How to Be a Super Duper Spouse With Cancer
I've been getting questions from women recently diagnosed with cancer.
How do you not become a martyr and make every disagreement with your spouse come back to the fact that you have cancer?
It's common to aim for the winning shot in any marital spat, and the Cancer Card trumps everything. I can hear the echoes of the arguments now:
I should get to pick the show we watch tonight, I have cancer.
I don't care what my tone sounds like, I have cancer!
I'm gonna roll my eyes at you all I want, mother trucker, I have CANCER!
Ah, yes, what a delight the scared cancer patient is. John and I had been living together about 6 months and engaged for mere weeks when I was first diagnosed in 1999. My parents and sisters came rushing to help—it was so shocking for all of us—and the way John remembers it, each of my people advised him to lock it all down while I was undergoing treatment: “You know you can’t expect anything of Kate now, right?” Ah, ye olde Riener family Shut Up and Deal decree. What he heard from them was that his feelings, his needs, suddenly meant absolutely nothing. He didn’t matter anymore. Indefinitely.
It was a point of contention with us, I behaved as if I had been absolved of all considerations for anyone but myself. I am pretty sure I threw the Cancer Card at him several times in arguments: “Because I have CANCER, that’s why!” Underneath my urge to be absolved of all obligation to John was the stark change that I couldn’t be his primary emotional support. I can’t take care of you, I have to take care of myself. In fact, you should be doing nothing but taking care of me!
John remembers retreating to Barnes and Noble with coffee and a notebook, writing a long letter to me of everything he felt he couldn’t say. He was scared and angry too, and didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t ask me for emotional support, he had to swallow everything and let cancer subsume our daily life. It wasn’t fair. Somehow he found the right words for me to hear in one particularly loud confrontation: “Having cancer doesn’t remove you from US. We are still in a relationship, we are in this together. We need to be together.” It was a shift we needed to take if our still very young relationship would survive. We couldn't let cancer take our partnership too.
It was our last blow-up over the Cancer Card, but it was a struggle to balance my pressing needs with the commitment to my partnership with John. Ultimately, he got emotional support at Gilda’s Club, where his caretakers' support group was led by a smart survivor named Andrea. She showed them to take care of themselves, and gave them permission to ask for things fairly and thoughtfully. Andrea brought us the term “use the I Language” and we actually developed better fighting skills we still use today. We found a better balance.
Much of my advice is to allow yourself the room to rage, weep, retreat, whatever… without hurling it at each other, and without recoiling when the other displays it. Be gentle with yourself and with each other. Don’t judge the emotions, let yourself feel whatever you need to. Try to slow things down enough to recognize the underlying anger/fear/sadness that you’re each carrying into disagreements. I often find that when I simply acknowledge an emotion it loses most of its power. I usually have to go through a terrible display of snit or coldness to admit that I’m acting out of fear or anger, but owning whatever is underneath lets the air out of it all.
And it might make you more willing to pick from his Netflix queue next time.