{"id":6276,"date":"2011-03-09T16:04:12","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T23:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/?p=6276"},"modified":"2026-01-30T09:48:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T17:48:33","slug":"hell-in-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2011\/03\/09\/hell-in-my-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Hell In My Head"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was playing with Bean today, and doing Mommy chores; Bean came up to me and said, &#8220;I love you. You&#8217;re my buddy.&#8221; And then she leaned against me in a hug. Most days, that makes me light with joy and melts my heart. Today, two days prior to my surgery (which I&#8217;m told will have 90% chance of revealing no cancer), it melts my heart in a different way. I was awash in the feeling that I had <strong>NO business<\/strong> having a child at the age of 44. What the hell was I thinking? It&#8217;s the age at which many serious medical issues arise and health begins its steady decline. When she is 20 I&#8217;ll be 64, assuming I make it to that age. And I don&#8217;t assume.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps it was irresponsible and selfish of me. Stupid me. <\/p>\n<p>(Okay, time to stop indulging in 100% unhelpful self-pity and gratuitous guilt, which is equally selfish. But still.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was playing with Bean today, and doing Mommy chores; Bean came up to me and said, &#8220;I love you. You&#8217;re my buddy.&#8221; And then she leaned against me in a hug. Most days, that makes me light with joy and melts my heart. Today, two days prior to my surgery (which I&#8217;m told will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motherhood","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6276"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13540,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6276\/revisions\/13540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}