Steel

She stood at the yellow marble counter, hot tears running down the lines of her face, the sun blasting in like a nosey neighbor. Green, white veined cabbage leaves lay drying on paper towels.

She was trying to cut a small hole (the size of a nipple) in each torn leaf with her good sewing scissors. They told her the leaves would dry up her breast milk.

She must stop the lifeblood that pulsed from her and fattened her babies. No longer able to see through the clumps of her wet eyelashes, she lay down the scissors, put her hands in her head and wept.

She wept for her twin girl babies, who were not ready to wean from her milk and kept nuzzling and sucking at her neck and bare skin.

She wept for herself and the knowledge that she would never again nurse another child, would never hold a perfect tiny hand and listen to the satisfied moans and grunts of her infants.

She wept in anger at the injustice and the sadistic humor of it all--that one of the most precious experiences in her life was ending violently, forcibly, and left her wearing cold cabbage on her breasts.

(She had fought hard not to snap at the cheery, twenty-something-and-never-felt-the-nail-biting-pain-of-a-good-and-blocked-duct community health nurse. Screw this precious age-old eastern tradition that would so quickly dry up the milk she had worked so hard to make.)

She had been proud of her supply. It had made her feel like she was a woman, that she had a natural capacity to sustain her children, even if they arrived by c-section, would never have made it on their own. The chemo would be poison of course. Her milk tainted with the chemicals that would kill her cells, even the healthy ones.

She had been slowly weaning for weeks, but her first course was to be tomorrow and she had stopped completely over the weekend.

She was sore and engorged, the pain a constant reminder. She could feel hard, tender tracks of wasted milk in her ducts. Her eyes fell on the scissors. She picked them up and felt the cold steel in her shaking hands.

She was so tired. So tired and she hadn't even started fighting yet. She just wanted it out.
She just wanted to jam the scissors in and take out the tumor that had started this all, rip out this thing inside of her that had turned their lives upside down and threatened to end everything.

She gasped and moaned out loud, hobbled by the despair she felt so deep inside her that she felt cavernous. She lifted the scissors to her cheek. The cool hard metal was comforting and solid. A baby stirred and she felt her nipples twinge and her heart flood.

She would make it through this. She would be strong and she would find peace, and she would wear these fucking cabbage leaves.

She put the scissors back in the drawer and went to exchange the warm, wilted leaves for crisp, cold ones.

©Margo Schulte McKinnon, 2003.