My son turned five this year. He has been alive for five years. He has been in cancer treatment for three and a half of them.

I have been thinking about the childhood we are building for him now that we are off active treatment. The childhood that begins after the years that were organized around chemo. The childhood I want him to remember as his.

This is a love letter to him.

Dear Max

You will not read this for a long time. By the time you do, you will be older. You will have your own memories of the years we are inside right now. I hope some of those memories include the small things I want to write down here, in case the bigger things take up too much space.

The years that came first

You spent your second, third, and fourth years inside cancer treatment. I do not want to pretend that was a small thing. It was the biggest thing. It was something you had no language for at the time, and you carried it the way small children carry hard things. With your whole body. With trust. With a kind of bravery I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.

I know you do not remember most of it. That is a kindness I am grateful for. The memories will come back in pieces. Some of them will be hard. Some of them, I hope, will be the soft ones. The yellow Cocomelon bus. The hand of a nurse you called by her first name. The way your dad would carry you into the house at the end of every clinic day.

What we are building for you now

Slow mornings

We are building the kind of mornings we did not have time for during treatment. Slow pancakes. Cartoons on the couch in your pajamas. A bowl of strawberries that we eat one at a time. No appointments waiting at 8 a.m.

I am learning to not check my phone during these mornings. The clinic is not calling. The hospital does not need us today. I want you to remember a mom who was just there.

The backyard

We bought the swing set you asked about for two years. It is set up in the backyard now. You go out there every morning, sometimes barefoot, sometimes still half in pajamas, and you swing. You learned to pump your legs by yourself last week. We watched from the kitchen window. I cried a little.

The backyard is a small thing. The backyard is also one of the most precious things we are building for you. A place where you get to be a small person in your own outdoor space, doing nothing in particular, for as long as you want.

Quiet rituals

Bath time at night. Books at bedtime. The same three songs in the car. A walk after dinner. The rituals that mark a regular childhood. We are building them on purpose now.

You will not remember each ritual individually. You will remember the rhythm. I want the rhythm to be soft.

Friendships

You are starting to have friendships that have nothing to do with cancer. Kids at preschool who do not know what your scars are from. Kids whose parents have never heard the word leukemia in our family's context. You get to be just a kid in their eyes.

I want that for you. I want the part of your childhood that is just you, building a small social world that has nothing to do with the medical one.

Your sister

You and your sister are figuring out how to be siblings outside of treatment. There is more time for it now. There are more afternoons in the backyard with both of you in it. There are bath times where you splash her and she shrieks. There are car rides where you sing.

She has been waiting to be your sibling in this fuller way. Both of you are doing the work of figuring out what that looks like. It is one of the most beautiful things I get to watch.

Your body, on your own terms

Your body has been used a lot. By needles, by chemo, by procedures, by scans, by doctors and nurses doing things to it that were necessary and that you had no choice about. We are now building a phase where your body is yours again. You run. You climb. You jump. You decide whether you are hungry. You decide whether you need to rest.

This is a small reclamation of something big. I am paying attention.

What I want you to know, when you are older

You were brave for a long time. You did not have to be brave for me. I would have loved you the same if you had been scared, or angry, or small.

You were also a regular boy who liked yellow toy buses and finger puppets and being barefoot in the grass. That part of you was never erased by the treatment. I think you will recognize it again as you grow up.

Your dad and I, and your sister, and a lot of nurses and doctors and child life specialists, and grandparents and friends and strangers, all helped carry you through this. You did the hardest part.

Now we get to build the next part. The slow mornings. The backyard. The quiet rituals. The friendships. The body that is yours. The sister who is right there.

I love you. I am so proud of you.

Mom

Dina
Mom of Max | Founder, Maxwell’s Toy Shoppe
Childhood Cancer Advocate 💛

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