Cancer gives you moments — and with those moments come conversations you never planned to have.

Some of them are beautiful. Some are heartbreaking. All of them change you.

Before cancer, I imagined the conversations I’d have with my daughter.

We’d talk about her favorite colors, the silly things she dreamed about, what she wanted to be when she grew up. Maybe one day we’d have those big life talks — about friendship, love, or how to be brave when life gets hard. But not now. Not this young.

Cancer doesn’t wait for the right time. It doesn’t care about childhood.

Now, we have conversations that no parent should ever have to have with their child.

We talk about hospital visits, about medicine that makes her tired and sick but helps her heal. We talk about why her hair is gone and why she can’t go to school or play like she used to.

We talk about how it’s okay to be scared. And sometimes, I tell her I’m scared too.

And then there are the questions that stop me cold — the ones that come out of nowhere and pierce straight through me.

“Mommy, why did I get cancer?”

“What happens if we didn’t catch my cancer?”

“Will I ever be able to run again?”

Some of these conversations I am thankful for.

Cancer, in its cruel way, has given us chances to talk about things that matter — courage, kindness, faith, hope. It’s made space for moments of honesty and tenderness that might have taken years to surface otherwise.

But often, I find myself having far too grown-up conversations with a little girl who should only be thinking about homework and when her next game is.

And I don’t know if she truly understands the weight of what she’s going through — or maybe she does, in that quiet, knowing way that children sometimes do.

Sometimes she says something so wise, so simple, that it leaves me breathless — like her spirit already understands things my heart is still learning to accept.

Cancer has taken so much. But it’s also given us moments of connection that run deeper than I ever thought possible — conversations that live somewhere between pain and grace.

And as much as I wish we never had to have them, I hold them close.

Because in those moments, between the fear and the love, I see her strength.

And I remember that even in the hardest places, there can still be meaning — and even beauty — in the words we never planned to speak.