In my life-long shunning of my mom, I pretended that her history had nothing to do with my history. In all the ways that she was, I wanted to be different. After a childhood that braided love with neglect, indulgence with abuse, I wanted nothing to do with her. Even though I loved her, even though when I was little, I was her shadow, her girl. My dad told me I looked like her, and my whole self flinched. I felt it to be true, but I tried to make it not true. Some things I couldn’t escape—I had her hooded blue eyes, her reddish hair, her toothy smile. But I was different: I stayed in school, I planned for a lifelong marriage, I mothered my children.
So in 2015 when Holly Residential Care Center called to inform me that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, I sat hard in a chair, lightheaded, sick with a kind of prickly, nauseating awareness. I could see a pattern. My mom’s mom: diagnosed with breast cancer. My mom: diagnosed with breast cancer. Me.
My own mammogram had been scheduled, but I had planned to put it off. I’d inadvertently made an appointment on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism. I was meant to be with my in-laws that day. The family I had chosen for myself, instead of my family of origin.
I kept my appointment, first surrendering the right breast to the vise of the machine, then the left. Next, I was brought into the ultrasound room, the warm gel and dim light doing nothing to calm my galloping fear. The technician maneuvered the wand around my breast. She excused herself, then came back with someone else. There was a suspicious formation in the left breast. In two places.
In the days that followed it was confirmed: I had breast cancer, an aggressive form called HER2 +. Like a sagebrush fire, it had spread to the lymph nodes in my underarm.
My mother and I, diagnosed with breast cancer, just a week apart.
It was the third time that my mother had given me life.
First, when she gave birth to me.
Second, when she didn’t show up for the second custody hearing, and my sister and I were able to live the rest of our childhoods with our dad and his new wife Rita.
And now, this third time, when her diagnosis triggered an awareness in me that I should not, could not miss this appointment.
Shortly after my own diagnosis, I began a regimen of chemotherapy, followed by a lumpectomy and then by radiation. At the end, after six months of treatment, I was stripped of every hair, right down to my eyelashes. I was stripped of every certainty. I struggled to see the path forward.
The only thing I did know: I belonged to my mother. I could no longer deny it.
A lifetime of running from her had brought me full circle to where I had begun my life, bald, crying, helpless. I had to rebuild in a place of truth in place of a past of denial. Denial of her. Denial of my own self.
Breast cancer brought me to my knees, and it was only on my knees that I could begin to pray to God to help me live. Live with myself. To not run from my mother, to not run from anything, not the worst diagnosis, not the most painful revelation that my marriage was coming to an end. In all the ways I could think of, I was the best of my mother and the worst of her. While I judged her for the way she failed my sister and me, she never once judged me for shunning her, my own mother.