BREAST CANCER/PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS: WHAT DO YOUR ADULT CHILDREN FEEL?
Although both sons and daughters will be strongly impacted by their mothers’ struggle with breast cancer, adolescent and young adult daughters may be most painfully affected. Unlike their brothers, they must carry the added burden of wondering if they, too, will become victims of this disease in the future. Most of them know that their statistical likelihood is greater than that of their girlfriends whose mothers are disease-free. Remember that their statistical risk is increased only a little. Your diagnosis absolutely does not sentence them to a future cancer. Each young woman has to work through these fears—acknowledging, confronting, and discussing these issues in her own way and on her own terms.
These issues become particularly acute at times of major life changes and transitions, such as finishing high school, beginning a new job, and/or going off to college. Although these transition periods are also very stressful for young men as well, for a variety of reasons (some societal, some cultural, some individual), young women who are daughters of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer may have an especially difficult time with these life passages.
During the years between eighteen and twenty-two our daughters typically strike out on their own, move away from home, and become independent adults, developing their own identities and their own lifestyles. However, our daughters may feel more than the usual level of conflict during this normal process because they are coping simultaneously with unusual demands on their time, attention, and energy from their moms who are ill back home, usually in a different physical location and often at a considerable distance. They feel conflicted, torn between wanting to be available (both physically and emotionally) and wanting to separate and live their own, individual lives.
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