It began before St. Helens erupted, but that was a sign as sure as any (there were others, too). I shouldn’t have gotten married. I was too young. Things were going wrong from the start, but I thought no one else would want to marry me. I allowed everyone else but me to have a say in my life. Twenty painful years later, I divorced. In the process, I lost in unbelievable ways…the greatest being my daughters. I was a stay-at home mom, who had a close relationship with my girls. At the divorce, my ex decidedly leveled every low blow possible, with the result being that my youngest daughter never lived with me again. She was only ten. That fractured my heart in unimaginable ways. I struggled to find balance, after moving away to another state. Things slowly improved, including my relationship with my girls. Then another leveling boom hit: two days after my birthday, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. On that beautiful sunny day in 2007, when life had been so full of promise, my world blew apart. I was in shock. It felt like being caught in a wave that rolls you around and kicks you out not where you dove in, leaving you completely disoriented. I lost my job, lost body parts, lost hair, lost so much….it was simply devastating. I still have not been employed full-time, scrambling through low-end part time jobs and freelance artwork to eke out an existence. The one thing that has undeniably grown out of this pain and struggle is a foundation of love found in the actions and empathy of friends and family, and sometimes strangers. It is a curious and beautiful and marvelous thing…one that I have to remind myself it’s okay to allow and deserve. I will always have a disconnect of pain that sinks deep within me, but that’s not a bad thing anymore. It brings me the ability to find compassion and hope in life in general. I can choose to ruminate in pain or to let it fly freely away from me, allowing me to see clearly the beauty that was there all along.