Red Velvet Cupcake
My usually modest thirteen-year-old daughter has let me come into the dressing room with her at Victoria’s Secret, where she is shopping for bras. It is as if we have crossed a threshold, being inside the dressing room, finally on the same side. She used to scream at me through the door, and hand stuff underneath. She used to hide her breasts from me. I start having a rush of PTSD because I see the word PINK in bright pink sequins everywhere, and my annual mammogram is tomorrow. Victoria’s Secret pink is definitely not breast-cancer pink, and that’s how I want to keep it for Skye: sexy, lacy, and push-up. This feels like such a normal mother-daughter moment we are sharing, until I anticipate the mammogram, and I get a bit nauseated in the all-pink dressing room surrounded by so many bras.
“Mom, can I get this one too? I love it. . . . Does it look okay?” I focus on Skye, and the white lace bra she’s trying on hints of the bandage I had on my chest after my mastectomy.
In the mirror she is so perfect and innocent. I feel my eyes watering and I don’t want her to see the tears.
“Mom, did you hear me? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I just remembered that I have my mammogram tomorrow.”
I’m trying to sound as routine as the mammogram is supposed to be.
Skye is still admiring the push-up bra, lost in her image of herself. I’m surprised when she asks, “Do you want me to come with you?” She is still looking in the mirror, scrunching her nose a bit at her reflection, and I wonder if she understands the implications of her offer.
“I’d really like that,” I say. And I would.
I’m still terrified that my boobs will kill me. And now I’m terrified about my daughter’s growing breasts. That was my biggest fear when I had her: Would she have my eyes, my bad math skills, and my breast cancer? I could almost faint picturing Skye someday being told she has breast cancer. The possibility of Skye with an IV in her arm from chemo, a bandage on her breast, is making me so queasy I sit down on a pile of bras to catch my breath.
Skye has picked out ten bras for herself, which I whittle down to six. She is both beautiful and awkward in her new bras, so on the cusp of womanhood. I can’t decide whether she is still my little girl or a grown woman, this poised young lady, her blue eyes sparkling now with more intelligence than mischief.
Later that day, when I tell my friend Betsy that Skye has offered to come with me to my mammogram and that I’ve said yes, she thinks I’ve crossed a line I shouldn’t have. “What if something bad happens? She can’t handle that. Why did you do that to her?”
I feel guilty, but something inside me knows that Skye is ready. Maybe she’s picturing herself in that mammogram room someday, and when she’s in that room, I want her to remember my courage.
I am trying to find that courage in the cab ride over to the radiologist. My palms are sweating. Skye is holding my hand, and I hope she doesn’t feel the sweat. You cannot wear deodorant to a mammogram, and I’m worried I smell. Armpit odor definitely wouldn’t match my game face. I need to be a role model for my daughter, but I want to smell good too.
When I’m handed the clipboard to fill in my medical history, I hesitate a bit when I write “mastectomy, 27 years old” to answer the question, “Have you had breast surgery?” I look around the waiting area, where my daughter is seated, and I see anxiety on all the faces, and it just smells like bad news. I wonder why each woman is here. Is it a suspicious lump, family history screening, or routine mammogram? Skye seems so out of place, so young and tender and her face so carefree. I wish Skye never had to be in this waiting room, but she’ll need to have mammograms, especially with my history.
Getting a mammogram is like waiting for a ride at Disneyland: You get past the front waiting room only to find more waiting before the main event. I am led to the back area where each patient has her own private little cubby that the staff calls a locker room, with a full-length mirror, a chair, and some paper towels to wipe off any goop left from a sonogram, if needed. There are magazines on a side rack and even a place to hang your coat. Today I’m assigned to locker room 3 and given a key to let me in and out. Skye is allowed to come in with me. The walls are a muted pink, but with a much different vibe than the Victoria’s Secret dressing room, where it feels like a boob fiesta. This small locker room is more like a breast library—very hushed and serious. This pink is a subtle and dignified pink, not a happy push-up bra pink. I take off everything above the waist.
Skye is staring at my reconstructed breast and the scar from the mastectomy.
“Mom, does your scar ever hurt?”
“It used to but not anymore.”
My daughter looks at me a beat too long and I realize I am being examined. “I feel bad for you that everyone can see your scar.”
I quickly put on one of the pink cotton robes.
Skye is embarrassed about my scar when it peeks out from bathing suits and dresses. I want to tell her that it has become a part of me now; my scar is a secret mother-daughter lesson that I have never quite known when to share.
But then someone with a clipboard calls out, “Mrs. Lucas.”
