When my daughter was four, she came home from school in tears one day.
“Nasty Little Girl said I can’t be a princess because princess can’t have curly hair!” My daughter didn’t even get hair until she was two, and by the time she was four, she had a short crop of cute curls. Not your stereotypical princess hair, but liberal social thinkers are always getting their knickers in a knot over the pervasive stereotypes of princesses because the majority of little girls who do not fit into that narrow mold get their feelings hurt, and my daughter was no exception.
She’s eight and her feelings are still hurt.
I used the episode as a launching point for the life lesson that some people are jerks, and you can’t avoid them, but you can learn to identify them and not care. I’m putting this particular little girl in the “jerk” category, as opposed to the “clueless” category because of something that happened at a birthday party during that year. The moms were all standing around chatting, and I was making a herculean effort to stand around with them chatting. It was the first time since I had finished cancer treatment that I even appeared in public. I had almost no hair and only one breast, and I couldn’t wear a breast prosthesis because I also had no skin on my chest wall, and I wasn’t going to stick a bra and fake breast over an oozing sore that went from above my collarbone to the bottom of my ribcage just so that people who looked at me could pretend to forget that I only had one breast.
I wore a red vest all the time, a quilted one that had enough substance to obscure the fact of my cyclopean cleavage enough that I felt comfortable leaving the house.
So there I was, at this lady’s house trying to make conversation with a bunch of women I barely knew, and who barely knew me except that they all knew I had breast cancer, so that my daughter could be happy that I finally accompanied her to a birthday party. The moms were all griping about their baby weight. Most of them had had babies, and the mom in question had a three-month-old, and she still wasn’t in her pre-pregnancy jeans, and she thought she should be, after three months of diet pills. There are a lot of reasons not to breastfeed, but it is my opinion that if you plan to feed your baby formula so that you can take diet pills, you might want to rethink motherhood and go get some therapy about your body image issues. And talking about them in front of someone with one breast is insensitive at best. I said so, at the time although not directly. I said the only thing I said all during that party: “I’ve lost all of my baby weight and I can fit into the jeans I wore in high school.”
“Lucky,” said Nasty Little Girl’s Nasty Mom, and she meant it. I know she meant it, because I checked later on with another mom, one who had taken the trouble to become my friend despite my pricklishness.
“Well, being thin is very important to Nasty Mom,” my friend tried to justify the comment and not say anything bad about someone else behind her back. Nasty mom also had waist-length blond hair, the kind that only comes from going to the hair salon every three weeks, which is fine, and something many of my friends do, but they never made me feel bad about my own cancer hair the way Nasty Mom did whenever I caught her staring at me.
When the princess hair episode happened, I told my daughter that Nasty Girl was only repeating what her Nasty Mom had taught her, and wasn’t it sad that a mom would teach her daughter to be so narrow minded and judgmental.
“There are only two little girls in that whole class who have princess hair,” I said to her. “What do the other little girls do.”
“Nasty Little Girl makes us be ladies-in-waiting.”
“So two girls with long straight hair dominate the other six of you whose hair is not long and straight.”
“Chinese Girl has long straight hair,” said my daughter.
“So it’s three versus three? That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said.
“They also said Chinese girls can’t be princesses.”
“Aha!” I thought, but I said, “Well, that’s not true for a fact. They made a movie called Mulan about one Chinese girl who was a princess, and besides, there are not ONE but TWO REAL LIFE princesses from Asia, who look a lot like Chinese Girl. One is in Thailand and one is in Japan, and they are part of royal families who have been kings and queens for thousands of years, far longer than anyone who has been a king or queen in Europe.”
“Well, she can’t be a princess in the game we play.”
“So why don’t you four girls go play your own game?”
Silence.
“Because the two girls with princess hair control things by excluding the rest of you?”
“Yes,” in a whisper.
“Do you really want to be like that?”
“No!”
“Well then. When someone says something mean to you, then walk away and just don’t even try to be their friend. Some people are just mean. You can’t change them, so just let them do their thing, and you go do yours.”
