About three months after my hotel scanning session and three and a half weeks after my mastectomy, a package arrives. I don’t think much about it. Probably more orders are coming for autumn clothes for children.
When my kids return home from school they ask to open it. Once I take a closer look, I tell them that it is the same idol I told them would come. My daughter suggests an unboxing video, and so we do one in which I’m opening the package and my kids are jumping around like popcorn. “Is that really your body?” My daughter gasps. And then, “Is this before or after your surgery?” And then, “That’s a good way to remember!” All without much breathing.
I placed the bronze Mini Me on our living room fireplace mantle, among wedding photos and pregnant belly photos and in front of a preschool art project, and sent photos to close friends who were involved in the process. “Rodin-esque,” writes one. “Very powerful,” writes another.
The bust looks very different from different vantage points. The front part of this one is fierce (and my DD-cup breasts exist for that); Sideways takes me closer to Degas’s famous Little Dancer; From an angle and an athletic glutes curve behind you, I’m still excited to be near her. It took me a few days to consider how this physical representation of my former-self made me feel.
Although surgery has forced me to slow down, most of my recovery period has been a day-long series of physical steps: measuring fluids from drains attached to my body, taking antibiotics four times a day, Trying to navigate motion-restricted showers between waves of stinging pain, emailing nurses to ask if extreme itching is normal, and then trying to be available for your kids. I have almost stopped thinking deeply.
So when I finally sit in front of my replica and invite myself to think about the past few weeks, I realize that not once have I regretted this surgery. And not once have I been embarrassed by this statue, not even when my daughter said to my son’s physiotherapist, “That’s my mother’s body!” I love that this statue, of a cancer survivor getting ready for a mastectomy, separates me from what my mother, grandmother, and great aunt endured, and also that it’s a symbol of art and culture and strength. Is a symbol.
I’m grateful that I have a keepsake that my daughter can inherit. I wonder what she will one day see in my bust, and how much of that will be informed by her future choices to meaningfully reduce her breast cancer risk and what more we might one day learn about her genetics. Are.
For my part, I will be proud that this statue represents a woman who made a very big, very bold decision. I can be inspired by her courage and beauty, while also loving the stronger new version of myself – with stitches, scabies, and arms that can’t reach above my head.
The truth is, I’m not worried about what I still can’t do. I know I will get there. Or even better, I’ll go somewhere new. The real me dances forward.
