Movie star Angelina Jolie’s recent announcement that she has undergone a double mastectomy, a considered effort to try to avert breast cancer for which she has revealed her personal genetic propensity–it evokes memories of my mother and her health circumstances over half-a century ago.
Not to mention, a stark awareness of the enormous medical advancement in such a surgical procedure, including remarkable post-operative breast re-enhancement which was hardly available in 1945.
I suspect that’s the year my mother had her left breast removed. I would have been two years old; my mother, age 40.
What is vivid in my memory is standing with my dad outside the hospital, looking up, from the ground below, at her framed in the window of the room where she was hospitalized, so she could see me as well. Apparently young children were not allowed to visit in hospitals in those days.
An even more indelible memory was the damage my mother incurred from such surgery, which extended across the rest of her lifetime, ‘though certain symptoms seemed to subside somewhat in her later years.
Most notable was her enlarged left arm, which I was told was a not uncommon condition following a mastectomy–at least back then. Such an unfortunate consequence surely affected her self image.
That my mother was left-handed may have exacerbated her condition, for periodically her arm would swell and redden with infection. She would be treated with, I suppose, an antibiotic and would lie in bed or on the couch in our living room for a few days, her arm raised and immobilized, propped up by some pillows.
We called these “her spells.” Before long, however, the condition would subside, and she would return to her dutiful self, caring for her family in general, and me in particular.
My mother who, were she living, would have been 108 on May 8–her name was Grace. And while I hardly think of her being a particularly grace-full person–hers was, rather, a notably critical and demanding temperament, with respect to both herself and others, particularly her children–I would nonetheless want to honor the courage, dignity and grace with which she faced the circumstances which had scarred, not only her body, but surely an important aspect of her life as a woman.
Speaking of which, I was visiting close friends in another state some years ago, a husband and wife several years older than I. Upon my arrival, I learned that in recent days they had been informed that she might be facing a mastectomy. Such that he was being the ever-supportive husband, seemingly more concerned–even anxious–for his wife than was she for herself.
Which was when the attractive, well endowed woman explained, with a touch of wry humor–referring to her husband and her breasts–“I’ve always thought he enjoyed them more than I!” Not unlike a lot of men, I can appreciate such an observation.
From my childhood and adolescence, I have no perception of my parents being or behaving in particularly sexual ways. They were too Victorian for that. In contrast, for example, to children who have grown up in families where they were exposed to a careless lack of sexual propriety on the part of parent figures or other older persons in their lives.
Except that, some thirty years later, I had a “sex talk” with my mom.
I should preface such a disclosure by explaining that most of my young adult years were spent in psychotherapy getting myself out of the “double-binds” I seemed to so often find myself not knowing how to get myself out of with my mother. Such “double-binds” typically had to do with what I perceived (often in the naturally distorted ways of a child) as her expectations of and for me. Similar “reactivity” between a child and a parent is not uncommon, and over the years I have helped many other young adults traverse this same inter-and-intra-psychological journey.
Or as my pastoral counselor/therapist noted, when I first asked, referring to my mother, “What do I say to her when . . . ?” [I didn’t know the term “double-bind” at the time, even though that’s what I was describing.] His reply was: “It’s not what you say to her; it’s what you say to ‘the her’ in your own head.” Such parental messages therapists call “introjects.”
Consequently, I became better able to enjoy my mother in healthier, more fulfilling ways by having created better defined “emotional boundaries” with her, a distancing from the “symbiosis” between my “self” and her “self.” Not because she had changed, but because I had. Except that anytime any of us change in such substantive, positive ways, it also typically seems that others have changed as well, often just as positively–even our parent(s).
Thus, my mom and I had a “sex talk.” We were traveling together, driving in the car, and because my emotional “reactivity” toward my mother had subsided considerably, I asked her, quite naturally, “Tell me about your sex life.”
To which she responded just as naturally and non-anxiously. Describing in healthy and appropriate ways her sexual relationship with my dad across the nearly 50 years of their marriage, before his death at age 70. This, from a woman who had suffered a mastectomy–and hardly one as sophisticated as what was available to Angelina Jolie–in her mid-life. Indeed a woman who, I might add, was fortunately married to a man whose sensitivities–certainly to his wife and children–seemed to exceed that of most men of his generation.
I wish my mother and I–and I with my father as well–could have had that same conversation when I was entering adolescence. Nonetheless, having such an appropriately intimate conversation with one’s parent is just as important–even better late than never.
My mother wasn’t a “whiner.” She was too stoic, too much of a “survivor” to indulge the luxury of complaining–about her mastectomy-related symptoms–or anything else for that matter. For her, you were meant to “play with the hand you’d been dealt.” And besides her health problems, which emerged following my birth, she had taken some other “big hits” in her life.
Her father was killed in a coal mining accident when she was a small child, and forever after she lived in fear of the poverty that had characterized her formative years. As smart and capable as she was, her family’s economic circumstances had prevented her from even attending high school, so she had a deep sense of inferiority over of her lack of formal education. That’s why she was such a “pusher” where her children were concerned, living through us, insisting that we would have the education and other cultural advantages in life which had been denied to her.
And some years before I was born she and my dad had incurred devastating financial circumstances due to the serious illness of my older sister. They were “in debt” for a long time, paying off their creditors. Only later, my dad having a good job at the coal mine, would I enjoy growing up in middle class privilege–relative, of course, to the small mining town in which we lived.
By the time my mother died, at age 86–of so-called “natural causes”–she had never been victimized by cancer of any kind. Such that once, in her later years, I did hear her question whether the mastectomy she had endured had even been necessary. Adding, with understandable resentment, “Dr. Lewis butchered me.”
Angelina Jolie represents, of course, an image of feminine beauty, including her sensuality, as it is projected these days in our culture. It is not an image I have ever particularly associated with my mother. What my mom did share with Ms. Jolie, however, was her mastectomy. Which surely had a negative impact upon my mother’s view of herself.