I thought about this episode today when a good friend stopped by. He and I got to talking, as we do, nonstop. He’s one of my favorite people, and his wife is one of the few people who I feel comfortable talking to about all of my feelings about this whole cancer thing. When I say I am lucky in my friends, I’m talking specifically about friends like the guy who stopped by this morning.
He’s got an illness that makes mine look like a walk in the park on a sunny morning with kittens and butterflies, and maybe a Broadway score, and I know it, and he knows I know it, and whenever I hang out with my friend, we talk about a lot of things including living with illness and disability.
“Everyone’s got a story,” I said, and he said the exact same thing at the exact same time.
It’s hard, trying to be normal, pretending be normal, but not being normal, when the things other people take for granted are the things that lie so far beyond our reach.
“We spend so much time and effort trying to get there,” he said. “But when we finally get there, we don’t want it, with the pressure to be perfect, and to perform all the time, and never slip up, and the unforgivingness and the body image issues and the self-loathing.”
I told him the story about the princess hair.
“All things considered,” he said, “Cancer hair is better.”
Here’s the Friday link of the day:
It was the best chemo jacket ever. The nurses loved it, and so did I, although my mother did not, and once I accidentally wore it to my kids’ conservative Lutheran school where it earned me hairy eyeball from the principal, who is, I discovered, much more my pal when I am not wearing a jacket with an obscenity plastered across the boobs. Or boob.
It was a great gift from a great friend, my brother’s now ex-girlfriend who remains one of my favorite people, a baby blue hoodie from the fashion house French Connection U.K. with the brand’s logo proudly displayed on the front. Baby blue is a terrific color on me, so I wore it around as much as I could, even in Texas, where even a mild obscenity slipping past your lips is enough to cross you off of the Christmas card list for a lot of people.
Foul language doesn’t fly here, although Texans as a whole have a rich lexicon that includes a vast resource of substitutionary profanity, not just equivalent synonyms like “fouled up” and “freakin'” but creative ones like Cheese and crackers! instead of Jesus Christ! (say it out loud), and I really and truly have heard almost all of my friends say “shoot” when I would say “shit” or “fudge” when I would say “dense confection made of milk, chocolate, and sugar, often with nuts.” It drives me bonkers, the use of cleaned-up expletives. I keep telling myself I am going to start cursing in French because I refuse to lower myself by the use of weakened words, but I keep forgetting to, and just say the bad ones.
When I went to Baltimore to visit my brother last month, he and I got into a long discussion about how happy I was to hear people casually say “Oh, fuck” on the street when, for example, they stepped into ankle deep slush.
“Don’t people curse in Dallas?” he asked. He was astonished.
“Nope. They say things like “Gosh” and “Sugar.”
“Holy shit. That must be like living with Jimmie Olsen, or Robin.” He kept blinking at me. “They really don’t say bad words?”
“Nope.”
“But they still use the same expressions, only fake.”
“Yep.”
“Don’t they know that it’s the exact same thing?”
“They don’t see it that way,” I tried to explain. But from one seventeenth-generation New Yorker to another, my pleas for him to understand and accept that some people really and truly find foul language offensive fell on deaf ears.
“Well, they’re wrong,” he said.
I agree with my brother. An expletive is an expletive, whether it’s clean or dirty, but tell a Texan that they sound the same to my ears, only sillier, when they say, “Oh freak” instead of “Oh, fuck,” and they would look at me as though I were the freak from another planet, not just another fuck from New York.
It’s a look I know well, because I get it whenever I order pork barbeque or blue cheese dressing. Technically, I am from another planet, the Planet of the Yankees. It’s a familiar experience; in Japan, there was a specific word for us, gaijin, which means, roughly, “inhuman barbarian.” In Texas, they just say “foreigner.” I”m not making that up, and one way to tag yourself as “not from around here” is to cuss. It’s why I do it.
The anti-profanity police occasionally tell me that using bad words just demonstrates a lack of vocabulary. I keep a mental tab of people who tell me that and when I am around them, I disengage the filter that keeps out all the big words that intimidate people and make me look more pretentious than I’d like. Not a shit list — an excrement list.
I think it’s a vestige of mid-century American culture which is still going strong here in Dallas. It’s probably what makes it such a nice place to live for people like me, who look like me, and sound like me, except for when I stub my toe.
