Breaking Up With My Breasts

Dear Breasts,

It’s been almost two years since I saw you. My last memory of us is you hidden underneath a checkered teal hospital gown that flapped against my naked bottom. I couldn’t look at you. I pictured the doctors cutting you off and resting you on a silver platter next to the operating table. Two jello molds, each with a cherry on the top. The whole thing felt surreal. 

What would my chest look like without you? Would I be left lying supine, exposed and vulnerable on the table? What would the doctors think of you? Would they comment? 

“Oh, her nipples are very large,” I imagined one saying.

My plastic surgeon would reply, “I told her they weren’t worth saving.”

I had elected not to undergo nipple sparing on her aesthetic advice, but would be later getting nipple tattoos.

Only a handful of people had seen my breasts in my entire life. Now they were on display as if placed in the Macy’s holiday window. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was entitled to cop a feel. The personal was no longer intimate. I became desensitized to the routine. Walk into a doctor’s office. Take off my shirt. Doctor feels up breasts. Repeat. 

My body was not my own.

I only have disconnected images of the day I lost you. A waiting room, the air heavy with anxiety, forced jokes followed by fake chuckles, the only respite from the silence of the ticking clock. My mom’s nervous smile, my dad holding back tears, my husband stoic, concerned, taking care of everyone else on this horrible day. 

A long glass indoor bridge connected the waiting room to the OR. Natural sunlight streamed through. I tried to hide my face. It felt too cruel for the sun to be shining today. A soft, delicate hand reached for mine with well-manicured fingernails, short, no polish. A diamond on her ring finger sparkled in the light. 

I guess Dr.P. is married, I thought. She likely goes home at the end of the day happy yet exhausted, leaving her patients behind and feeling good about the lives she’s saved. All in a day’s work.

Her lot in life stood in stark contrast to mine. I should have been standing there in her white sneakers, instead of slowly padding through the hallways with my bare feet hidden in ugly mustard, non-slip socks. I wasn’t an invalid. I was thirty-three years old for fucks sake.

I thought I would be happy to be almost two years post-surgery, waving good-bye to that horrific chapter of my life as I rode off into the sunset. Instead, I’m conflicted. A jumbled mess of unprocessed feelings. I miss our life together before cancer, when it was just you and me. Or rather, when I was just me. And yet I hated you, resented you, spent so much time of my time trying to control you, punish you. My anger is and always was toxic. Two years after losing you, I can finally say it’s time to let go of that anger.

Our relationship had always been complicated. When you came into my life, I wasn’t ready for you. I resented you because of the innocence you swindled from me. I was only nine years old. Too young for such a complicated relationship. You turned me into a woman before I was ready. You made men see me as a sexual object when I was still a child. 

There was that time in middle school when I thought Brandon Goldstein liked me. But he was only using me to get to you. When I exited the room, I overheard whispers that made my synapses feel like they were going to explode. I locked myself in the nearest bathroom to release the tears that came streaming down my face.

“She has the biggest tits, man.”

“I know. I was like lost in them. Too bad she’s not thinner. She’d be smoking hot.”

The words penetrated my flesh. I nervously fingered the straps of my Victoria’s Secret hot pink bra. The underwire chafed against my chest as if I were wearing a boned corset. I couldn’t breath.

I was tired of being held captive to you. Something needed to be done.

I deprived myself of all food and exercised excessively until you deflated to match my self-esteem. My chest became hollow, concave. My mom told me I was beginning to have the appearance of a stray greyhound. As I scoured cupboards and trash cans for scraps of food, I yearned to return to a happier me. It was then that I realized I couldn’t rid myself of you without disappearing in the process. 

Our relationship was toxic. I needed you. But I hated you. 

You represented everything I despised about myself: gluttony, weakness, sensuality, the many slights of womanhood. I bound you close to my chest with sports bras. I squeezed you into a size four or six when I was really an eight. I hid you behind Peter Pan collars, dressing like the petite girl I wanted to be. The girl you deprived me of a chance to be. 

I am not the type to let go of a good grudge. It feels silly, in hindsight, that I spent so much of my life trying to hide you. Now I know we would only have a short time together. If I’m lucky enough to survive the (other) “c-word,” I will have spent more of my life without you than with you. 

But once I had you forcibly confined, we reached a stalemate until I got pregnant. Pregnancy was your declaration once and for all that you were in control. It was as if you were shouting, “You are a woman. What did you expect?”  

You inflated until you made it difficult for me to find a comfortable position to sleep. You became tender, swollen, making it hard for me to forget about you, even for a second. I was unable to shimmy into the blazers I needed to wear in order to maintain the guise of professionalism at work. You came bobbing out of my neckline, two water balloons dropped into a pool, distracting colleagues and contemporaries alike. Once again, you ensured I was objectified by the male gaze, that I knew my place.

