge smile beaming on his face. I had written a blog about how I started drawing the figures, one after another, to help me to rise above my sheer panic and sadness. I drew the figures with crayon, one right after another, and taped them up all over my work office. I used up the bright yellow crayon in one box and had to raid other crayon boxes for that particular color --- yellow, the color of light and health.   In the blog I described how my co-workers started posting my drawings in their offices, our family and friends started posting them on their refrigerators at home or at their desk at work. I started calling the picture “Healthy Marty”. Working for a printer at the time, our daughter, Beth, had 50 copies made of the picture and sent to our home so we could display them everywhere. One Sunday our oldest daughter Sarah and I posted them on Marty’s workshop, on his bike, on the clothes line, even on the back of the shorts he was wearing – trying to celebrate our belief in his health. Marty has survived and I shared this blog and the picture with many others. I drew a healthy girl picture when a female family member was diagnosed with colon cancer. I sent her the “Healthy Marty” story and months later she shared that the simple picture and visualization of health helped her. So the sharing continues. Joan asked me to write the story for her friend’s children, and I did. I asked a friend if her eight-year-old would edit the story for me and Elsa did not change a word. Afterwards, her mother encouraged me to write a book, and here we are.   I am including not only the “Healthy Marty” story and visualization – which I have now changed to “Healthy Mom”, but a few other simple tools children and adults can use to help them to navigate the incredibly stressful and emotionally ravaging throes of dealing with a parent with a serious illness. The other sections of this book describe how developing an attitude of gratitude can lift our spirits, keeping a journal can be a very special personal counselor and expressing our anger or other feelings is a very important thing to do. These simple tools have helped me and my family.