Back in the fifties and early sixties, using bad words was a surefire class marker, and not a good one.
It’s changed.
Our cultural role models curse, the good ones, not just the kids on South Park. My friend the lexicographer Jesse Schleidlower, educated at the University of Chicago and at Oxford, authored a book called the The F Word. It’s a wonderful resource for a writer, and it’s where I learned the expression “Bald headed chicken fucker.” I understand a new edition has just been released, or shortly will be, and I’m so excited. I like to keep it out on my living room table, but my polite friends keep quietly shelving it when they come over. I think they’re afraid their children will see it, and I wonder what they must think of my art.
Robert Sutton, a professor of business at Stanford recently published a book called The No Asshole Rule, based on an article he placed in the Harvard Business Review on the condition that they print it as he wrote it.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, except in Texas, the modern class marker is a comfort with profanity and the ability to integrate it into literary prose.
Sometimes, the best word is the dirty one, like wearing a sweatshirt with F.C.U.K across the chest to chemotherapy. A lot of people wear buttons, caps, or t-shirts that proclaim “Cancer Sucks,” but that phrase makes me uncomfortable in its vulgarity.
I’m a literary hypocrite.
Our motives are the same, me and the Cancer Sucks button wearers: to lessen the power of cancer by naming it, or cursing it. Back in the fifties, the word cancer itself was forbidden, spoken only in a whisper, taboo in the extreme. The ability to name the enemy, and thereby weaken it, is a direct result of the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies, a product of the zeitgeist of letting it all hang out, joining an encounter group, never holding back.
Perhaps we’re all, except Texans, more comfortable with words like fuck and shit and so forth because the meanings of those words have become an open part of our culture. We see advertisements for laxatives every time we turn on the television, and during the actual prime-time programming, we see characters in bed together.
I do believe there is more of a place for privacy than we’re given in popular culture, but I’m glad that a lot of what used to be taboo is now perfectly socially acceptable.
When I was my daughter’s age, breast cancer was the subject of whispers. It would have been a lot harder for me to have fought my disease had I also had to bear a burden of shame.
As I proclaimed every time I wore my sweatshirt, F.C.U.K that.
I have new boobs, and they are perky. The perky part has a lot to do with the fact that reconstructed nipples don’t react the way real ones do. They’re stuck in the high beam position.
They are remarkable boobs. I know this because my friends remark on them. Mostly, they say nice things that all deconstruct into “Nice tits” but this morning a friend asked about my surgeon.
“You went all the way to Houston?”
I get that a lot. Evidently, there is some kind of Dallas-Houston rivalry and people from Dallas can’t imagine why I would go to Houston for medical care. “There are doctors here who specialize in breast reconstruction,” they tell me.
I’d almost think that most people have no idea about the complexity of breast reconstruction surgery. It’s a relatively simple procedure, so here’s a summary to make it easy to understand: the doctor places the magic implants on on the patient’s chest where she used to have boobs and then waves a magic wand and voila! Hooters!
Kids understand this concept very well. Did you know that you can take two or three giant cardboard boxes, spray paint them silver, attach some dryer vent tubes for arms and legs, attach everything together with silver duct tape, draw in eyes with some paint pens and voila! Robot!
If you want the robot to really work, you can add in battery-powered LED lights on the instrument panel on its chest.
Of course it doesn’t really work that way. It’s much more complicated. We know this about the robot, but we don’t know it about breast reconstruction; most people don’t think much about it.
Breast reconstruction is, quite literally, making something from nothing. There are two methods: implant-based reconstruction and autologous tissue reconstruction. Most patients have implant-based reconstruction: the doctors insert tissue expanders into the muscle of the chest wall, the slowly expand the space and the skin and muscle slowly stretches, and then the doctor changes out the tissue expanders for saline or silicon-based implants. After it heals, they create nipples, usually by reshaping skin. After the nipple heals, they tattoo in an areola and voila! A boob! For most patients, it works out. For me it didn’t. The implant in my right breast failed several months ago, which was more disgusting and painful than I would have anticipated.
Most patients have implant-based reconstruction because it is a much simpler procedure than the other kind, and in surgery, simple = good. It’s also not recommended by my doctors for patients like me who have had extensive radiation therapy. That’s when they do the other kind, autologous tissue transfer.
