Explaining a parent's big illness to kids

When mommy has a boo boo inside

I got this question from a reader some months ago:

In December, I was diagnosed with lung cancer (totally random, I don’t smoke). I’m amazingly lucky because it was found on an unrelated scan, I had surgery and I’m ok. I will go on a maintenance drug for the next three years.

But obviously, it’s been quite an insane few months. My son is not yet four, so we told him that mommy had a boo boo inside; “a bad lump” and the doctors took it out. We didn’t use the word “cancer” because we were afraid some older kid might hear it and tell him his mom was going to die. I’m not. At least not now!

I would love to know how other witches have dealt when they are the ones with tough stuff. It’s really hard! And I tend toward martyrdom, which is of course stupid and self-defeating. eg “I’ll just get up (bleeding) and do it!”

Too many young-ish parents are on this type of long, hard illness road with uncertainty ahead. Here’s what some witches in this scenario said about how they talked to their kids about it. What warmed my heart was how so many of them offered to be in touch with the witch who wrote and one even offered to be a resource for anyone reading this who might need some further advice.

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I got diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2021 when I was 40 and my kids were 5 and 7. My hospital (Northwestern in Chicago) was amazing and offered a social worker to speak with me after my diagnosis. I initially declined because I have my own therapist, but they strongly recommended that I speak with her because she specializes in telling kids. She gave me some great tips:

1. Make sure they know it’s not their fault that you got it. Kids are little narcissists and think everything is about them, so you have to be super clear that you having cancer is not a consequence of anything they did. Like, they stayed up past bedtime and Mom got mad at them and then she was tired and that gave Mom cancer. 

2. Make sure they understand that they can’t get it from you and they didn’t give it to you. I was diagnosed during a COVID resurgence when all we were doing was wearing masks and talking to kids about germs and how people can give each other germs so she told me to be exceptionally clear that no one can get this from me. 

3. Explain it in the simplest terms possible and be fine with whatever their reaction is. I told our kids something along the lines of “Mom went to the doctor and found out that she has something called cancer. Mom is okay right now and she is going to be okay. But right now there is a tumor inside Mom’s body that needs to come out. Do you guys remember when the 7 year old had the splinter in her foot and Dad couldn’t get it out and she said, ‘Just keep it in there and I’ll be okay!’ And do you remember that we said that we can’t leave it in there because if we do, it would get infected and would get much worse. That’s what the tumor in Mom’s body is like. The doctors have to take it out.” They could understand that.

4. Things got a little more complicated when we also told them that I was going to have something called chemotherapy and that one of the crazy side effects was that I would lose my hair. That was the part where my 7-year-old got upset, which then made my 5-year-old upset. That I would look different was so, so impactful to them. I also have a lot of thoughts about that, but I will say that when the time came to shave my head, we had them help with the process which made it SO MUCH EASIER. They very quickly came to the conclusion that nothing had really changed. But they often said that they wished that I looked like a “normal mommy” and YOU KNOW WHAT KID? ME TOO. :)

The good thing about telling young kids, though, is that—at least in my case—it was really one of the first times they had heard the words “cancer” and “chemo.” So it wasn’t like they had a lot of baggage around those words or expectations around what that diagnosis meant. They were new concepts for them. 

It was also helpful to tell people around us—especially teachers, neighbors, and the parents of kids they play with—when we told the kids. Some of it was because I didn’t know what their reaction would be and how they would share this info with other people, but mostly because I didn’t want a neighbor kid to say, “My aunt died of breast cancer” to my kid. However, I DID want the neighbor kid to say, “My grandma had breast cancer too and she’s totally fine.” And that’s a thing that actually happened and made my kid feel a lot better. Also, their teachers could not have been more supportive and lovely. 

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I went through this with my spouse, who had stage 3 cancer when my daughter was 2.

My advice would be to speak to your child in an age-appropriate way about what’s going on “Mommy is sick and I don’t feel great and I need to rest but I’m here and I love you etc.” We told her teachers what was going on and said she was struggling to understand it and needed some extra consideration, and everyone was very supportive and understanding. Mostly it manifested in her relationship with the sick parent and wanting to be around them less than anything that came up at school. But in general, people understood she was going through something and were patient with her random outbursts and things like that, and she doesn’t even remember it now, so I think she weathered it pretty well, considering.

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Being an open book, I told my older son (9 years at the time) and younger (4 years) together over dinner. I reminded my older how sick I was during pregnancy with my younger (exactly 9 months of vomiting, no days off). I reminded my older that I was JUST as sick when I was pregnant with him. Told them that I was not pregnant but would be feeling the same way for the next nine months. Warned them I’d be bald, we laughed more about that than anything. I educated them about the different stages of cancer. I used the word “cancer” a lot, as I knew they’d hear it and needed to know it wasn’t a scary word. 

I think we went through that time feeling as if we were a team, knowing that this was my 3rd time feeling like absolute shit, day in and day out for exactly 9 months, but would be completely fine after. 

I had separate conversations with them (due to age difference), making sure we were on the same wavelength (this happened mostly while reading them to sleep). I didn’t want lack of communication to affect them later in life (like it did me while my father was dying of stage 4 lung cancer when I was 8 years old), so I was honest. Best place to be honest is driving in car or during reading at bedtime (my forever savior).

