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 of it. Probably more fall clothing orders arriving for the kids.
When my kids return home from school, they ask to open it. Once I take a closer look, I tell them that this is the sculpture I’d told them would be coming. My daughter suggests an unboxing video, and so we do one in which I am opening the package and my kids are jumping around like popcorn. “Is that really your body?!” my daughter gasps. And then, “Is that before or after you got your surgery?” And then, “It’s a good way to remember!” all without taking much of a breath.
I put the bronze mini me on our living room’s fireplace mantel, between wedding pictures and pregnant belly pictures and in front of a preschool art project, and send photos to close friends who were in on the process. “Rodin-esque,” writes one. “Very powerful,” writes another.
The bust looks very different from distinct vantage points. Front on it is fierce (and my DD-cup breasts are there for it); sideways gets me closer to Degas’ famous Little Dancer; from an angle and behind you see an athletic glutes curve I am heartened to still possess. It takes me a few days to reflect upon how this very physical representation of my before-self makes me feel.
Though the surgery has forced me to slow down, much of my recovery period has been a just-get-through-the-day series of physical steps: measuring liquid from the drains attached to my body, taking antibiotics four times a day, attempting motion-restricted showers amidst waves of piercing pain, emailing the nurses to ask if extreme itching is normal, and then trying to be available for my kids. I have all but stopped deep reflection.
So when I finally sit in front of my replica and invite myself to think about the last 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 tells my son’s physical therapist, “That’s my mom’s body on the mantel!” I love that this statue, getting ready for a cancer-avoiding mastectomy, separates me from what my mom, grandma, and great aunt endured, and also that it is a symbol of art and culture and strength.
I am grateful to possess a keepsake that my daughter might inherit. I wonder what she will one day see in my statue, and how much of that will be informed by her future options to meaningfully reduce her risk of breast cancer and what more we may one day know about our genetics.
For my part, I will remain proud that this bust depicts a woman who made a very big, very bold decision. I can be impressed by her guts and beauty while also loving the strong new version of me—with stitches, scabbing, and arms that cannot reach above my head.
The truth is, I am not worried about what I still can’t do. I know I’ll get there. Or better yet, I’ll go somewhere new. The real me dances onward.
