There is a scene in Notting Hill (one of my favorite romantic comedies) where Hugh Grant’s William Thacker tells Julia Roberts’ Anna Scott that he’s asking for a normal amount of perspective when the press have discovered her at his home. Her response is that she’s been dealing with it for 10 years. She tells him pointedly, “Our perspectives are very different.”

We’ve all heard the sayings about looking at things from someone else’s point a view, walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. But no one can really do that, can they? We only have our own perspective on anything. We can empathize…sympathize…any other -ize. But our perspectives are ours alone.

(So now comes the hard part of the story for the week.)

My husband Dennis lived the majority of his adult life afraid of cancer. Anytime there was something wrong with him, he was convinced it was cancer. When he had kidney stones, he thought it was bladder cancer. Blocked salivary gland? Mouth cancer. Nodules on his lungs? (He was a life-long asthmatic.) Lung cancer. And anytime we were waiting for test results, he would want me to pick them up from wherever they were. He didn’t want to wait on the doctor to call. Because he was convinced he had cancer.

I, on the other hand, would respond to his worries with, “You don’t have cancer.” And he would ask me what if he did. My response was always the same: “We’ll worry about it when we have to worry about it.” We all have an expiration date, but I refused to spend my life worrying about mine.

Then one day almost four years ago, he did have cancer, and suddenly my perspective was different. Now we had to worry about it. Suddenly the “what if” became “what now.”

Needless to say, Dennis and I approached our lives during his treatment very differently. He continued to be worried about the next scan. I continued to say we would worry when we had to worry. At least that’s what I said out loud. On the inside, I was terrified. I looked up the survival rates of pancreatic cancer…more than once. I tried to find anything that could give me hope. I prayed a lot.

Dennis’s oncologist tried to refocus him at every appointment. Dennis would ask him, what about this or that. He would always respond the same way. Focus on staying strong. Focus on your family. Let me worry about the treatment.

Dennis would express concern about all of the things he didn’t want to miss, especially in Corinne’s future. The doctor would tell him not to worry about what he might miss later because all he was doing was missing the now as well. And he reminded Dennis more than once that we all have an expiration date. Most of us just don’t have a clear timeline on when that might be. Our minister would tell him the same thing.

I used to get angry with Dennis when he was so over-protective of Corinne that he didn’t want her to go out with her friends like I did at her age. He would say that he didn’t want to hear any sad stories if something happened. He worried…a lot.

I worry more now. I still let Corinne go out. She shouldn’t be afraid to experience life. But I caution her more than I used to. I check in on her more. I feel more over-protective on the inside while trying to not be over-protective on the outside.

I’m a single mom now, and the world can be a scary place, so I have to teach my kid how not to be afraid to live life to the fullest, to enjoy every moment. And sometimes I have to remind myself.

My perspective is different.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for The Promise of Us by Jamie Beck

322 pages
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Publication Date: April 9, 2019
Author giveaway—thank you to Jamie Beck 🥰

Publisher’s Description

They couldn’t be more different…or more completely perfect for each other.

Claire McKenna knows about loss. The bullet wound that ended her promising professional tennis career drove her to make a quiet life for herself working with fabric samples, chatting with her book group, and spending time with her parents in her sleepy coastal Connecticut hometown. Then there was the boyfriend who dumped her to pursue her adventurous childhood friend. Now, Claire’s business has hit a financial snag, but she’s up to the challenge. After all, she can survive anything. At least she thinks so…until her teen crush, Logan, returns to town with his sister, Claire’s traitorous friend.

Photographer Logan Prescott is more playboy than homebody. But his sister’s illness teaches him that there’s more to life than chasing the next thrill. Bent on helping her win Claire’s forgiveness, he turns his charm on Claire and offers her big bucks to renovate his multimillion-dollar New York City condo.

After years of playing it safe, Claire must now take some risks. The payoff could be huge, but if it all falls apart, can her heart recover from another loss?

************

Main Characters:

• Claire McKenna – 30-year-old interior designer, owns a small remodeling business with Steffi Lockwood. As a teenager, Claire played tennis until she was injured in a shooting at a mall. Has always felt like people in small-town Sanctuary Sound pitied her for both her injury and the way her best friend started a relationship with Claire’s ex.
• Logan Prescott – older brother to Peyton, lives off a trust fund in New York City and works as a photographer, searching for the next big humanitarian story that could win a Pulitzer and also make a difference in the world
• Peyton Prescott – 30-year-old writer, recently diagnosed with and being treated for breast cancer, had a falling out with Claire when she started dating Claire’s ex-boyfriend.
• Steffi Lockwood – 30-year-old contractor who returned to Sanctuary Sound and started a remodeling business with Claire.

The second book in Jamie Beck’s Sanctuary Sound series gives voice to the idea that we have to push our own boundaries. We have to get out of our own way sometimes. And I love that she uses Claire to do it.

Let me start with the reason that I knocked this one down a star from the first book in the series. Logan is brutally pretentious at times. He lives off a trust fund, he grew up with money. I get it. But I just felt like sometimes he crossed Claire’s boundaries versus just pushing them, believing that he knew what was best for her. We do see his sensitive side when he gets Claire out of her comfort zone, but there were times in the book that he was just unlikeable. I would have preferred him to be more down-to-earth. Claire deserves that.

That’s literally the only thing I didn’t care for.

Logan definitely has an ulterior motive when he first comes to town. He knows that his sister wants nothing more than to have Claire’s forgiveness, and he kind of takes advantage of the fact that Claire had a crush on him in high school. What he discovers along the way is that Claire has become afraid to venture out into the world because of the shooting that stole her future as a tennis player. She sees danger around every corner, in any place outside of their small hometown. He makes it his personal mission to help her rediscover the adventurous person she was as a teenager.

Claire knows that Logan is trying to manipulate her into forgiving Peyton. At the same time, he is her teenage crush, and she is completely taken in by him…against her better judgment. But he seems to understand her, and we can see his empathetic side, especially when he talks about the photos he captures of the human condition. Claire sees it too, and she has a hard time balancing her feelings for the man that he is despite being the brother of the friend who betrayed her.

Mixed in with all of this is the sub-plot of a memoir Logan and Peyton are creating to help other women fighting similar battles, with the goal of donating proceeds to cancer research. Logan shoots photographs along Peyton’s treatment journey, and Peyton writes the text. I’m hoping that we see the result in the third book of the series, which is Peyton’s story.

Just like in the first book, our heroine is a very flawed human being. She walks with a limp and a cane. She eats her emotions on a daily basis. Claire doesn’t believe that she deserves someone like Logan. She is the book version of many of us. And Logan is the protector, the rescuer. He is the perfect human specimen, but he is also a serial womanizer who has never been able to commit…until now. (This is a romance after all.)

This is another sweet story by Jamie Beck…one that touches on facing our fears and living in the moment and not letting the best opportunities go by because we’re afraid of what may or may not happen.

On to book three….

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