MUM PREPARES KIDS FOR TOUGH ROAD AHEAD

LEARNING YOU HAVE METASTATIC CANCER IS HARD. IT MEANS, IN MOST CASES, IT IS TERMINAL. WHEN YOU’RE STILL A YOUNG MUM, THE TRAGEDY IS COMPOUNDED BY THE REALITY OF PREPARING YOUR CHILDREN FOR THE PATH AHEAD. ONE SUCH MUM HAS WRITTEN A CHILDREN’S BOOK TO ADDR

Katrina Lau Hammond faced an unimaginable task — how to tell her children about her metastatic terminal breast cancer.

She searched for books that could help her children, aged seven and five, understand but found nothing appropriate — so she has written her own.

The Village tells a cancer story from the perspective of a five-year-old boy named Charlie.

Now 39, Ms Lau Hammond has been living with breast cancer for the past five years.

“When I was first diagnosed my kids were really young, my son was three and my daughter was a baby aged eight months,” she said.

“My husband and I wanted to tell our son, so we were looking for resources to support us in that to tell him about cancer but what we found didn’t fit out needs.

“Some glazed over it and would not mention the word cancer. My (then) publishers wanted the characters to be animals and I didn’t want that, I wanted real life people so when the child read it they could see it happens to the families, not just them.

“It’s a story told from the viewpoint of a child and his mum has cancer and how it affects his life and he sees over time the village gathers around to support the family.”

There is no glossing over the concept of cancer, but the book gently reassures the child reader with descriptions of cancer treatments and therapies and can be applied across many different types of cancers, not just breast cancer.

“We use the correct terminology, those words aren’t scary to a child,” Ms Lau Hammond (pictured with daughter Mackenzie) said.

“If you tell a child what chemotherapy means or what cancer means, they accept that, there is not the fear behind it we has adults have based on our life experience.

“I use words like oncologists, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, cancer throughout the book but still at a level children can understand.

“Nobody ever wants to have that conversation with their kids, to tell them that they have a life-threatening illness.

“But kids are intelligent, perceptive, inquisitive human beings. They’ll pick up on your little cues and the change in mood, even if you are trying not to tell them.

“I believe that if you continue to hide things from them, they create their own little stories in their head, and that can often be far scarier than the reality.”

The essential message she hopes to convey to her children — and others — is that someone will always be there to care.

“I hope young families don’t feel alone, they need support,” Ms Lau Hammond said.

“Everyone knows the saying it takes a village to raise a child, whether or not you have cancer, the village is important. So I run that theme through the book so that the child knows they are not alone, there will always be someone there to look after them — whether it is mum or dad or grandparents or a carer, or preschool or school, there is always someone there to look out for them.”

The Village will be released in August and all net proceeds will go to the Cure Cancer charity.