But an amazing thing happened. You finally proved your worth. When my son was born, you provided him with the nourishment that would get him through his first six months of life. Initially, I believed it was impossible for my son to learn to latch onto the bowling balls hanging from my chest. But he did. And you filled him with milky goodness, providing him with nourishment that allowed him to thrive. Thank you for making me the best cow on the dairy farm.

Even then, it wasn’t all roses and rainbows. I was held hostage to your every whim and shackled to my baby on your behalf. But truth be told, I didn’t mind it as much as I thought I would. 

While earlier in my life, you were nothing but a nuisance, transporting me out of my girlhood and subsuming me in a body that was not my own. You redeemed yourself. I realized you had a purpose. I loved you for your function in a way I never could for your form. You allowed me to experience the corporeal joys of motherhood, the ability to care for someone else, to hold my baby against my bosom. You restored my faith in my physicality as I learned a mother occupied a carnal state. 

At the time I felt most connected to you, ironically, you were the most lumpy and gargantuan you had ever been (as was I, to be fair). And when deflated, you hung like two floppy sacks overlaying the loose skin of my milk-soaked belly. 

But it didn’t matter. We engaged in this shared project of motherhood, a project so much bigger than either of us. You and I had grown together. Now we sustained the life of another human being. Perhaps, we were no longer toxic?

But it was too late. The genetic code had been broken. The mutation had caused a malignancy in your ducts. An invasive carcinoma was growing and spreading, reaching my lymph nodes in an attempt to annihilate my organs. I lay there pregnant with my second child, blissfully unaware of the blitzkrieg about to erupt. 

I discovered your betrayal before my daughter was even born. I was angry at you on her behalf. This beautiful, perfect little being deserved more than formula. She deserved her mother’s milk. 

I had to cut you off to save myself. The doctors told me a double mastectomy was my best chance at long-term survival. The surgery was less than three weeks after my daughter’s birth.

You understand why I had to do it, right? I needed to protect my children. I couldn’t be the mother they deserved with you in my life. You would have surely killed me, eventually. Please, you can’t blame me for choosing my life over yours.

Admittedly, I could have at least had the guts to say good-bye.

You patiently awaited our dramatic ending. I was eager for the surgeon to remove the gown and with it my deformity. I couldn’t look at you. Yet another flaw in my imperfect body. But this time it was serious. I wasn’t entirely surprised. You and I had always been toxic.

I now see that you were never out to get me, were you? You were me. And I was you. And, you know, as much as it pains me to say, you will always be a part of me. I wish I could take back some of the horrible things I said about you. I wish for a do-over. Most of all, I wish I had seen you were not the problem before you developed cancer. I was.

I’ve been living without you for almost two years and learned a lot about myself. I’ve learned the things I hated about my body, the imperfections I tried to control, are the very things that made me human. I’ve learned to see the ability to hate your physical appearance as a luxury of the healthy. It was a privilege I took for granted. Now I see that without my body, I would not exist.

As I await my new nipple tattoos, I miss my nipples, ugly brown areolas and all. Something I definitely never appreciated. Who does? But without nipples, I am an alien. Every other mammal, from my son to the whales in the sea to the deer in the forest, has nipples. I miss looking in the mirror and seeing what I always saw, what I always expected to see. I miss being me. 

The beauty marks present since birth provided a roadmap of my body. They have long since blurred into the landscape of my skin. So much so that I no longer noticed them. But after the surgery, they were moved an inch or two to the left or a touch to the right. I was no longer symmetrical. 

Now they remind me that I have been displaced and rearranged. I have been taken apart and put back together, though not entirely restored to my original condition. When I look at my reflection, I feel like Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror. A Bruce Springsteen lyric comes to mind, I [am] unrecognizable to myself.

And then there are the scars. The scars remind me I have been through some shit. They remind me that I am no longer the person I once was. They are the physical representation of all my hard-earned wisdom. 

I saw my reflection in a window. I didn’t know my own face.

I have new breasts now. Well, actually, implants. They are bouncy and cute, pretty much the opposite of you. The plastic surgeon called them “gummy bears.” They sit perkily atop my rib cage. I can wear strapless and backless dresses to my heart’s content. I can even ride a horse barebacked through the ocean (I haven’t done this yet, but just saying). 

They are just like gummy bears, a  sweet mold of a real-life object. A prosthesis. Nothing could be less sexy than the word “prosthesis”. Artificial. Replacement. Missing.

I had to learn the hard way. I had to lose you in order to learn to be me.

Love,

Jenny

Jenny Leon hails from Toronto, Canada. She moved to Manhattan almost a decade ago to pursue a career as a corporate lawyer. Jenny began writing memoir after being diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with her second child when her first child was only thirteen months old. She now lives in New Jersey with her husband and two toddlers. Her work has been featured in such publications as HuffPost Canada, Motherwell, Kveller and Scary Mommy. Links to all of her previous work can be found here: https://linktr.ee/jennyrosenyc.