Catherine Gigante-Brown

I try. I really do. But whenever I attempt to embrace my husband Peter’s Cuban culture, I always screw up.

I thought cancer was behind me. Until I had a weird pain near my left ovary which lasted for several days. It felt a lot like ovulation...Only, at 56, that train had left the station a long time ago.

"Bring over a meal—and leave. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, from soup to nuts. And coffee. Plenty of coffee."

Makeup and I have always had a love/hate relationship: I love it; it hates me.

After I got over the initial devastation, I pulled myself up by my big-girl panties and got on with it. Chemo was no picnic—but it was do-able.

I realized my father was from a generation that never said those three little words. He was saying he loved me without them. But I didn't realize it then.

If the odds of getting cancer are like Powerball, why couldn't I be a scratch-off millionaire?

Even when I explained to my son that he came from a long line of short people, it didn’t help. David still felt bad about being small. How could a five-year-old possibly get this type of size-shaming message? From other people, mostly insensitive adults. They gave him the idea that bigger was somehow better.

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

My husband and I agreed: raising a child with an independent spirit who made decisions for himself was a good thing.