Autologous tissue transfer means “using flesh from somewhere else on your body to make a new breast.” Most of the time they use muscle and skin from your back, but sometimes they use fat, skin, and sometimes muscle from your belly. I’ve had both kinds: my left breast is made of fat and skin from my abdomen and my right breast is made of fat, skin, and muscle from my back, plus an implant.
It’s not easy surgery.
Some people say that breast reconstruction is harder than cancer treatment, and I can see why they say that, although in my case it wasn’t. My treatment was more aggressive than a typical case of breast cancer, if there is such a thing as a typical case of breast cancer, which may or may not have contributed to my implant failure; it’s hard to determine causality.
Moving human flesh around isn’t like transplanting trees. It takes hours, as the doctors individually reconnect blood vessels. In my case, my doctor had to invent a procedure since the main blood vessel they usually use for the kind of surgery I had was, in the words of my doctor, “crispy bacon” from radiation therapy.
Sure, there are doctors in Dallas who specialize in breast reconstruction surgery.
It’s the difference between “specializing in” and “being the best person in the world at.” It’s hard for me not to be an asshole about how lucky I am that my doctor took me on. I do have lovely new knockers, and it’s because my reconstructive surgeon is a genius.
He also has a great sense of humor.
I wonder what he’ll say if I ask him to install a long life battery and LED lights in my new nipples so that they “really work.”
Last fall, Chris and his friends took out a bunch of scrub from the jungle in the creek bed behind our house which was great fun, especially the burning of it. We’ve left the space largely open — there are a couple of mature elms back there, and ground cover, and my plan is to put in a garden, slowly, including ornamental trees about the same size and shape as the scrub we hacked out, only pretty. In mid-October, I found some large-ish Mexican plum trees on sale at Home Depot, so I bought six. We put two out front, two on the shadier terraces, and two down in the jungle.
They immediately lost their leaves. They didn’t go through fall foliage; the leaves just turned brown and fell off.
Over the winter, we pruned them and strung them with bright blue LED Christmas lights. Scraggly trees with lights on them look as silly as you might picture, but they were fun, and I like trees. When they started to bud, we took the lights off of them and crossed our fingers, hoping for blossoms.
Two of the trees bloomed on the tips of a total of seven blossoms.
I was disappointed. I’d hoped for a bloom, and I got a paltry few flowers.
Then they leaved out. And leafed out some more. And then they started to grow.
We can measure the change in the trees’ growth daily. I know that they won’t continue their rate of growth throughout the growing season, but it’s astonishing, and reminds me why I like my garden. My new trees have gone from wretched to beautiful in three weeks. It’s glorious.
It’s because they spent all winter growing roots underground. Trees do that.
I’d like to be able to take this post and talk about how I’ve also been able to put down roots here in Dallas, despite the fact that I’ve been so sick and wretched, although at no time during my cancer journey did I ever wear bright blue LED lights from Wal-Mart. But I’m not a tree, and I don’t put down roots.
I move.
I get up and I take my big stupid dog for a walk by the lake so I can see the water and the reeds and the birds, and I can feel safe because she does look like a wolf and she would rip the face off of anyone who tried to hurt me.
I have coffee with my friends, except that I gave up coffee for Lent, so I have herbal tea and try to feel smug about it, but fail, because I don’t much like herbal tea. I should switch to steamed milk.
I shop, some, but not much, because my resolution for this year was to buy nothing for myself, and I’ve kept it except for one thing, a necklace I love. I go to the movies, often by myself.
I go to the art museum.
The metaphor likening a woman to a tree, drawing upon the earth and reaching to the sun and sky is a lovely one. I see it a lot, and it’s a fine image, but it’s not me.
It’s the opposite of me.
I don’t draw strength from staying in one place.
I draw strength from change, open spaces, from moving, from learning. I’m not a tree. I like trees, though, and I’m glad I had the forethought to plant a bunch of them last fall.
I like language.
I like the whole kit as well as the kaboodle. It’s my bread and butter, of course, since I am a writer, but I also like it for its own sake.
