Emmy just turned two in July, and her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. She amazes me every day. Her pronunciation isn’t always clear; she will be demanding mucus in the car and I’ll say “What are you saying? Mucus?” “A song, a song!” she’ll demand instead. She means music!

My vocabulary? Amazingly, at 40, my vocabulary is expanding as well. What is “RT”? I just searched Twitter’s help section to see what the heck RT means. Re-tweet was the answer, and it turns out there’s a right way to RT and a wrong way.

What about BRCA? BRCA is breast cancer, as in breast cancer gene testing. It’s been about three weeks since I found out my mom went to have a gene test. We’ve always wondered if we have the BRCA gene mutation; Mom was first diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 40, and I was 27 when I was diagnosed.

If we find out Mom does have the mutation, what then? Most likely my sisters and I have the mutation as well. One of the mutations will make us more at risk for developing ovarian cancer along with breast cancer. Whoo-hoo! A double whammy! We’ll have some important decisions to make.

My biggest worry is about my daughters. Have I passed the mutation on to them? Now there’s some motherly guilt that will be pretty hard to recover from.

But then again, maybe I won’t need to feel guilty. Maybe my mom and I both having breast cancer at a young age is just a coincidence. A strange and unnerving coincidence, but perhaps one more bearable than having the BRCA gene mutation.

And so we wait….

Have you heard about “The Circle of Fear”? This circle comes from a story about The Eagles. When they are preparing a new song for a concert, they sit in a circle with acoustic guitars and unamplified voices to rehearse. There is no place to hide and errors are obvious. This is what adds “fear” to their circle; the fear of having their mistakes exposed. This exercise, however, is exactly why The Eagles have such wonderful concerts; their harmonies and musicality shine through in their performances due to “The Circle of Fear.”

Back in May, I was extremely fearful. I was terrified, in fact. My sister was getting married at the end of the month, and she wanted us to sing at her wedding. By us, I mean my mom, my two sisters, and me.

I have stage fright. I try to get over it, but it seems like I sing best in a choir, where my voice is masked and covered by other singers. Ed and I sing duets at church as well, and the last time we sang, we both had colds and our voices just didn’t cooperate.

Our mom has a beautiful voice, and she has sung in public for years. She sang at weddings, for funerals, in choirs and even in the chorus of an opera. So when we sing together with our mom, she gives us courage. She leads us, and we always sound good with her as our leader.

Just a few weeks before the wedding, however, Mom decided she was just not strong enough to attend the wedding. She is battling breast cancer, and her recovery has been steady but difficult. Many tears were shed over her decision; mostly because we didn’t want our mom to miss this special day; but in the end we also want Mom’s healing to continue. We agreed that although it was a painful decision, it was for the best.

I don’t brag often enough about my sisters. I’m extremely proud of both of them. Heather, the sister who was getting married, is an art professor, and her art appears in galleries all over the country. My other sister, Meredith, is a music professor, and she composes choir and instrumental pieces which have been performed all over the country as well.

The piece we were going to sing was arranged by Meredith for four voices. She scrambled to make changes so the three of us could sing it without it sounding too disjointed.

The day of the wedding rehearsal came. The first time through the piece at the church sounded, well, if not horrible, not good. We met back at the hotel for our own “Circle of Fear.”

We focused on the notes; the harmony; the music. We made it all come together. But the fear wasn’t there; we weren’t afraid to sing wrong notes in front of each other, or to bungle the rhythms, or make a bad entrance. We worked out the bugs and managed to sing quite well for Heather’s wedding. We made a DVD of the wedding for Mom, who cried when she saw us singing.

With my sisters by my side, I don’t need to have any fear. They support me through bad times and good times. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Heather buzzed her hair in support of my baldness, and Meredith kept me from knowing how scared she really was inside. They have rejoiced with me when I announced my pregnancies, and have been the best aunts imaginable to my two little girls.

When I’m with my sisters, when I’m with my entire family, the circle of fear doesn’t exist. We don’t always get along; we have had huge hair pulling, drag out fights. But there’s no fear. We always hug, say we’re sorry, and our circle, the circle of family, strengthens us and makes life a little less scary.