A strange thing happens when I'm on the phone with my mom. My sister calls her at the same time. The reverse is also true. But it's not just a mother-daughter thing. Sometimes, my dad even noses in on the tele-connection we share. My family is as close-knit as they come, so it's no surprise that we find ourselves picking up the phone to talk to one another at the same times and on the same days.

But there was a year in our lives when parts of that familial connection were frayed, splintered by an unwelcome caller who thought nothing of taking my mother's breast, a few of her lymph nodes, all of her hair and much of her identity as a physically strong and mentally prepared 49-year-old woman.

I can remember a few times growing up when my mother came to retrieve me from grade school because a close family member was ill. Those were always frightening times, full of questions and concerns about what the future held, but my mother didn't shy in the face of crisis. She broke news to us with a steady gaze and a certain manner, and we knew whatever else happened, she was there to make sense.

Even when my father suffered a heart attack just five years earlier at age 44, she found a way to hold together the stitches of her children's existence, one that by necessity and by design centered around this man and this woman, and we fed off that strength as we helped him return home healthier.

But in the fall of 1991, sitting in the backseat of my parents' car in the parking lot of Hinton James dorm -- where I was a freshman at UNC -- that woman had taken a leave of absence. In her place, a figure sitting directly in front of me could not look at me as she broke the news: There was a lump, it was malignant, she would have a mastectomy, then chemotherapy and then ... no one knew. There was no face to the message she delivered because its ending was foggy and incomplete, marked by a lack of details, a terrible uncertainty, a fear for herself and for the many people she impacted as a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend, a woman.

I learned several years ago how my mother coped with the feeling that cancer gave her, the feeling that she wasn't who everyone expected her to be anymore. She had, unwittingly, stumbled onto a support team that didn't know her before her illness, people she saw at treatments, one that was led by her extraordinary nurse, Julia, with whom she still keeps in contact ... sixteen years since her last chemo treatment.

It's like that with cancer for many people. Recently, I discovered a woman who goes by the blog handle WhyMommy. Last summer, shortly after her second child was born, she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and deadly form of breast cancer that doesn't usually present with a lump and is often misdiagnosed as mastitis.

As WhyMommy says on her site, there are more than 100,000 women in the U.S. with this type of cancer; only half will survive five years. WhyMommy has blogged about her experience from the day she first discovered something funny about her breast, and in response, a virtual support team -- hundreds of Julias -- has cropped up, each one joining her fight through Team WhyMommy and many leaving encouraging messages on her site.

Some moms you've read here and some other folks associated with The News & Observer will be lacing up to participate in the Race for the Cure this Saturday. If you're not walking or running this weekend, you can still help by donating to the team.

You can also do something completely free. You can join Team WhyMommy and steal this post (she wants you to) about IBC and either publish it on a blog you own or send it to your friends (male AND female). And if you want to read about a woman with an extraordinary gift to put emotions -- love and loneliness, fear and joy -- into words, stop by her site.

Stay a while. Feel inspired.

Beth appears every Tuesday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Beth at Mother Bunker.