I like other languages, learning them, speaking in funny accents, making puns in them, and watching movies in them with the little subtitles and the lips that keep moving long after, and I like the Kung Fu part. I like learning to curse in them, except for Japanese which, I was told, has no curse words because “that would be impolite.”
I like the philosophy of language, of how it might mean what you and I think it means, and I like how the meaning thereof means something.
I like this video, which makes me think that language has a lot more to it than what it sounds like. I’ve always wanted to get around to learning ASL. Here’s why.
Enjoy.
I do let my kids see scary movies. I put a lot of thought into it, and I do it for a reason. I let them see scary movies because they have faced scarier stuff in their six and eight years than many people see in a lifetime. I put a lot of thought into movies that address some of the stuff they’ve had to deal with, metaphorically, and then I unleash the monsters so that they can see them vanquished.
They’re smart.
They get it.
When I first finished everything and we were all, all four of us, shell-shocked, I knew something needed fixing, so we sat our kids down in front of Lord of the Rings, all seven extended director’s cut hours of it, and let them watch. We paused it to answer their questions, and let them know that it was all pretend, and we explained that it was a really good story that told the truth, even if the story wasn’t a true story.
At the end of it, five-year-old Georgia said, on her own, “Mommy, the ring is like cancer and you are like Frodo.” On her own. My son, who was three when he first saw the movie, said, “I want to be like Sam.”
My kids are smart, and they get it.
When they were having a hard time understanding why we all had to work together as a team to deal with the aftermath of my cancer, as well as the repeated surgeries of breast reconstruction (we’re at six surgeries and counting) I sat them down in front of Jaws. I let them see Jaws so that they would know that you need practical knowledge, academic knowledge, and hands-on leadership. That, and a bigger boat. We sailed through my recent surgery without a freakout, but with plenty of jokes about some bad hat, Harry. And the shark-chewed torso you see briefly? Nowhere near as scary as what I look like when I come back from surgery, and no, I don’t parade around the house like that, but what parent hasn’t had their kids walk in on them drying off after a shower.
Right now, they’ve clued in to the terror that cancer sometimes come back. I don’t know whether they picked that up from me and Chris talking, or from well-meaning idiots talking about it in front of them, whispering as if they did not know that whispering in front of kids is like waving a red flag that says, “HEY KIDS HERE IS SOME JUICY INFORMATION SO LISTEN UP.” We don’t spend a lot of time at home talking about the risk of recurrence, largely because my doctors treated my cancer so aggressively that I have a much greater risk of dying from a side effect of my treatment than my cancer coming back. My primary risks are infection from a compromised immune system, stroke from damaged blood vessels, heart failure, or secondary cancer. My kids don’t know that, so I’m inclined to think that they picked up on the recurrence thing from someone who is not me speaking out of turn.
I can’t think of a better metaphor for “there is something terrifying inside me that might surprise us all and kill me, but I am going to beat the crap out of it because I am a survivor,” than Ripley beating the crap out of Alien so stop sending me nasty messages about how I am a bad mom for letting my kids see terrifying movies, and telling me I ought to put my kids into therapy, or I need to put my kids into therapy because I let them see scary movies. And no, I’m not going to approve your comments.
I did put my kids into therapy. Of course I put my kids into therapy. They saw their mom walk through the shadow of the valley of death.
Their therapist called me. “I’m concerned,” she said. “Well, specifically, your daughter said something that I need to follow up on. She said, … ” and then the therapist went on to describe the specifics of breast reconstruction surgery.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s pretty much how it happened.”
“Oh,” she said. “Thank you. I see.”
I haven’t found a movie that deals with the issues around breast reconstruction. I’d let them see Frankenstein but that’s a little dark, it doesn’t get the message across, and the monster kills a little girl and that’s way too scary for my kids. I’d let them see Young Frankenstein but I haven’t picked it up yet from the bargain bin. It’s not like The Wonder Pets has an episode around amputation, which, from where I sit, is the closest way to describe what my kids have had to watch me go through.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t let my kids watch. I have nothing against Miley Cyrus, but Hannah Montana sets up a culture of materialism and superficiality, not to mention backtalk, that I don’t want to expose them too. I don’t let them watch Caillou because he’s fearful and neurotic, and bald, and the baldness creeps them out. I don’t let them watch a lot of stuff on TV because it’s full of commercials for processed food that’s chock full of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats.