“Good luck, Mom,” Skye says as she heads out of our locker cubby back toward the waiting area, and the clipboard person leads me back to the mammogram room. I am cold and shivering as I untie my gown and step up to the machine’s chilly plates. The mammography technician tells me her name is Sandra. I watch Sandra take in the long faded-red mastectomy scar running down the right side of me, just the way Skye looked at it.
Sandra pushes me closer to the mammogram machine and turns me so my “real” left breast is resting on the bottom plate.
“Pretend you’re not here,” she encourages me, sensing my nerves, as she is manipulating, squeezing, repositioning, and squeezing again. She is clearly a pro, but I wonder how she can stay in this room every day, this room of possible bad news and a big scary machine that holds the future.
“Don’t breathe. Just hold the position. Close your eyes.”
My breast is being squeezed hard and pancake flat. You never realize just how flat your breast can become until it’s in the machine. Sandra escorts me back into my little locker room, and the harsh fluorescent lighting is so not flattering when I look in the mirror.
All the years I’ve looked into these locker room mirrors during my annual mammograms, just praying to grow old enough to have wrinkles—and now I’m sad to see my prayers answered. This morning I applied thick foundation to erase the sunspots and broken capillaries on my face and to smooth out the pores that seem to be growing larger by the second. My face is falling and looks like it needs a lot of sleep or more foundation. Lately, my makeup routine has become a cover-up routine, and I take it seriously. I know now what an older woman means when she says she has to “put on her face.”
As I keep staring into the mirror, it’s clear that, sadly, I’ve lost the wonder of my cancer gratitude moment. After cancer I thought that the thrill of returning to life and being well would stick, and that I would always be satisfied with being healthy and growing old. Not true.
I am now—at forty-five—dissatisfied. And today I feel even worse about it. I feel guilty knowing that I should only feel lucky that I have my health and my hair and the wrinkles I prayed for. I feel shallow because I’m disappointed that I’m aging, and sagging.
It would be good for Skye to see that a woman can age gracefully, especially her own mother, so why can’t I embrace my wrinkles like a badge of honor, a badge that in my case especially would say “I survived”?
I make another promise to myself: If there’s no cancer, I will appreciate my wrinkles. I will be thankful that I’m okay and smile when I look in the mirror. I will not complain about my pores. I will love everything, in all its healthy glory.
A clock ticks in my head while I’m waiting for the radiologist to read the images. Since my daughter is with me at this screening, the question is even scarier: Will I go back to my life, or back to the operating room?
Skye’s breasts are out of context in this place. They are part of a fun new chapter in her life, a chapter of growth and possibility and excitement. I remember being thirteen years old, and so badly wanting to wake up with boobs. I’m sure if Skye could water hers and sprinkle them with breast food, she would. But there’s no magic formula to growing breasts. It is all just so mysterious.
I look at myself in the mirror, open my gown, and stare at mine. I miss them—the way they used to be before cancer. Almost every woman I know wants her breasts either smaller or bigger, a reduction or implants. I have only met one woman ever who loved hers exactly the way they were. I want to tell my friends, “Your boobs are healthy! Enjoy!” I want to tell every woman who hates her breasts to love them, because they might disappear. I always wanted bigger breasts; now they are bigger from my reconstruction, but suddenly the breast I had to give up is something I long for. All these years later, I still dream about the smaller breast I lost. It was mine. It was perfect. I never loved it then, but I miss it so much now.
There is a knock at my locker cubby door. Skye has come to check on me, and we squeeze in together, facing the mirror.
“You okay?” She looks worried.
“Yeah, we just have to wait a little while to see if they’re normal.”
“Phew!” Skye says, squeezing some invisible pimple on her face. There are times Skye appears confident, but she’s also terrified of zits and she hates her freckles. She is pure thirteen-year-old swagger mixed with meltdowns.
“Mom, I’m thinking about getting a blue streak in my hair. In the back, so it’s not obvious.”
“I don’t think that’ll go over so well with your school and Ms. Hoffman.”
“Mo-om,” she says. “Everyone has one.”
Hair is a big deal to Skye. She’s always stocking our bathroom shelves with new hair products that promise more volume, shine, and more hair.
“Can I get blond highlights?”
After the blue hairstreak request, blond highlights seem so reasonable that at first I’m sort of relieved. But my daughter doesn’t have light hair. She’s deep brunette.
“Honey, your hair is beautiful. Don’t dye it until the day comes when you have to cover the gray. I wanted to be blond all my life, but now that I’m gray I dye my hair the exact shade I always was: black.”
