If anyone of the boys noticed that the little kid, the catcher squatting behind home plate, was a girl, instead of a really short boy under a pulled down baseball cap, I would have been toast. My emerging tits were out to ruin my life. As time went on and when I could no longer hide my emergent sexuality, my breasts brought the unwanted attention I’d feared. They distracted from what felt important to me; they were an annoyance; they were my sculpturer’s after thought: Oh what the hell, I’ll slap these more than ample titties on her. When I had children, I refused to use them; I wasn’t a cow, I told my mother.
On the other hand, my wife grew up on a dairy farm. She welcomed her breasts, a sign of her womanhood, a promise of children she would one day nurture and feed. She happily nursed her two babies. Her breasts have always been a natural part of her, and their removal an amputation to her selfhood.
That my wife lost her breasts and I didn’t feels like a cruel cosmic joke. I’m not one to believe, even for a split second, that life is fair…Ask my kids. It was my mantra—the elixir I spoon-fed them when life didn’t go their way.
As a writer, I appreciate irony, the sudden cold-water slap to the face or the stealth slam to the back of the knees of the reader…
But not so much in my personal life, where I’m helpless to redact irony: Not here, Not now, Not her. It’s my story of no rewrites
(For reading about things that are raw, scroll down to: “Speaking the Unspeakable”)