So Fuckin' Lucky Week

Welcome to I'M SO FUCKIN' LUCKY! WEEK @ Honest 2 Betsy, brought to you by moi, the felicitous, the fortuitous, the propitious, Betsy B. Honest.

Pardon my French. It's difficult for me to use the word "Lucky" without adding the "I'm so fuckin'...".

The reasons are manifold:

1) the assonance of the phrase creates an internal rhyme that is compelling to me

2) I am from Northern Alberta where people swear a lot, even around babies

3) I'm so fucking lucky!

I don't believe in much. I am a heathen, a humanist, and an atheist. But I believe in Luck and I believe in Irony and I tend to capitalize those words as if they are proper nouns instead of just common ones. As if I think of Luck and Irony as Goddesses who lurk around waiting for an "in." I'm superstitious that way. Or pragmatic, depending how you look at it.

This week, though, I'm not talking about Irony, I'm talking about Luck. So, it is without Irony that I say, "I'm so fucking lucky!"

This time last year I was counting down the days to my hysterectomy and I was wretched and terrified. A big health scare - cervical cancer - shook me right down and brought into sharp focus what mattered to me:
bringing up my beautiful kids, loving my eccentric, well-bearded husband, walking my dog in the teeming woods, and you know, being alive. For purely selfish reason, I want to be alive. And I am. How lucky can you get?

I was pretty sure I wouldn't die, I was assured and re-assured by lots of doctors and people otherwise in the know that I was as lucky as a person with cancer can get. But all the same I was scared I might not wake up from that surgery. Or that I might wake up different and ruined.

So because last St. Paddy's day I was frightened that I might not see my kids again I went to the Chocolate store (I also capitalize chocolate as a proper noun) and bought mittenfuls of gold coins and shamrocks wrapped in green foil. Then I went to the Dollorama and picked up some tiny leprechaun hats and some glittery shamrock stickers and I created a treasure hunt around the house while my husband and kids were finishing their dinner.

And then I yelled down from upstairs, "Who is at the door?"

And my husband yelled up the stairs, "What are you talking about?"

"I thought I heard a teeny tiny knock-a-knock-a-knock at the door!"

"Nah, you're cracking up," he told me.

"But I'm sure I heard a teeny tiny knock, and it sounded kind of green..."

Then I opened the door, brought a wee little leprechaun hat with a shamrock-sticker-covered clue folded inside it and said "Oh my Gods -- I think a LEPRECHAUN came to our house."

Then I handed the note to my daughter and we followed the hunt for clues all the way to the baby's crib which contained a brass pot overflowing with gold coins.

Then we sat in a sunbeam in the baby's nursery eating chocolate on the floor and I hugged them and kissed them and told them how much I loved them and how lucky I felt to have them and how even if nothing good ever happened to me again for the rest of my life, I'd still feel lucky because I had them.

I just wanted them to, you know, know that for sure. And if they were going to grow up with only the filmiest memory of their mother, I wanted that to be the one. Though given how Luck and Irony work it would probably be me saying something bitchy to their father while picking my nose.

"Mommy," my five-year-old asked me today. "Remember last year when a leprechaun came to our house?"

"Yeah-huh."

"I hope a leprechaun comes to our house again."

Guess what? A leprechaun totally will.

I'm going to be posting a lot this week. I'm going to be posting about my feelings on this, the anniversary of my hysterectomy, I'm going to be posting about luck, and how I've got it, how I want more, and what I'm going to do about it.

Love and Luck,
Betsy