By Fay Gordon
@faygordon16

March, 2023. I stand at the stove, stirring stale bread in olive oil. The one meal my family reliably eats is a sausage crouton sauté. Each week, I chop bread and move quickly, watching my boys huddle in our pantry, grabbing Cheez-Its, pretzels, and Tagalongs because they’re staaaaarving.

Diego, my kindergartener, runs through the kitchen asking, “Can I wear my Warriors jersey for Spirit Day tomorrow?” and is out the door to play soccer before I can answer. Leonel, my toddler, waddles past in my slippers and sunglasses. He smirks—he knows he’s cute.

I rip kale leaves off their ribs when Maggie Rogers’ Back in My Body starts playing on Alexa. I put down the greens. Why do I torture myself with this song? I think, and my eyes begin to water.

This time I know I’m fighting
This time I know I’m back in my body
This time I know I’m fighting
This time I know I’m back in my body

Placing my hands on the cool counter, I take a deep breath. The memories come flooding back, the years when I felt like a completely different woman, totally separated from my body.

***

June, 2021. She opens the pool gate and thinks, I’ve never felt this confident in a swimsuit. She’s thirty-eight weeks pregnant. After adjusting the straps on her teal one-piece, she places a towel on the chair and slips her toes into the eighty-two degree water. Slowly lowering her body, she feels the pool welcome her, the water in her belly synchronizing with the water in the pool. She takes off, backstroke first. Head perched, she watches her belly glide like a teal dome above the surface. Propelled by her arms and legs, she feels her body, her baby, and her mind, converge as a united force.

She feels great in this swimsuit because she knows the only significance of her body in a swimsuit is that it signals she is going swimming. After decades spent wondering how she appears in a swimsuit, finally, her appearance is meaningless. At thirty-eight weeks pregnant, there’s no judgment, no objectifying gaze. All that matters is my body is moving exactly as I want it to, she thinks, delighted to feel the sunshine, the water, the baby.

Seven weeks later, she Facetimes her OB. She lies in bed, supported by pillows, her newborn baby in one arm, iPhone in the other. She wears her “good” pajamas, the cotton periwinkle ones with pink piping. She tilts the camera up to hide her sleepy eyes and wonders who she’s trying to impress. Herself? She answers her doctor’s questions.

I feel ok, just tired.

The C-section scar is healing well.

Leonel is taking the bottle. The formula is working out well for us.

But then, Oh yes, just one question …

She’s not sure how to articulate it. She mutters something like:

My body, it just, it doesn’t feel like me. It’s tender. It looks different. I don’t feel like it's mine yet.

Dr. C looks up from her computer, smiles into the camera, and nods.

“It’s going to take time,” Dr. C says. “Your body is remodeling. It went through a lot of change preparing for birth. Now, all the scaffolding and structure must shift and adjust to the new foundation. It’s a process.”

She thanks Dr. C. She likes the idea of remodeling. The shifting structures in her body are still under construction, and construction can take a long time.

***

March, 2020. If her body was a building, then 2020 marked the start of a full gut rehab. After several months of trying to conceive her second child, she found herself at the doctor’s office. Not in the OB suite, but three floors down, in the basement’s Breast Imaging Center. Her physical restructuring started with a biopsy scar. Like knocking down one beam and discovering the wall must be demolished, a few weeks later her chest was fully destructed during a six-hour long double mastectomy.

As she recovered, during those bizarre early pandemic weeks, she joked with friends that while they flattened the curve, she literally flattened her curves. Alone, she stared, shocked by her new chest. The scars and her implants’ bizarre firmness made up a body that was hers but entirely not hers at all.

Just before the mastectomy, she read a poem called Waking After the Surgery by Leila Chatti:

“I was somewhere or something
else, not quite dead but nearly, freer,
my self unlatched for a while as if it were.”

The words float in her head until all she can think is: surrender. If she is to survive this trauma, she must unlatch and surrender from her physical self.

She surrenders to the surgeons, as they slice, carve and scrape. While recovering, she closes her eyes as her husband tenderly clears bloody drains from her chest and notes the ounces on a legal pad. She thinks, surrender, surrender. On a family walk, when her three-year-old reaches for her hand, begging his parents to “swing me! swing me!,” she looks away. David, her husband, says, “Sorry buddy, not with Mama’s boo-boos. Let’s race instead.” Watching them take off down the sidewalk, she floats away inside, mentally leaving her body and the pain of missing these moments.

Her body is being rebuilt, and so is her mind.

***

March, 2023. Listening to Maggie’s song, I remove the croutons and place the sausage in the pan. This month marks three years since my double mastectomy. My post-cancer baby will soon turn two. I have struggled believing the woman who endured cancer surgery, pregnancy and childbirth—in fifteen months—is me. Sometimes the only way I comprehend the whiplash is thinking it happened to someone else, to another body.

I coped by dissociating, and with time, the construction ended. My body is thirty-eight years old, now complete with a C-section scar, memory gel implants, and two subtle breast surgery scars. At least that is what I see on the outside.

The real power in this remodel is not in my body’s appearance. The true rebuild happened internally. I’m back in my body. I no longer surrender. I’m here, sprinkling Parmesan cheese over the sauté and rolling my eyes that dinner is finally ready and everyone’s water bottles have magically disappeared.

With time and rewiring, I’m aware of what this skin, these bones and muscles—of what this self—gets to experience. Each day, I get to feel Leoneli grab my cheeks and barrel his head toward me in a cuddle. At night, I feel David pull me in close as I fall asleep. I can savor the taste of buttery Chardonnay, cream cheese slathered on a perfect sesame bagel, and the candy-like cherry tomatoes that grow on our patio. This summer, I can’t wait for my face to feel the wind whip past it on a night walk, or for my arms to feel the bay breeze waft through the window as I give my boys a bath. In the morning, my ears wake up to their gurgly giggles or their calls for mama. My day feels complete each afternoon, when Diego clasps his hand in mine on the walk home from school. He’s too old to swing, but we’re in that moment together, and I’m fully present for it all.

Dr. C was right. There’s a new foundation, and sometimes I struggle to believe. But then I look up at this table, at these boys begging for “more cheese, more cheese,” and David pouring chili oil over his sauté, and I’m here. I’m here for it all.

This time I know I’m fighting
This time I know I’m back in my body

Guest essay written by Fay Gordon. Fay is a mother, writer and lawyer. She has written for Kveller and Coffee + Crumbs, and she publishes Making Care, a Substack on caregiving.