How much money am I now paying once a month to have my hair dyed to the exact same color it always was despite my never having loved my natural color? I was embarrassed that my hair was so dark and black and different—and all the girls used to call me “witch” and chase me around the playground and pull my hair hard. I lament all that time I wasted hating my hair. After chemo, all I wanted was the exact hair that I had never appreciated. My wig had to look exactly like the hair I’d had. I did not want the blond wig. But then I don’t want to scare Skye by making her think about when I had cancer, before she was born.
The clock is ticking. What is taking Sandra so long? Was my mammogram normal? It is so hard waiting for my mammogram results, and my mind jumps around to everything that could be wrong on the film.
“Mrs. Lucas, we need some more images.”
I hug Skye and I am led back to the mammogram machine, and when I put my breast between the plates again, I try to think about other things I want to tell my daughter before it might be too late. Like: Skye, stop trying so hard to grow up, because when you’re older, you might miss being young. When Skye and I shop together, Skye flees the juniors’ department because she thinks it’s cheesy and not mature enough. She is shopping in the women’s department, and I have to admit I sneak into juniors’ and drool because the clothes feel really hot, and I want to see what the tweens and teens are wearing, to inspire my wardrobe so I feel current. I’m not alone. Most of Skye’s friends’ moms wear tight jeans that are so not mom jeans, and they seem to be trying to look like their tween daughters.
I am tempted to make an announcement at the clothing store. I would like to get onto the PA system and yell, “Ladies, girls: Stay in your own department! Ladies, please return to women’s. . . . Girls, please return to juniors’. Right now!”
Sandra escorts me back to my locker room, where Skye is making a face at the mirror.
“Hey, Mom.” Skye hugs me so tight it makes me want to get mammograms more often.
“Skye, you look especially beautiful today.”
“Mom, please stop staring at me.”
“I can’t, you’re so beautiful.”
“I’m not, and don’t stare. I am not beautiful. You just think that because you’re my mom.”
Somehow the fluorescent light makes me look yellow but my daughter look even more amazing. And for a moment it feels like an out-of-body experience watching my daughter and me in the mirror: I can’t believe what I see.
Then Skye yells at the mirror, “I hate my freckles, Mom!” As if screaming at her freckles in the mirror might actually scare them away. “They are so annoying.” My heart sinks: I think her freckles are gorgeous, like a painting on her skin. I want to remind Skye that her hero, Amelia Earhart, had freckles—but there’s a problem. The history books report Amelia also hated her freckles and was incredibly self-conscious about them. My daughter learned about Amelia in school. When I was growing up, I worshiped Amelia Earhart too, and I wanted to break boundaries the way she had. The woman who broke barriers . . . hated her freckles? Even the glamorous, accomplished, and historic Amelia Earhart wanted desperately to change something about herself. No amount of glory could erase that longing.
This is what I’d like to say to Amelia: “Millions of women admire you, so love your freckles. They are cute and sexy and adorable. They make you seem real, as if you’d spent time in the sun. You loved to climb to the clouds and maybe you thought you could touch the sun. Flying so close to the sun causes freckles. They are yours. Own them, Amelia!”
Skye got her freckles from my mom. I recently found a photo of my mom when she was Skye’s age, and she was so pretty I couldn’t believe I was related to her. All that time when I was a teenager and I was embarrassed by her and mean to her—was this the same woman I tormented?
The snapshot was a black-and-white and she looked like an old-time movie star. I was sort of shocked by the glamour of the photo and of this woman I had known all my life and never really seen. I was excited to show the picture to her and Skye, and I expected Mom to blush and say something like “I drove the boys crazy.” But when I did show it to her, she just stared and stared and seemed so sad. Finally she said, “I never felt pretty growing up.”
“Whaaaat?” I almost shouted at her. How could she not have seen her own beauty? My mom got very quiet and looked like she was about to cry. She seemed shamed about what she was sharing with me, as if she were telling me a secret that hurt her very much.
“I was too skinny,” Mom whispered, and she meant what she said.
“Too skinny? Who ever felt too skinny?” I was about to burst out laughing, because I was trying to diet, and wore Spanx; how could she say she’d been too skinny? Was it a joke? I couldn’t believe being thin had made her feel ugly.
“When I grew up, people were supposed to be plump—that’s what was beautiful. My mother always told me to drink milkshakes every day, but I stayed skinny. Today my skinny body would be considered a knockout.” She looked away from the photo. “I hated those milkshakes, Skye.”
