Husband and Father Guiding the Ship

We have been absent from our family blog for one month exactly as our son Thomas was diagnosed with cancer. We were publishing over at CaringBridge (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/thomaslauer/), but are now going to try to bring the two together seamlessly in order to continue the family blog I have written for 14 years. This blog post is copied from CaringBridge and is being published retroactively. Please subscribe to our family blog to receive updates as I publish!

I haven't written much about what Chris is doing all this time, but it is much! Watching how the complementary roles of husband and wife and different personalities work together during a time of great need is a beautiful thing.

Chris is quietly working behind the scenes, guiding the ship. He continues working his job, with much support and flexibility from his company--so I might find him working in the middle of the night if he spent significant time helping Thomas during the day.

He is maneuvering finances and anyone who has done that kind of research and paperwork knows how time consuming it is. Chris is working on selling our large van (repair the doohickey, get it cleaned and detailed, research fair market value) and purchasing two smaller vehicles that fit in the hospital parking garage and are better suited for our overall needs right now. Chris already found one perfect vehicle at a good price for our family, so he does all those little things I couldn't possibly think about right now: sync my cell phone to the Bluetooth, show me what all the dials and knobs do, program the button-thingy to open our garage door. He is researching refinancing the house. He is filling out the paperwork for his company's charitable grant program for families experiencing crisis. If you suspect that my brain is too mushy right now to manage all of those tasks, you are correct!

Chris is the "people person" of the two of us. He has so many connections and now is one of those times that connections can become very important. I hear him having long phone conversations at times with people who can help us in any number of capacities.

I witness Chris zipping about repairing some things at the house during the calm moments because having those nagging issues off our plate matters. The broken garage door? Now is the time to get that working. Purchases or repairs that will make the house even cleaner for Thomas: now is the time!

My husband also keeps an eye on me, trying to make sure I'm as calm and stable as is possible right now. For example, when our medical appointment was delayed and I would no longer need a babysitter here, I said I was going to cancel babysitting. Chris took one look at my emotional state, which was getting shaky, and said I needed to keep the babysitter just so I could get some help that day and achieve more emotional equanimity.

Nowadays it seems like men's skills and contributions, their usually very different ways of thinking and achieving, is discounted, denigrated, or vilified. However, I've had too many single mothers express how desperately difficult it is to attempt to fill both mother's and father's roles, to do every single task that needs to be done, especially when in crisis. Those ladies know better than anyone how much their family would benefit from a decent, good-hearted man doing the things that men do. Men's strengths are great and I'm very appreciative for my husband's contributions right now.

🙏 🙏 🙏 

No news today from the oncologist . . . the labs are delayed, our nerves are frazzled, to say the least.

SPECIFIC PRAYER REQUEST: Please pray that Thomas's ganglioneuroblastoma does NOT have an amplified MYC-N octogene.