The Kids: Part 1- Maia

How are the kids doing?

I get this question a lot. Since I seem to be getting a lot of traffic from people who don’t know me right now (wow, do I feel popular this week!), let me tell you about my wonderful family. Here’s the cliff notes version:

All Photos: Courtesy Leah Schoeneman, IntricateHeart.com

I have been married for 20 years to my high school sweetheart, Matt Morrison. 

We grew up together in Sheldon, IA, a small town just over the IA/ SD border from where we now live in Sioux Falls, SD. We got married at the tender young ages of 19 & 20 after dating for 4 years. Matt & I attended USD in Vermillion, then the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. After grad school, we moved to Marion, Indiana and lived there for 8 years. That was where we began our lives in ministry, and had our babies. Xander was born in 1999, and our daughter, Maia came along in 2004. 

Xander is now 13 years old, and in the 7th grade. He is extremely intelligent, and his teachers describe him as “quirky and fun.”  He has wonderful friends, who are as delightfully nerdy as he is. He is a member of the “Robot Geeks,” who are the SD state champion First Lego League team for the past two years. He plays a lot of video games- favorites are Minecraft and Pokémon, and more recently Assassin’s Creed III (against my preferences. I keep telling him he can’t grow up to be a psychopath, and he just rolls his eyes). He is musical, but probably plays the cello and drums out of a sense of obligation more than passion. He sort of assumes that if you’re going to be a Morrison, you have to play an instrument. He has a beautifully rich, low voice that changed almost overnight a couple of summers ago. I kind of wish he would sing- but he says he plays cello and that’s enough. 

Maia is 8 years old, and in the 3rd grade. She is 100% her own person. She is silly, and sensitive, and very musical and theatrical. She is a free thinker, and a dreamer, and a hoarder. Her favorite thing in the world is... well, me. And a close second is her bunnies, Bon Bon and Lily. She plays the piano (when she feels like it), harp, and sings like a little angel. She keeps our lives very interesting, because she says the funniest things. Usually without intending to. She generally rides an emotional roller coaster, and the adolescent years are going to be awesome with her. 

In my humble opinion, they are the best. 

When we got the news on Wednesday, we went and picked up Maia after school. She gets out early on Wednesdays, so she was home by 1:30. She actually went down and was making her bed- the finishing touch on getting her room ready for company to come over that evening, as we were hosting our weekly Bible study that night, and all the kids play down in her room. 

Matt & I went in and sat down on her bed next to her and said, “Honey, we need to talk. We got some bad news from the doctor today. Mommy has breast cancer.” (How do you deliver this kind of news to your baby?)

She immediately grabbed the closest stuffed animal (a dog named Goliath), and pulled herself into a little sitting ball.  I looked her right in the eye and said, “Now, you need to know something very important. This is not going to kill me. I am going to be around for a LONG time. I will see you grow up and get married and have your own kids. I plan to hold my grandbabies. You understand?”

She nodded with tears in her eyes. I gave her a big hug and stroked her long blond hair. I said, “We don’t know much of anything yet. We just found out, and I’m going to meet with a team of specialists sometime soon, and they will help us all understand more about what’s going on. I’m probably going to be pretty sick for a while, but it’s all temporary. OK?”

“OK.” She nodded. I asked if she had any questions, and bless her heart, she said, “How are we going to pay for this? Will we have to use the money we saved for St. Louis?” 

Knife in the chest.

She’s eight. This tells you a lot about a kid who knows that sometimes we have to make sacrifices because there’s just not an abundant supply of money at our disposal. 

Many of you are probably wondering the same thing, so let me take a big weight off your shoulders and tell you that I qualify under the income parameters for a program called All Women Count, and from what I can tell, the whole process will be covered. It’s not all finalized yet, so this is an area that can use some prayer, but we are simply not worrying about money as we begin this journey. (That’s extremely unusual for us, so what a blessing!)

Now, back to Maia. She is processing slowly. Wednesday evening, I let her touch the lump and see the bandage where they took the needle biopsy. Thursday morning, she was whining about  a pain in her foot, and then she kind of just curled up in a ball and sat on the floor (the same ball she curled into when we told her the news). She was a little teary, so I wrapped myself around her and said, “Hey, why the tears?”

“I’m just going to miss you,” she whimpered. 

“What, when I go to work?” She shook her head no. I said, “Hey. I’m not dying from this. Remember?  I’m going to rock my grandbabies. We talked about this.” 

I think she turned a corner in her thinking because the next morning as I was combing her hair, she said, “After your cancer, we’re all going to start over and be better.”  I caught that word- after.

I laughed and said, “Maybe we could just try to be better right now. Who needs to be better?”

“Xander. He should stop swearing at me.”

“Well, yes. He shouldn’t be swearing at anyone. What about you?”

“I should feed my bunnies.” 

“Well yes, but you already do that. Maybe you could try to think of some other things to do better. What about me? Do I need to be better?” I asked.

“No, you’re the best one of all of us. That’s probably why you got cancer.” I laughed and said I don’t think it works that way, but I do think we will all be better people as a result of this season of our lives. 

I'm already seeing my sweet little goofball start to trust Jesus in ways that she couldn't before. That is one of the things that makes this journey worth it.