Twenty-six years ago I became a mom for the first time to a beautiful boy. Four years later a gorgeous girl joined our family.

Becoming a mom happened at a time when my body was well. I enjoyed good health and was able to birth two children. It was a time when my body was strong and did not let me down with poor health as it does now. It was a time when my life changed and I lived for the future, raising my kids.

With cancer, I now live for the moment and enjoy my kids more than I ever have. Being present to them and being in their presence is what I hang my hopes on in living with cancer and fighting this disease.

Being a mother has been one of life’s most rewarding experiences. It’s also one where I have done a lot of “flying by the seat of my pants” in parenting. There is no book that tells all in being a mother.

Although you can take the parenting classes, and read a library full of parenting books, you’re never quite prepared for being a mom. Raising children is an experience that is universal, but is unique at the same time for each child raised is not like any other.

The early years of mothering are a blur. You are busy attending to the needs of these young lives that you welcome into your family. The years go quickly.

It doesn’t seem so long ago when my infants became toddlers, became pre-schoolers, became school age, became adolescents, became teenagers, and are now young adults forming their own lives.

You go from active parenting where your children are totally dependent on your care, to enjoying life along side them on ball diamonds, soccer pitches, pool sides, basketball courts, music lessons, parent-teacher interviews, and an array of other activities. Quickly, those moments of being along side your children, become sidelined as your children move forward to adulthood and make their own decisions.

Hopefully, along the way you have parented well. You see that your role changes over the years, but becomes more loving and fluid in adapting to being a mother of adult children. I am still a mother and will always be. My role now is more of a coach who waits to be asked for advice. I am also an adult friend.

Daily, I see the rewards of parenting well. I enjoy my kids for the unique individuals they have become. I enjoy being with my kids in the normal day to day things of life. I enjoy being invited into their worlds as they enter new phases of being adults coming to full maturity in finishing post-secondary schooling, in having good jobs, in buying a first home, and in getting married.

My kids are the treasures in my life. They each have their own personalities. One is more like me, the other is more like their father. They have a bit of both of us in each of them. They are kind, responsible, and caring. They love from their hearts and show it freely.

With my cancer diagnosis, their love is more genuine, more sincere, more heartfelt. They show it in acts of kindness. They show it in sharing household chores. They show it in coming with me to appointments. They show it in hovering around me, in just spending time with Mom.

As a mom, one of the things I had hoped to pass on to them was the concept of “being present” to people in their life’s journey. It’s a hard concept to teach. It’s a concept that is best taught by example.

Somewhere in parenting my children, they have caught the concept of “being present,” not only to me but also to so many others they are close to. I am particularly moved when I see them “being present” to their elderly grandmothers each time they are with them. They know the value of spending time with those you love.

I am grateful for the gift of “being present” in the lives of others, and in “being present” in the lives of my children and now their partners. The parenting rewards bring me peace and joy as I live with a life-threatening disease.

The gift of being present carries on daily as I live with cancer with Strength, Courage, and Determination.