When my daughter was born, I was worried that I wouldn’t be the one she would call out for in the middle of the night.

Josh brings her warm, tear-soaked body into our king-sized bed – all 29 pounds of my two- and-a-half-year-old. The bed is already fully occupied. Me, Josh and my almost four-year-old son, Miles, sprawled out as if he was attempting to make snow angels in his sleep. But I still welcome Lyla with outstretched arms.

"You're not very gracious, are you?" he said, flashing a wry smile from his perch near the ultrasound monitor, next to the exam table on which I lay. I felt a pang; I don't like to think of myself as ungrateful. I hadn't shown much appreciation when he declared that the wound from a biopsy performed a few months earlier had healed well, that everything looked fine, and that I could now go a whole eight months, as opposed to six, or three, before my next round of precautionary imaging.

I have loved my girls ever since I got them, maybe because I don’t have beautiful legs or a JLo butt. I’d like to declare my feelings of femininity come solely from my character, but I am not that evolved. When my girls arrived around the age of thirteen, they felt wonderfully womanly. I’ve loved them ever since.

When the nurse called and said, “Your biopsy results show malignant ductal carcinoma in situ,” I was shocked. Did she say, “carcinoma?”

“What?” I sat down. “What do you mean, ‘malignant?’”

She said a few more words and I interrupted, “Wait a minute. Are you saying that I have CANCER?”

At first, they were nothing but trouble.

“I want her to wear a shirt from now on,” my father barked at my mother. He refused to address me now that I had the smallest hint of breast development.

A short time later, as my tops clung to my chest and my flat torso became round and foreign, I felt weird and ugly.

The Charles River Esplanade, a green and flowering oasis in the heart of Boston, is a popular place for cyclists, picnickers, parents pushing strollers, and college kids looking to rent kayaks and sailboats. But on a September Sunday I spent there, the majority of park visitors had a different activity in mind: a 5-mile fundraising walk while wearing lots of pink.