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I might not be the perfect person for this — my oldest was six months old when I was diagnosed, so he wasn’t really aware of what was going on (my hair started coming back when he was about two.) Both boys visited my oncologist with me for follow-ups and got to meet my FRIENDS (aka oncology nurses) at different points, but only after I was in remission. I’ve always been very practical/pragmatic when discussing any of my health issues - or theirs. I always use proper terminology and try to never sugar-coat anything. This was very helpful when my younger son was diagnosed with short stature and had to have things like BRAIN MRIs when he was only 5 or 6. I was able to name and explain everything that was happening to him, and it was very comforting to him to know his mom knew what was going on, knew it wouldn’t hurt him, and could help with injections after injecting myself with things for so long, and was hiding nothing from him about the situation.

I WILL say that even now, as a teenager, it bothers my older son whenever I talk about having cancer. He doesn’t like the photo from his first birthday where I’m wearing a wig. He doesn’t like seeing photos of me with my head buzzed/short hair. He had an assignment in high school last year that was about interviewing a cancer survivor and I saw it in his Google Classroom digest, he didn’t talk to me about it at all.  I offered to talk to him about it but he was absolutely against it.  

So, while I have no good advice for announcing, my advice for the in-remission witch of the future will be to not joke about it or think that it is OK to be super-casual talking about it - because even if  everything is fine now, it’s still a sore spot (the part about thinking your mom could be dead.)

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I’m 32 and my husband was diagnosed with cancer when she had just turned 1 (in 2021); he had surgery, we were told that was probably it and he’d never have anything else happen with cancer in all likelihood. And then it shook our world when his cancer not only recurred but also spread to his lymph nodes, so he went through several months of chemo when she was 2. That said, here’s what I did to handle it in talks with my kid. 

We described it as Dad being “big sick” (versus when we get colds, viruses, etc, was “little sick”) so that my 2yo knew there was a difference and didn’t associate it closely every time we got sick after that. Especially since we were getting sick A LOT this past year, that was helpful.

Self-brag: I am honestly very proud of how I handled it because we were very open, I did a lot of research to support that, we read books, I consulted a couple of professionals (by emailing them out of the blue and yes, they actually responded!) about how to tell her things in a developmentally appropriate way.

But that’s also different from this person’s situation because I wasn’t the one with cancer; when it’s the mom who has cancer, that mental + physical labor would have been impossible because you’re out of commission, so I hope she knows that’s a systemic issue that meant I could handle it in a more privileged way. I want to acknowledge how the patriarchy seeps into this issue yet again, as nothing is immune from it. (And if anyone wants proof that the patriarchy doesn’t leave cancer patients alone, I mean, just look at those stats about how many men leave their wives during cancer treatment versus when men are the ones in treatment. Whew.) 

We also used this awesome org, Wonders & Worries. They’re small and based in Austin; we are not in TX, and they still did several 1:1 calls with me throughout his treatment. (It was genuinely so kind and I’m forever grateful, I was just this random person being like, help me??? And they did!) They gave us advice like explaining cancer with different colored Legos and how some people’s bodies make extra of certain colored Legos/cells faster, etc. Honestly, it even helped me understand cancer better. They also recommended books, I think now they do free webinars, they now have an app. 

I got this idea from one of my calls with W&W: we still occasionally talk about cancer stuff to normalize it. Like how Daddy gets his scans and his doctors monitor him and make sure he is healthy so we don’t have to worry about it. She can focus on other things, like just being a kid. They emphasized that cancer shouldn’t become this super loaded word and if we never used it, it would become that. 

She often saw Dad in extreme distress, extremely ill, was even scared of him for awhile I think because he looked so different. We talked about how cancer isn’t something you can catch and how she did no role in causing this; it’s just the way his body works. Someone had told me kids commonly think that because, by their very nature, they are so self-focused, which means they think a lot about themselves but they also tend to assume things are their fault. Even things we might find absurd. 

I can recommend some good children’s books (and some not-so-good ones!). I also did like this parent one because it’s so small but helpful: A Tiny Boat At Sea, how to help children who have a parent diagnosed with cancer. I would be up for talking further to anyone else who is dealing with the issue [ed: please reply to this email if you are interested in being personally connected with this witch, who lives in the Washington DC area.)

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This is Claire again: A couple of other random resources witches/friends have told me about include Bright Spot Network, which has free virtual support groups and free books for kids about cancer, an Imerman Angels a one-on-one cancer support community I learned about from my friend Erica, a former Angel herself.

Finally, a happy update: The OG witch wrote to me in March, and I followed up with her in late August, and she had this update:

“I think one of the things that I have learned from this process is that some people will show up for you, unprompted, some will not, and some need very specific instructions and I need to get better about asking. And I’m doing well. Had a clean six month scan, which is great.”

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End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. New here? Here’s what the newsletter is all about. The Evil Witches archives live here. I dipped into it on Friday when I performed at a show on Friday (which also featured witch Carly, who runs our Instagram account!), and I brushed off this piece about tricking your kids into talking to you after school (which I thought of after I could not get my 12-year-old to say shit to me on the drive to his football game.)

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One witchy thing

Text from a friend with a VERY busy spouse: