Five Years

What if you grouped the years you’ve lived so far into half-decade chunks? You could start with the years you were 0-5 and move up from there, or work backwards from where you are now. Or, like me, you could consider a significant five year stretch and then work back. I’ve been taking a drug to ward off further cancer in my life for almost five years. Not long ago I went to the cancer centre to fill my last prescription for Tamoxifen. Five years ago today a little bit of cancer was cut out of my right breast.

I didn’t have to go to the cancer centre for my prescription refills over that stretch of time. I chose to because I felt a need to keep one foot in the cancer world, so it wouldn’t feel so jarring if my whole self was pulled back in at any point. I could still be yanked back there of course, even now, at any time. But I’m choosing to call this the end of the five year period that involved cancer.

2018-2023 was a fascinating slice of my personal history. A pandemic happened. I went to Australia to have grand times with a dear friend who isn’t here anymore. It was a stretch of years that marked the end of my favourite dog’s life. C finished elementary school and started high school, which will mark the next five years of her life.

Before that there was 2012-2017. I quit a job to go into private practice. I reconnected with my dad and he met C, just when it seemed like that might never happen. I started practicing better care for myself after the earliest years of parenting a child with a disability had forced the issue. I turned 40 and travelled to Belgium with a friend, my first big trip away from my family and an opportunity to continue the practice of returning to myself.

The 2006-2011 years are perhaps the most significant of my life this far. I got married and we became parents to two loves of my life, a pug and then a girl. Being a mom was surprisingly easy then surprisingly very, very hard. I was shocked into a new version of myself.

2000-2005 was the start of my relationship with Patrick and my professional initiation as an SLP. These were easy, breezy years and yet I remember being bored and lonely a lot, in particular in my first year of work when I lived in a 400 square foot apartment by myself in the small island city of Nanaimo. That’s where I was, home sick from work, on 9/11, a day that changed so much for so many.

The other chunks can’t so easily be summarized in a paragraph this many years on, nor should they be if I want anyone to keep reading this essay. But in brief they fit neatly into the following:

1995-1999 university life.

1989-1994 high school life.

1983-1988 elementary school life

1977-1982 formative early years

So now my task is to think about the next five years. I’ve never been one to make a “five-year plan”, and yet I feel like I have laid a foundation in these quintets of time that urges me to be more thoughtful about what is ahead. That urges me to think about what I want for the time that I am privileged to anticipate.

The foundation I’ve established includes much to be proud of in the realm of taking care of myself. I am now a (very) occasional drinker, a consistent practitioner of yoga and meditation, a weekly dancer, a some-time runner, and a consumer of more than 30 different plants every week. No wonder I have no friends! Just kidding, I do have a few close friends, and it’s in my nature for that to be the entirety of my social life. But I crave more connection and community, because I feel like that is where more joy can be found.

So I’m doing random things like subscribing to Substack communities before they’ve even really started (have you heard of the new podcast A Social Life, with Friends started by Madeline Dore? The associated Substack community kind of sounded like what I need…). I continue with inclusive education advocacy and am finding like-minded folks in that space. I have hope that at the end of the next five years the community surrounding me and C has evolved in a way that feels like, well – a community. The importance of this is not lost on any family caring for someone with a disability or illness, and yet it’s not always easy to establish.

I can’t bring myself to think beyond the next chunk of half decade and I won’t try. The world is changing in terrifying ways and it’s all I can do to infuse some hope I have for small positive changes into the realms I walk in regularly. In each past set of five years those realms have shifted in ways I couldn’t control, and in some ways that I could, and that will continue. If I am so privileged, I look forward to looking back on you, 2024- 2028, and marvelling at all that you were. Here’s to five more years.