treatswords

I always loved her boobs.

I once heard my dad whisper to her behind their bedroom door, “You have perfect breasts.”

Her breasts fed me when I was a baby. They were the breasts that at age thirteen I idealized their perfect bounce and jiggle as she would run around the house in her white bra (she never wore any other colored bra), her hair wrapped up in a towel and a pink tooth brush hanging from her mouth.

“One day my boobs will be as big as my moms. They have to be, it’s in our genes!” I told my friends on the school bus, my size A cups being held back by a training bra.

That was before her breasts were surgically cut and removed from her body, before the cancer left a tumor the size of a pebble in her breast tissue. Cancer wormed its way around inside her, deciding that her breasts would become its home, the one place it felt safe to change her life.

Breast cancer did nothing but take from my mother. It left her with wounds that looked like flesh colored zippers. It took her long brown hair; it took her eyelashes and her eyebrows. It took her ability to feel like a woman. Cancer took more than just her breasts. I watched as it stole a piece from her. I watched as it pulled a thread from her. I first noticed the missing thread the day she started losing her hair.

She had walked into my room her head covered by a black stocking cap which was pushing her brown bangs into her eyes. I could tell she had been crying, my mother was the type of person who couldn’t hide that she had cried that day, no matter how long ago it had been or how much make up she put on afterwards. She was pale, her normally pink plush lips were almost as white as her skin.

“I showered and clumps of my hair just came falling out. I could feel my hair sliding down my back. What can I do? The chemo is winning, what can I do?” She asked me. Her green eyes were rimmed with water and her hands were open, her palms facing the ceiling like she was waiting for the answer to fall into her hands.

I didn’t reply because she already knew the answer.

She wouldn’t take her cap off, but I didn’t want her to. I was relieved that I didn’t have to see them. The bald spots. Her hair always reminded me of when I was a kid. I would braid her hair down her back. I would sleep on her chest during thunderstorms and wake up tangled in her long hair. Her hair was home to me and I never thought my home would fade away, strand by strand.

But it was.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

The next day she went to her hair dresser to have her head shaved. She didn’t want me to go with.

“I need to do this alone. I didn’t even ask Gina to come. I just need to part with my hair on my own. But I love you so much KK.”

Gina was my mom’s sister. She had also been diagnosed with breast cancer five years earlier. Our family had a gene, a breast cancer gene. I always imagined this gene to look like a twisted up ladder with pink and green steps. I couldn’t help but stare at my own breasts sometimes and wonder where that gene was inside me and when it would decide it was time. Time to change my life the way it changed my mothers. She called me after her “hair appointment.” Her voice was cold. It was the same voice I used to hear from her as a kid when her and my dad had been fighting. It was her, “Go on up to your room, I will be there shortly,” voice. A calm yet concerned voice.

“Well the deed is done. I’m bald,” she said.

“How does it feel? To not have hair?”

“Well, I feel maybe the worst is over, do you think so?”

I paused. I didn’t know if losing her hair was the worst part. After all when it comes to cancer isn’t it all the worst? Isn’t surviving the only good part about cancer?

“Of course mom, the worst is over,” I told her.

And that night I convinced myself of that. I sat in my room and cried. I know it may seem silly to cry over someone else’s hair but I did. I mourned it. I mourned the twenty years I spent with it. I convinced myself that things would get better from there on out. That was until I met chemo.

I met with my mom in Duluth for one of her chemo treatments. I waited in the lobby for her and my grandma to arrive. I paged through pink breast cancer pamphlets and I hummed along with the little bald headed boy’s melody he was playing on the lobby piano. I had never noticed how many bald heads there were until my mom became one. Bald heads seemed to be everywhere now. Bald heads meant cancer. Every time I saw one I wanted to fall to my knees and mourn for their hair too. The history they had with it, the love they had for it. I felt I had to mourn for them because I felt selfish for having a full head of hair. I had asked my mom if she wanted me to shave my head, that way I could be bald too.

“ I will gladly do it. That way you’re not alone mom.”

“Oh god KK, I would never ask you to do such a ridiculous thing. Just because I lost my hair doesn’t mean you need to go on and lose yours too. You need to keep your hair. You being here is enough, I know I’m not alone.” She had replied.

