It’s funny, in a strange and heartbreaking sort of way, how life reshapes itself when cancer enters it.

There’s spring, summer, fall, and winter — and then there’s cancer season. A season that doesn’t follow the calendar, doesn’t obey the weather, and certainly doesn’t care what else might be happening in your life.

When you’re in the season of cancer, time starts to move differently. You stop measuring weeks by holidays or school events or family dinners — and start measuring them by chemotherapy cycles. “Two more days until treatment.” “One more week until counts recover.” “Three months until the next scan.”

It becomes its own rhythm — one you never asked to learn, but now can’t stop hearing.

And yet, even as you pray for time to move faster — for the sickness to pass, for the scan to be clear, for the season to be over — you also find yourself praying for it to slow down.

Because life didn’t stop when cancer started.

Our newborn still took his first breath in the middle of all of it.

Our toddler still called “Mommy!” in that sweet, tiny voice that only lasts for a couple of years before it grows up and out of babyhood.

Our twins still giggled their way through the last age they could count on their fingers.

And I keep realizing how fleeting all of it is.

So I find myself living in this strange in-between — praying that the chemo cycles would hurry, but that the days would not. That the nausea would go quickly, but the bedtime snuggles would linger. That the side effects would end soon, but that our baby’s first year wouldn’t rush by unnoticed, tucked between hospital visits and waiting rooms.

It’s such a contradiction — wanting time to both sprint and stand still.

But that’s the season of cancer. It teaches you to live inside that tension. It teaches you how fragile, how precious, how wildly unfair, and how deeply beautiful life can be — all at once.

One day, I hope this season ends. I hope it fades into memory, just another chapter in our family’s story. But I also hope I never forget what it taught me — how to see time, how to feel it, how to hold it.

Because even in the season of cancer, life keeps blooming.

And sometimes, that’s the most miraculous part of all.