Skye said, “Why did you hate them? I would love drinking vanilla milkshakes all the time.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Mom said. “They forced me to do it and it didn’t help at all. But I feel beautiful right now. I’m almost seventy and it does take some work, you know; I get my nails done and my hair done once a week. But it’s not really the appointments. I feel pretty now, more poised. I look at pictures from when I was young, like this one, and I see that I was so stiff. Now I’m relaxed and just myself.”
She smiled at me and added, “But I still can’t believe I made you.” She was proud of Skye and me. It was making her feel good about herself. I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t impressed with myself, because that might have robbed her of her pride. I couldn’t tell her that I was embarrassed by what she’d said because I have yet to learn to relax and love myself.
“Mom, I can’t believe I’m related to you. You are so cool.” I never would have thought that one day I would think my mom was cool. Would Skye ever think that I was cool and not annoying?
My mother has a feather woven into her hair now, and she seems to walk differently. She’s confident and has a swagger, a lot like Skye’s, which makes her seem as if she’s finally a very mature thirteen-year-old girl, with attitude and bright red nails. I look at my daughter and I wonder: Does any woman truly love to look in the mirror? Why don’t women want to look like themselves? And why are women always pointing to other women they’d rather look like? Chances are that the other women that the first set of women are trying to look like are women who have done something to themselves to look like someone else. And so on and so on and so on.
Another knock at the locker door, and I pull my pink gown tighter.
“Mrs. Lucas, give me five more minutes.” It is Sandra, and I am worrying.
Here’s the secret I need to tell Skye after this mammogram:
The one time in my life when I felt most comfortable with my looks was during my cancer treatments, when all those ugly things happened to my outside.
I had to work hard to find things that weren’t on the surface and weren’t right there staring back at me from a mirror: my kindness, my brain, my family’s love, my friends.
When I lost my pretty—was divested of it, like a turtle without its hard shell for protection—I was unrecognizable to myself and to people who knew me, but I was still somehow me. I felt like a cupcake without icing, but I was still a cupcake. A red velvet one—I didn’t need the icing. It was a sort of existential moment, because then I discovered how to find something inside that could still be beautiful, that no scalpel could take away. I called it “inner cleavage,” and it was my “game,” and I had game even when my chest was stitched and oozing.
When there was nothing left on the outside, it was all inside of me, and I was shining because I knew that people had to really notice me. It was autumn when I had my chemo, and as the trees were losing their leaves, I was losing my trimmings, but I was still a tree.
I thought I had finally made peace with the mirror when I posed for a topless photo for a women’s magazine, after my mastectomy. Skye would cringe—there was my scar for everyone to see. When the photographer showed me the image, it astounded me. Instead of focusing on my long diagonal scar, I saw my eyes and my courage. It was the first time I ever felt beautiful. That picture made me aware of my journey, and I really “saw” myself for the first time.
I thought the wonder of that moment would stay with me, and I would always see myself a bit differently. I was proud of the way I looked that autumn because it meant I was still there despite what I had lost. Yet all I wanted was to look exactly the way I had looked before cancer. I wanted to look like me again. The me I never appreciated.
“Okay, Mrs. Lucas,” Sandra finally calls through the door. “You can get dressed and go back out to the waiting area.”
I wonder if this is the moment my doctor will appear to tell me my cancer is indeed back. She finally comes into the locker area and knocks on the door while I am changing. I grab the pink gown I’ve just removed, hold it in front of my breasts for some modesty, and open the door.
Skye hugs and kisses me. When we are waiting for the elevator, my daughter looks me up and down. “Mom, I really like your outfit today.”
I decide I will wear this outfit every day because she likes it.
As we leave the building, I feel so elated, and not just because I had good results today. I feel great because Skye usually disapproves of my jeans, my armpit acne (is there really such a thing?), my muffin top. She seems bothered by me. She doesn’t like the way I breathe (seriously) or the way I talk (too much). But today I thought she could finally see me, what I saw when my leaves fell off, when my outside fell away. Today I thought she could see inside of me, and nothing on my outside was bothering her now. I was healthy and okay.
That night I promise myself that every time I look in the mirror I’ll see myself through my mom’s adoring eyes (the “I can’t believe I made you” lens of wonder) and through Skye’s admiring gaze (the “Mom, I like your outfit” look of approval). I am my mom’s daughter and my daughter’s mom, and I will treasure those beautiful bookends and be aware that I’m the connection between those two beauties.
When Skye is a bit older, I will tell her about my autumn, when I lost my leaves. I will show her the picture of myself with the huge scar. I will teach her how to really love herself. For now, Skye approves of me, even though I don’t fully approve of myself. I have always been afraid that my daughter would get my self-hate, my legs, my ass, and my breasts.