My mom and grandma finally met me in the lobby and we were lead to a little room hidden by a curtain. The curtain had little blue cows on it. I wished my mom could be a cow. Being a smelly, fat farm animal would be better than being what she was now.

A cancer patient.

The doctor shoved tubes and needles under her skin and I watched as a clear medicine bag leaked drops of liquid insider her. I wanted to pull the needles from her arm. I wanted to drag the bag to the front desk and ask, “Is there any other way to do this?!”

I hated chemo.

It seemed like every time she went to a session it took something away from her.

First it was her hair.

Then it was her appetite.

She had started to look frail.

“I can’t even eat noodles and milk anymore KK. Everything tastes like metal. Chemo leaves this awful after taste in my mouth and it never seems to go away. I feel like I’m always sucking on a nickel or something.” She had told me once over the phone.

Noodles and milk had become a regular at my house since she couldn’t eat it anymore.

I ate it for her.

I wouldn’t let that piece if her slip away like her hair did. I did everything I could to keep pieces of my mother around.

Now I noticed that the chemo was taking her eye lashes. I hadn’t noticed until the sun casted light on her face. I could only spot three. Three little hairs clinging onto her eyelids for dear life. The rest had fallen and been brushed away like dying leaves in the fall. The entire session took about two hours.

The entire time she kept asking me, “KK, are you okay?”

It seemed ridiculous that the bald headed woman who was fighting cancer wanted to know if I was okay.

“Mom I am fine. Are you okay?” I would reply.

She would nod, tears spilling down her face. Not enough to ruin her make up or to wipe them away. Just enough to leave small wet smudges on her cheeks. Just enough to let me know she was hurting.

I was her only visitor at that treatment besides my grandma.

“Sometimes I just can’t see my friends. I am embarrassed. I don’t know why but I am. I just want you here today.” She told me when I asked where her friend Traci was who only lived a block from the hospital.

After her treatment my grandma had to help her stand up straight while they walked to her vehicle. The chemo made her delirious, like she was hammered off of cheap wine.

“I love you so so much,” she kept yelling to me as I walked to my car.

It was so hard to leave her.

Losing her hair and everything else was hard enough, but what if I lost her? Her as a whole? What if one day her veins, cells, heart, toes, fingers and nose were all just gone? Cancer was a war. I knew my mom was tough but her enemy was a stranger to me. I didn’t know what weapons it had; I didn’t know how many troops it had.

All I knew was that my mom had me and I wouldn’t let her loose.

After all her chemo treatments had been completed she decided to get a mastectomy. She knew it was what she had to do to win her fight. She had to part ways with her breasts.

Her and I stayed in a hotel together the night before her surgery. We lied in bed, flipping through magazines. I had accepted her bald head that was now sprouting little white hairs from it. I decided I would make it a part of me the way I had made her hair. All her lashes were gone and her eyebrows had a few hairs left. She would coat them with brown mascara whenever we left the house.

“I gotta work with what I got,” she always said.

“I’m scared KK. I’m not going to pretend I’m not. I’m very sad that I have to lose this part of me,” she said circling her boobs with her finger tip.

“I know and I am so sorry for that, but at least I get to keep the rest of you.”

She smiled a tired smile.

I know she knew this was true, but she had a right to be selfish about this. She had a right to mourn her breasts.

So I let her.

I only spoke when she spoke. I let her have the silence she needed to accept what was going to happen the next day.

“I do get to keep my nipples. How great! Those will be mine. Those will still be Tammie Treats nipples,” she said.

I think what was most important to her was that throughout this whole process she was never given anything. Things were just taken from her piece after piece, thread after thread. But this choice to keep her nipples was a choice she got to make. She got to decide that she was going to be able to keep something, a piece of herself before breast cancer.

We went to bed that night and after her surgery she never cried for her breasts the way I did. I cried the first time I saw the pink scars that seemed to grow thicker every time I saw them. I cried when one of her implants started leaking and she had to go through surgery again. I cried at the lopsided way they sat, bumpy and uneven. But she never cried. I think she didn’t mourn for them because they were still her.

Her nipples were still her.