D R A M A++Q U E E N

What's the sleaziest thing you've ever done? Come clean in Drama Queen for a Day
(04/14/98)

T A B L E++T A L K

Is your workplace "family friendly"? Discuss corporate policies and attitudes on everything from maternity leave to child care in Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Unspeakable losses
By Dayna Macy
Why are Americans so afraid to talk about their lost pregnancies?
(04/14/98)

Can you hold? I've got sobbing on Line 2
By Susan McCarthy
Working at home means trying to sound professional on the phone while your kids yell, "You big sucky poophead!" in the background
(04/14/98)

Boys without men
By Celeste Fremon
When a middle-class mom needs fatherly advice for her son, she turns to a gang member named Crazy Ace
(04/13/98)

Peep show
By Kate Moses
A passion for Peeps led to my loss of innocence
(04/10/98)

Not waiting to inhale
By Dawn MacKeen
Joycelyn Elders on why teens are going up in smoke
(04/09/98)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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SECOND THOUGHTS: SMALL MERCIES | PAGE 2 OF 2

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I love having my breasts held and admired, cupped and adored. Such a tender pleasure to lay one's cheek on breasts, these strange and wonderful things. Twenty years ago, my infant son pulled at my breasts with a pressure I've never forgotten, something otherwise unknown, and with each pull of his mouth the hormones through my bloodstream, clamping down on my uterus and filling me with dreamy pleasure, the milky drug signaling maternal power -- a great power, a great strength.

A few weeks ago, a woman was told to leave a swimming pool near here when she breast-fed her baby by the wading pool. In protest, a dozen lactating women came with their babies and nursed together, little trickles of their sweet milk dribbling into the water.

The admitting clerk is surprised and a bit upset when I refuse to sign the forms for anesthesia. I want to stay awake. It's a small surgery, only the excision of a lump near the surface. And I'm a nurse. I've stood around these tables in surgical scrubs; I know the sounds and smells and vocabulary. And I know what can go wrong and how quickly a sleeping body becomes body parts. And I know that when my mother went to sleep for the the same reason, she woke up without her breast.

When I say my mother died of breast cancer, it sounds as though she died from having breasts. Sometimes I think of it that way, I think her breasts killed her. I think this isn't fair to breasts. The truth is that my mother died from cancer, and the first part of her to die was her breasts. She went in for a biopsy on Halloween several years ago, and was dead in less than two years, minus both breasts and several other parts. She died young, as deaths go, and in the nuance of oncology, my sister and I are "first-degree risks."

I know some women with a history like mine will rush to take tamoxifen, despite its side-effects. Some will have their breasts cut off before their breasts can betray them. They submit to the knife and say farewell to the unseen tangle of flesh inside, and the surgeons pop in substitutes and sew them up. This is "reconstruction," which always makes me think of Scarlett and Tara and the war -- first the defilement, the fire and the loss, then the cleaning up and something new.

Soon other women enter the cool operating room, each masked and gowned, each with hair bound up in paper hats like women wrapping candy on assembly lines. There are only women here today. The surgeon is a blowsy blond, efficient and a bit tipsy at once. She breezes up to me and pads her sturdy fingers along the edge of my rib cage, seeking the spidery lump that climbs the lower ridge of my right breast, then marks the spot with a purple felt pen labeled SKIN. All I can see of her face are blue eyes, outlined in black pencil.

"I'd like to say a prayer now, if that's all right," she whispers through the mask, her golden hair peeking in curls from under the hat.

"OK," I answer.

Her eyes immediately close. "Lord, thank you for letting me meet this woman, and please be with us today during this surgery. Help her to be calm and to place herself in your hands. Help me to do the best job I can. We hand ourselves over to your care, Lord, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen."

She opens her eyes and looks at me expectantly. I am clutched by the urge to say amen in response, but bite my lip.

"All right, then," she says. "All right, then. Let's get started."

The nurse gently washes, circling my breast with a cool wet swab, dark brown and syrupy. I have second thoughts now but say nothing, as the table tilts and more drapes appear and bit by bit I disappear under green towels and blue paper and can see nothing, even in the light fixture above.

This story isn't about cancer -- it's about not having it. It isn't about losing a breast, but about having them, these swollen hillocks of life and lust, infinitely variable, malleable, universal, mammalian breasts that we love, that will, like everything else, die in time.

The lump was benign. I stroke my breasts with absent-minded care every few weeks, and go about my days.
SALON | April 16, 1998