This one hurt a little.

This morning the memory from one year ago that popped up on my Facebook feed showed L in her freshman homecoming dress. One year ago my girl went to her first homecoming dance with her friends and danced until her feet hurt and she had to carry her shoes home. We laughed at how dirty the bottoms of her feet were from dancing barefoot in the school gym as she twirled around in the kitchen at 11 p.m.

Homecoming had snuck up on us and we had gone on a mad hunt for a dress that involved scouring our town and the next one over for a full day. We had miraculously found the perfect dress at the last hail Mary shop we visited. It was a fun adventure story and she looked beautiful.

The lump in her cheek was still small then. Hardly noticeable. We had asked the dentist two weeks prior at her orthodontics checkup what he thought it was. He wasn’t sure but guessed it might be a salivary gland. We were still waiting to see if it would resolve on its own.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

This year we are celebrating a different kind of homecoming. She is in the hospital on day 5 of round 13 of chemo. It’s the final day of the penultimate chemo cycle, so once the Mesna (the drug that runs for nine hours with each chemo infusion to protect her bladder) finishes running she can come home.

She’s impatient and hates the hospital, even when things are running smoothly, so coming home is a celebration every time. Anyone who has been in the hospital for any period of time knows that feeling when you finally walk out the doors and back into the fresh air. When you can get in the car and drive away. When you can lay on the floor in your own house and pet your dog and open the drawers where you keep your clothes and walk around without the constant shadow of an IV pole.

To be honest, I haven’t spent too much time feeling crushed by the “should have been”s. Two weeks ago when the littles started back to school and L didn’t, I felt a twinge of sadness that she should have been starting her sophomore year but wasn’t. There won’t ever be a standard “first day of school” photo for this year. It felt strange and wrong to post the other two on their first day photos without any mention of L.

But as a general rule I don’t see much point in agonizing over the way we imagine things “should” be. This is the situation. And we have a lot to be thankful for because we’ve seen worse. She’s on a chemo regimen that is working and that isn’t making her feel miserable. She’s well enough to be plugging away at some online classes, and we can see the day when she’ll be able to return to school on the horizon. Most importantly, that lump in her cheek is gone. That’s what matters.

I don’t know why this is the journey she/we are on and why she doesn’t get to have the “normal” high school experience that we were expecting. But here we are.

And the truth is, both kinds of homecomings are a celebration and a milestone in their own way. So we’ll celebrate the ones we get. What else is there to do but that.