I let my kids watch scary movies because I believe in the redemptive power of literature.
The Dallas Film Festival is upon us. This makes me happy; I like living in a city where things happen, and I like even more when I get to participate in them. This afternoon, after church, we met up with some friends in the mall food court across the street from our kidss school. As we were leaving the food court, a pleasant young man who turned out to be a production intern working on one of the films gave us some free passes to see a film called Snowmen.
“You all look you just came from church,” said the extremely pleasant production intern. “It’s a family friendly film from the producer of Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. Family friendly? “Yes,” assured the extremely pleasant production intern.
And so we got to see a real live movie screening, complete with swag in the form of little stuffed “Target” dogs in each movie seat. I heart swag.
The premise of the movie is that a dying kid with cancer overcomes unpopularity and sets a world record by building the most snowmen in a day.
A little kid with cancer. Bald. Dying. Mocked by his peers for his bald head.
It may be family friendly, but it’s not friendly to my particular family.
I’m the mom who deliberately shows my kids Lord of the Rings and Jaws and I’m about to unleash Alien on them, but a film about a kid whose cancer turns him into an elementary school pariah almost sent my daughter over the edge into a PTSDesque frenzy. She wanted to crawl over into my lap and comfort me and hug me and kiss me and tell everyone in the theater that I, too, had cancer, and thank heavens I had the presence of mind to lean over and whisper in her ear, “Cancer is a cheezy plot device to engage the audience’s emotions and build sympathy for the protagonist. He doesn’t really have cancer, he’s an actor who shaved his head, and anyway only really horrible people are mean to kids who have cancer. It’s a good movie, so don’t ruin it for yourself by freaking out because I had cancer four years ago.”
What I did not tell my daughter is that I had the privilege of being friends in junior high and high school with a kid who was bald, and that the film underplayed how horrible kids can be. I think I’ll save that discussion for another day, maybe after we watch Alien, to explain emotionally healthy versus unhealthy ways to explore differences between people and healthy ways to channel rage. I don’t know how much of the readership of this blog consists of people I went to junior high with, but please know, if you are one of the boys who called my friend “Wiggy” and beat him up in the boy’s locker room because he refused to take off his wig and show you his bald head, when I grow up to be a famous writer, I’m going to ask my friend’s permission and then write about that incident and name you by name and describe you and satirize all of your shortcomings and mock your current life failures in the face of my friend’s brilliant success. I knew I was in for a good movie when I saw that exact scene played out over again. Someone who made Snowmen had real life experience with cancer.
On the surface, Snowmen is a mawkish exploitative tale about a dying kid with cancer who mobilizes the whole school, defeating a bully along the way, to help him find immortality by getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Scratch a little and it’s a whole lot more than that. Snowmen is a story about the sacrifices parents make for their children. It’s a story about death, and life, and trying to find meaning at the point where the two intersect with a brilliant cameo by Christopher Lloyd. But most of all, it’s a story about how hard it is to have cancer, and not die.
Someone else, not just me, gets it.
It was a tight movie, well-paced, well-written, with acting that was good in most places and great in quite a few, including a brilliant comic role with a poignant turn by our favorite stock crime villain Ray Liotta.
At first I found the father-as-sleazy-used-car-salesman to be trite and the Jamaican kid from across the street to be overtly token and overdrawn at that, but a quick bit of internet sleuthing revealed that the film’s auteur, Rob Kirbyson, wrote the story to honor Howard, his childhood best friend from across the street, who was from Jamaica, and who died tragically, as well as his own father, who died from leukemia when Kirbyson was 13 years old.
Someone in the production of Snowmen has real life experience with cancer.
That’s what art is all about: telling a story about what matters.
It was a good movie. I’m glad I saw it.
It’s been scheduled for release on DVD in Wall-Mart and Target for the Holiday season, with maybe a broadcast showing and, with luck, opening in theaters this fall. If it comes to a movie theater near you, it’s worth the $10 and two hours.
Dance with the Reaper 