Cancer Is Tie That Binds Kids : A group of Orange County children whose parents have the disease have formed a ‘friendship network,’ a place to call to talk about their fears, or just cry.

Robyn Wagner-Holtz says that this is a happy story, and certainly it is, but it is happiness muddled with pain, and with courage, and hope.

The hope, really, is what’s brought me here to this pristine Rancho Santa Margarita subdivision, a neighborhood that was initially shocked by the arrival of Robyn and her family two years ago from Boston. Robyn says maybe the neighbors thought she was a Hare Krishna. She was bald.

Chemotherapy can do that to a head.

Robyn’s hair has grown back now, and ho-hum, she looks rather like everybody else. You wouldn’t look twice at her in the supermarket aisle, although you would probably return her smile.

And now, too, the neighbors around here are into doing neighborly things, and everybody thinks everybody else is swell, and Robyn, 37, says life is about as normal as it can get, for a cancer patient that is.

She jokes that her 4-year-old daughter thinks that all mommies put one of their breasts in the drawer overnight.

Robyn’s son, though, is too grown-up for that. Jon Holtz-Wagner says that he needs to talk, really talk, about breast cancer and what it was doing to his family’s life, and specifically, to his own.

For that, Jon figures you need kids talking to kids. He didn’t have that in Boston, and for too long, he didn’t have it here.

“I don’t want other kids to go through what I did,” he says. And Jon’s not just talking about “bugging” his mom until, finally, she told him why she was crying all the time.

There were the friends who turned away because they thought that he’d give cancer to them, and the others who taunted him because his mother was “gross” for having lost a breast.

But Jon is a bright and earnest child, 11 years old going on 25.

So he typed up a modest funding proposal in February, addressing it to Dr. Dava Gerard, a San Clemente surgeon who heads the Orange County chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises funds for breast cancer research and awareness. Jon’s pitch, as tapped out on his home computer, said this:

“My idea is to start a ‘Kids Care Network’ where kids can call to talk to kids about the terror of having a parent with cancer, where they can discuss their fears or just cry and know their feelings are shared.”

And the foundation bought.

So did Disneyland, which is hosting the first “Komen Kids” meeting on May 18 at the Disneyland Hotel. (Any kid who has a parent or other close relative with cancer can come, and it’s free.) And so did the San Clemente Junior Women’s League, which wrote out a check.

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Most important, so have other kids, boys and girls who have formed a “friendship network” as an oasis from the routine cruelness that cancer brings.

The friendship hot line ((714) 589-3334) is on the desk in Jon’s room, next to the plastic aquarium where a tadpole resides right now. Call anytime, any day, and Jon will set you up with a kid pal who knows what you are going through.

Only puleeze don’t call this a “support group,” Jon says. This is not a grown-up deal.

To give you an idea, the kids themselves are interviewing the adult psychologists who will attend the monthly group meetings. Mere professional qualifications don’t cut it. These grown-ups have to be kids at heart. Leave the condescension, and the stuffiness, at home.

Because the formal structure is the least noteworthy about what’s really going on with Jon and his new friends.

Even when they’re not talking to each other--which they do a lot--there is an understanding that engulfs them, warming them when so much of the world seems cold.

Like one thing you don’t want, says 12-year-old Char Greene, whose mother, Corinne, has breast cancer, is a pat on the head and the meaningless platitude, “Everything will be fine.”

Char says she stopped asking questions about cancer because that was all she got. So she’d cry herself to sleep, wondering what her mother’s funeral would be like, the flowers, who would be there, the music, and then she’d think about life after Mom. Would her father raise her, or would she live with her grandparents?

Her mother, who is 39, listens to her daughter’s words with a slight smile, and tears welling in her eyes.

“I really wanted to know, ‘Why is Mommy sick?’ ” Char says.

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To find out, Char researched on her own, choosing breast cancer as a topic for a report last semester at school. She even interviewed her mother on video, and out of a possible 100 points, her teacher awarded her 115.

Char is funny, and spunky, and quick. I mention that she seems to be doing so well.

“It’s all right here,” she says then, grabbing at her throat. Her face crumples, and tears burst from her eyes.

“It’s depressing. It’s scary. I just want it to go away,” she says.

They all do, of course.

When 10-year-old Brian Rothring talks of his mother, too ill to be here today, he kneads his hands together, anxiety bordering on terror telegraphed in his eyes. He is sick of cancer, he says.

“My brother and I think, ‘Why does it have to happen to us? Why do we have to put up with it?’ ” he says. Their mother, whose breast cancer has spread to her bones and brain, has looked upon her illness as a “family secret,” Brian says.

But he wants to talk about it now.

“Once you know about it, you’ll never forget it,” he says. “It’s very scary to learn what it is. It’s scary. I’m really scared about what it is.”

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Jane Hill, a 42-year old comedian who has added breast cancer humor to her routine (“Hey, it cuts the foreplay in half”), says that some parents don’t know how to talk about cancer to their kids. It’s worse than sex.

Jane initially told her daughter, Kelly, two years ago that she had a “lump in her breast.” Which meant nothing to a 10-year-old child.

“I remember we were taking her home from the hospital and I wished I could have been the one in her place,” Kelly says. “She was crying the whole time.”

But Robyn is right. This is a happy story. “We all get our strength from our kids,” she says.

And I saw how that works.