Please, Skye, don’t get my cancer. Please love yourself, Skye, even though your mother wants . . . Botox.
· · · ·
Before my mammogram, I had scheduled a Botox appointment, and even after my “love myself” therapy session with myself in the mirror of the pink locker room, I decide to keep it.
When I arrive at the plastic surgeon’s office, he describes how I can look like “myself” again. It doesn’t only involve the usual Botox, and he assumes I liked the way I looked to start with.
“Your cheeks, that fullness you used to have—we want to regain that.”
I stare hard into the gorgeous antique hand mirror thinking, I never realized that my cheeks had fullness, or that they were something I should have loved. I’m willing to consider pain to make them what the doctor says they once were.
The doctor explains that he has come up with a treatment he calls “Wow” cheeks, which involve a filler type of injection. He is patenting it, publishing about it. Because when women look in the mirror for the first time after this treatment, they say, “Wow.” Actually, they say, “WOW!” All caps, exclamation point.
I want to cry when the doctor tells me what these women say next: “Yes! That is me! This is exactly how I used to look. These are my cheeks again!” Sometimes, according to the doctor, they are so excited about looking like themselves again that they become very emotional and even cry. But I’ll bet that secretly they were never, ever in love with their cheeks when they were thirteen. And even if they did love their cheeks, and in the unlikely event that before they lost them they said “WOW!” every time they looked in the mirror, I’ll bet they hated their butts or their noses.
In the plastic surgeon’s office I start to think about the word “WOW!” with an exclamation point, and it’s bothering me. Because women, or at least the women I know, so rarely say it when they look in the mirror.
Imagine, for a moment, if on cue every woman in America screamed “WOW!” when she looked in the mirror. Like she was the best thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. “WOW!” would echo through bedrooms and mirrored department-store dressing rooms, and the sound would be so loud and exciting that it would ricochet off the crown of the Statue of Liberty, bounce along the New York City sidewalks, and even echo through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Denver, Colorado, on the way to the Grand Canyon. “WOW!” “WOW!” “WOW!”
I decide to pass on the “WOW!” cheeks and only get the Botox shots today. I want to work on my wow without the “WOW!” cheek procedure. The doctor pushes the Botox needle in, and I close my eyes and think about truly loving myself. A “WOW!” kind of love. Of course I am striving for the intellectual self-love, but I just want to look a bit better.
I remember seeing that love on my niece Stella’s face at her ninth birthday party at a roller skating rink. Stella was skating solo to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” She was wearing the most amazing blue-and-green-striped dress and a disco-ball necklace, gliding around the rink with her curly blond hair flying. She even dipped down and extended one leg, doing a cool trick. I want her always to have that joy, always feel so happy to be herself.
When I was nine I felt the same way. What happened to make me lose my confidence? Where do our nine-year-old selves go? How do we destroy our spirits and how do we ever build them back? Can the Botox make mine reappear? The doctor hands me the mirror and I do look sort of amazing after that shot. The Botox really helps lift my face up and seems like a subtle, teeny bit of air freshener for my face.
I’m hesitant to let Skye know that I’ve gotten Botox shots but I tell her anyway.
“No problem, Mom. Whatever makes you happy.”
She stares at my face intently to see if she can notice the difference. And then she realizes she has an angle. “Oh, does that mean I can get my ear cartilage pierced?”
The problem with being a mom is that I need to be my daughter’s role model, but I still haven’t learned what my own mom tried to teach me: Just love yourself. So I want to say this to Skye as my final lesson about beauty:
I am forty-three, and trying hard to fall in love with myself. You are thirteen, and have your whole life stretched out ahead of you. Maybe some of the confidence that my mom missed growing up, and that I’m still trying to find, will be there in our next generation of women—in you, Skye. And maybe my mom’s journey toward her newfound confidence will inspire both of us.
When Skye looks in the mirror and finds that something is not right, which seems to be all the time now, I feel a pain sharper than the Botox needle. I want to help my daughter get past her self-criticism, but if I can’t get past mine, how can I expect her to pull that off?
Here’s my promise to you, Skye: I promise that I won’t feel dread when I look in the mirror, only pure infatuation. I want to love me always and not lose any more time with myself. Years from now I don’t want to look at a photo and say, “Wow! I never knew how amazing I really looked!” I want to say “WOW!” now.
Seventy-five percent of women hate looking in the mirror, and 39 percent report that it negatively impacts their self-confidence. I refuse to be one of those stats anymore. If I need a shot to get me there, at least I will get there. I promise I will get there, Skye. I am still the tree.
The red velvet cupcake without the icing.
The naked turtle.